Bike Ped Adv. Board Update
Bike Ped Advisory Board Summary (29 Nov 2012)
By James Thompson (Advocacy Director, GCC)
The Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Board (BPAB) is a group of 12 citizens appointed in three parts by the City of Gainesville, Alachua County, and the joint Metropolitan Transportation Planning Organization. The Committee is “non-actionable,” meaning it does not make decisions about policy. It recommends action or further research based on citizen input and local needs.
This latest meeting saw a huge quorum (10 of 12) of fairly new and also first time Board members. The participants are largely well-known in advocacy circles and in their respective communities.
I will summarize some agenda item outcomes, but if you want more detail you may contact me at jtexconsult@gmail.com. These are complex infrastructural issues, so corrections are welcome.
Much of the meeting, as usual, centered around the bureaucratic process whereby the MTPO representative explains current and proposed projects that the MTPO is trying to recommend to County and City governments. This MTPO reporting may seem a little redundant, since the MTPO appoints one third of the BPAB members, but it is an important part of the transparency process. Moreover, this gives bike-ped focused citizens and BPAB members a chance to recommend improvements or changes to the MTPO projects before they get to the actionable stage with elected officials.
These MTPO projects included updates on evaluating safety at SW Archer Rd and 16th Ave, updating the City of Gainesville (Gainesville) Public Works Planning Division map of the bikeway system, moving forward with “scoping” (mapping/design) plans for the South Main re-design (for the planned museum and innovation complex there), and a discussion of the current City safety evaluation by the public through an online questionnaire.
By far the most interesting topic of interest was the mapping of the bikeway. A preliminary hard draft will be placed on line with comment options and likely a Facebook dialogue option, after recommendation by the BPAB. In summary, while the currently GIS mapped and updated bikeways are a vast improvement over the dated map (last published in 1999 and not very accessible on-line), there are a lot of thruways and legal off-road paths that are not part of the map. I brought this up and thought I was clear, having discussed such paths with Ewen Thompson (Citizen Advisory Committee, MTPO) and Dakova Beatty (capable Staff Advisor to the BPAB)--Ewen is a real expert in non-mapped connectivity. But in the end I think no one really understood what I and many Gainesville Cycling Club and non-GCC commuters have been asking to have mapped--off-road and legal connectivity.
These are sometimes called the “in-town” trails by local mountain bikers and savvy commuters. While thought to be illegal “trespass” trails (many of them are) a lot of the best ones are _not_ illegal. They would require only minimal signage and some mowing or clearing next to extant on-road infrastructure to make them accessible to bikes and pedestrians. While some are accessible only by off-road specific bicycles, most are walkable and rideable by persons without mobility issues. I will endeavor to clarify that GCC wants these legal paths made a part of the bikeway map.
Either way, the map will be made available for public comment, and we expect GCC commuters to be a big part of that.
On a similar topic, Art Stockwell (newly minted BPAB member) has made a project of adding legal connectivity to many of the bike-ped “holes” in our city grid. He painstakingly explained how this would add to the overall value of bikeway connectivity in Gainesville and how it chimed in with the Gainesville Parks, Rec, and Cultural Affairs (PRCA) plan for a fully connected bike-ped system. There are some ideas out there about how to fund the purchase of homestead and other private right-of-ways to achieve this. Look forward to more on this later.
-end-