The beautiful fall weather continues to hold! We hope you had an opportunity to get out on your bike. If you need some fall riding tips, check out the Madison Bikes TV episode about extending your riding season into the colder season.
Progress on West Washington Ave semi-protected intersection
Work on resurfacing West Washington Ave is making progress. Scheduled for completion in November, the design will feature a semi-protected intersection design at Bassett Street, combined bus/bike lanes as well as buffered bike lanes on sections of West Wash, as well as the continuation of the parking-protected bike lane on Bassett for another block.
Transportation Policy and Planning Board
The draft South Madison Plan, which has been in the works for a long time now, will be on the agenda at the Transportation Policy and Planning Board this week. This is a comprehensive plan for the area between Fish Hatchery Rd, Wingra Creek, the Beltline, and Lake Monona. This is an area not well served by transit, walking, and biking infrastructure, and the plan describes possible improvements. This includes adding missing sidewalks to streets, extending the Cannonball Trail, adding several bike boulevards, and bus rapid transit on Park Street.
No improvements to biking on Park Street itself are included in the draft, and neither are upgrades to existing, unprotected bike lanes on busy roads such as Rimrock Rd.
Complete Green Streets update
If you go to any city meeting or read public comments submitted about projects that reduce car parking or make driving ever slightly less convenient, you may get the impression that there is a solid majority of people who put driving and parking first. But are those voices representative?
The City is currently working on a “Complete Green Streets” planning process. The goal is to help us decide how we allocate limited public space to uses like sidewalks, trees, car parking, etc., with an eye to safety, equity, access, and climate change adaptation. A second round of public input just finished, and results will be presented at the Transportation Policy and Planning Board tonight.
The process involved both a survey, as well as targeted outreach and focus groups in BIPOC communities, and a separate survey for people with disabilities. The results seem clear: Large majorities support a hierarchy where people walking and rolling are on top, followed by transit, biking, driving and freight, and car parking at the very bottom.
Almost 80% of survey respondents agree that safety is a higher priority than convenience and speed for driving; less than 10% think that car parking is more important than space for trees; over 65% agree that safe and comfortable bike infrastructure is more important than on-street car parking. 82% of people support prioritizing the needs of historically underserved people. And so on. You can find all the results here. So yeah, maybe the loudest voices that testify at public meetings aren’t representative of our city’s values.
As always, you can find an overview of all bike events on our Community Bike Calendar. Email us at info@madisonbikes.org to add your events. And if you value our newsletter and other work, consider donating to Madison Bikes. For construction updates, check out the city’s Bike Madison page.