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HENRY TAYLOR
BOON
A
Green bike boxes like these near the Tate Center
could be coming to other parts of the city as
Athens-Clarke County updates its bike master plan
ACC Updates Its 15-Year-Old Bike Master Plan
By Martha Michael news@flagpole.com
T he mayor-appointed committee charged with revis
ing Athens’ bicycle master plan held its second meet
ing Aug. 29, but Athens cyclists aren’t likely to see
any changes to bike routes until, at the minimum, a year
from now.
Since 2001, only 11 out of 16 routes in the plan have
been completed, says Tyler Dewey, a committee member
and executive director of BikeAthens. And while those 15
years have passed, bicycle and pedestrian standards and
demands have changed, making it necessary to update the
BMP. The new master plan is county-wide, Dewey says,
instead of only stretching in a 3-mile radius from the UGA
Arch, and will provide better access for pedestrians.
When the original BMP was created, “the only thing was
simple bike lanes, but now it’s a lot easier to look at other
examples across the state and the country,” he says. For
example, Atlanta has added protected bike lanes with barri
ers between bike and car lanes, and Roswell has added bike
boxes on road lanes for added visibility of cyclists. Some of
these changes have already been enacted in Athens’ prob
lematic “hot spots,” such as the green-painted bike boxes
around the Tate Center on UGA’s campus.
Despite those few changes, there is still a long way to
go. “In many ways, we are still working on ironing out the
details,” Dewey says. After the first two convenings of the
new BMP committee, “we’re working on, ‘What’s our pro
cedure?’ and ‘What’s our scope?” says Tony Eubanks, com
mittee member and representative from Complete Streets
Athens, a group that grew out of efforts to make Prince
Avenue more pedestrian-friendly. “The whole planning pro
cess will be a year long or longer.”
That length of time is necessary to lay out both short
term and long-term plans to be completed over the next
20 years, says Ken Sherman, another committee member
and chairman of a nonprofit devoted to building the Firefly
Trail along an abandoned railroad between Winterville and
Union Point 40 miles south. “We will be looking at how
we can tie together Firefly Trail, the [North Oconee River]
Greenway, as well as designated bike and pedestrian areas
to create a coherent and unified system. The way the areas
are designed now [doesn’t] necessarily create a viable sys
tem,” Sherman says. “We are looking at a big project—this
is not something that can happen overnight.”
Together the committee and the county will create a
draft of the scope of the project—one that Dewey says will
answer to bicycle, pedestrian and transit transportation
needs, as well as revisit previously constructed bicycle cor
ridors to make sure they are still appropriate for cyclists
and drivers.
Once the draft is finalized, the next step will be to hire a
consultant with “specific skills and knowledge in bike and
pedestrian transportation, not someone with just general
engineering knowledge,” Sherman says. Hiring a consultant
should happen within the next two to three months, Dewey
says, “and then the fun work begins”—the long-term
design and construction of an expanded BMP.
“We are in a state of flux,” Dewey says, because proposed
routes that have been on the BMP since 2001 but have
yet to be updated, such as Prince Avenue, are now slated
to undergo major construction. On the 2001 BMP, if the
county measured from curb to curb and did not find extra
space for a bicycle lane, “they didn’t envision widening
lanes,” Dewey says. Now, where major construction has been
proposed, one may be able to expect roads to be widened
so bicycle lanes can be added, such as on Prince Avenue.
However, no plans are close to being finalized yet, and there
“may be ways to reconfigure [lanes] without changing curb
lines, while also bringing down costs,” says Dewey.
On the other hand, areas proposed to have minor con
struction could undergo less lane widening, but more repav
ing and adding signage and striping, such as on Alps Road or
Westlake Drive. On Milledge Avenue, too, minor construc
tion may involve repaving, resigning and restriping lanes.
Projects labeled “Planned Bicycle Facility” are ones that
will be implemented by other agencies, such as the ACC
Leisure Services Department in the case of the Greenway,
because they are not necessarily street projects, Dewey says.
The committee will continue to use data from UGA’s
Traffic Safety Research and Evaluation Group, as
BikeAthens does, to determine those problematic areas and
what kind of construction needs to be done. Yet Dewey says
there are “not many concrete hot spots, and they are cer
tainly not outside of high-traffic areas.”
The committee expects to continue including commu
nity feedback throughout the drafting process. “One of the
great opportunities is to expand feedback, to hear back
from the community,” Dewey says. “We are hearing about
people wanting to walk and bike more if they have the safe
space to do so. But someone who is comfortable riding on
the road is going to have different concerns than someone
who only rides on occasion.”
As public interest and approval increases, “certainly
some things can start to happen,” Sherman says. “We hope
to have a lot more to share down the line.”
The public is invited to attend the next meeting on
Thursday, Sept. 22 at 6 p.m. It will be held at the Planning
Department Auditorium at 120 W. Dougherty St. ©
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