Some Rochester streets are friendly to cyclists. They have bike lanes or good shoulders, they aren’t heavily traveled, and their intersections are relatively easy to pass through.
Other streets are inherently difficult — even dangerous — for cyclists. They may have heavy traffic or little room between lanes of moving cars and lines of parked ones. But they still serve as routes to get people to important places.
It’s with the second set of streets in mind that the City of Rochester is looking to the concept of bicycle boulevards: side streets that could serve as alternate, parallel routes for major, tough-to-bike roads.
The city plans to hire Alta Planning + Design to develop a bicycle boulevards plan. City transportation specialist Erik Frisch says the plan should take between nine months and a year to put together, and that the city hopes to move quickly on the plan’s recommendations.
The first step will be to identify some of the tough-to-bike roads as well as parallel routes, Frisch says. He uses Clifford Avenue as an example of a road that’s inhospitable to cyclists, but where an alternative may exist.
Clifford has two busy 12-foot-wide lanes and two well-used 8-foot-wide parking lanes. But Fernwood Avenue, a less-traveled street, runs parallel to Clifford between North Goodman Street and Portland Ave. The city could identify Fernwood as a bicycle boulevard, Frisch says, and determine whether there are changes that would make Fernwood more hospitable to cyclists and less attractive, potentially, to cut-through drivers.
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2013.
Bicycle boulevards for Rochester, NY will be a major jump forward in making Rochester a bicycle friendly community. These boulevards will increase bicycle safety and help make active transportation (walking and bicycling) a real transportation option in our city. They will increase the value of homes, promote a healthier lifestyle, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and overall make Rochester an even more pleasant place to live.
These are a great idea, but I don’t know why we need to pay a design firm to identify them. I ride to work and all over the city, and I pretty quickly identified by riding on them which streets would make good “Bike Boulevards”. For example, Harvard St instead of Park, Pearl instead of Monroe, Averill and Meigs instead of Alexander and Goodman. Just look at a map and you can easily identify your own bike boulevards.
Buffalo has one of these that is pretty nice http://buffalorising.com/2012/09/linwood-avenue_-_the-bigger-picture/
It would be great if Elmwood Ave could be made safer for bicyclists. The 30MPH speed limit is totally ignored by most drivers and the shoulder is narrow.
@Culver
Often times transportation planning firms will identify routes based on level of service measurements and determine which are most necessary for filling out a bike network considering city funding limitations. While it would be nice for the city to do this one in house with public suggestions, I’m not sure they have the manpower or the expertise to assess the routes and determine which they can actually afford to implement.
My only hope with new bicycle boulevards are that they are clearly marked AND clearly lit at night. Some of the inhospitable streets are in some neighborhoods where after-dark/before-dawn riding can have more than one danger, or at least the appearance of it. Fernwood may be a nice street, but some of the other streets that run parallel to Clifford are less so.
Another option might be to re-design sidewalks so that they are easier to ride (make them wider, pave the bike parts to do away with the seams).