Peoria is in the process of updating its nine-year-old Bike Master Plan, taking a closer look at safety, access, and connectivity.
The Public Works Department held an open house Wednesday at the Gateway Building to start gathering community feedback on the city’s bicycling needs.
“It’s time to get new input, to find out where we need to build more bike paths and connecting corridors, and then what types of bike paths to build,” said Andrea Klopfenstein, Peoria’s city engineer and deputy director of public works.
“Some people will want transportation corridors – on-street paths, so they can go fast and they’re not impeded by pedestrians and other obstacles. Then other people will want safer paths to take kids and strollers and things like that. So we need to know where and what the community wants in order to provide the best bicycle facilities for our community.”
The open house is a component of the community engagement portion of the process to draft a new bike master plan. Infrastructure services firm Crawford, Murphy & Tilly is working with the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission, in collaboration with the city.
“An update is really important because lot of design options have changed for biking in the past five years, and even just in the last year two new design guides have been published,” said Jacque Knight, the project manager for CMT.
“A lot of communities have started to take this ‘all ages and abilities’ lens, and thinking more about, ‘how can we accommodate children on our streets?’ So that’s an approach that we’re taking in our project, looking at developing streets that are safe for all users.”
Among those attending the open house was Per Ellingson, a longtime cycling enthusiast and the current interim secretary for Bike Peoria. The nonprofit co-op helped Peoria shape the existing bike master plan that was adopted in 2016.
“When I heard they were looking to revisit it and check it out, I thought this is a great opportunity to try to provide any insight that I can – first, for my own experience or for other people in our community who may choose or need to use a bicycle to get around,” said Ellingson.
“For a lot of people, having a bike and a way to get somewhere on that bike is meaningful. It could mean the difference between holding down a job on the other side of town or not.”
Knight said an assessment of Peoria’s existing biking network shows about 25% of the roadways are considered low stress for bicycle traffic.
“But that means that 75% of the streets are that more stressful environment. So when we go through this planning process, we really want to think about flipping that pie chart and thinking about some of those streets that are higher stress, what are the treatments and how can we get those to be lower stress?” said Knight.
“Another thing that we’ve witnessed is that even on some of those low stress streets, crossing some of those bigger roads is really challenging. So, how are we accommodating cyclists through some of those more challenging crossing points where we know high volumes of traffic are moving?”
Ellingson said immediately after Wednesday’s open house, he would be participating in the annual Ride of Silence, a worldwide observance in honor of cyclists injured and killed on the roadways. He said a new bike master plan should be a part of an approach to strive for safety with all modes of transportation.
“Whether you’ve got a fancy car or just a motorcycle or a bicycle, or you’re walking or taking the bus, or even if you were rich enough to have a helicopter to get around or something, we want everybody to be safe,” he said.
Klopfenstein said one of the issues they often hear about is having too many gaps between existing bike corridors.
“We don’t have a lot of funding, so we aren’t able to do miles and miles of connecting bike paths. So we’re doing it piece by piece, as we have a project come online,” she said. “We get the frustration from the public of having a nice corridor for several blocks and then a gap, and then a nice corridor and then a gap.
“We know that that’s a frustrating thing, and we’re trying to address it. Having the information from this bike plan to really help us focus where those connecting pieces will be the most impactful will be helpful for us.”
Other details the plan aims to address is determining where bike crashes are occurring, how people travel through the city, and what new ideas could encourage more people to get into biking.
The next steps in the process include continuing to gather community feedback, reviewing recommendations, developing a street design toolkit, and prioritizing projects. The goal is to have a draft of the plan completed this fall and finalized by winter.
Klopfenstein said getting the new master plan in place is a first step toward determining how to improve the city’s biking network.
“Once we know what we need from a corridor perspective, we can look at the costs. And once we identify the costs, we can look at what types of grants are out there,” she said. “There will be priority projects that we will try to find funding to then build, to make more progress in a shorter segment than if we just did random pieces.”
Interested residents are encouraged to participate in the department’s online survey about the bike master plan. The survey and additional details about the project are available on the city’s website.
