Not much has been posted on m-bike this past week. Believe it or not, that’s a good thing. That means I’ve been spending more time doing bike advocacy and have no free time to blog about it.

So, now that it’s the weekend, there’s time to provide updates on some local non-motorized planning efforts.

Royal Oak Task Force

As we reported earlier, a group of cyclists went before Royal Oak’s City Commission to ask for improved biking and walking facilities. As a result, the Commission formed a Task Force to work with city staff to develop some proposals.

That has happened.

The Task Force has held many meetings and it seemed that near the beginning there was consensus that we needed to develop a non-motorized plan – a prerequisite for receiving construction grant funding for biking and walking facilities. We also concluded that such a plan would need to be developed by a planning firm that is experienced in developing such plans.

Of course means we would need money to pay for that planning. Most of our Task Force discussions revolved around finding money to pay for this planning. In fact, Royal Oak put this planning project on their economic stimulus request list. However, it did not make the final cut.

But, Royal Oak is getting economic stimulus money for road construction which frees up about $300K in road funds.

Our Task Force will be going before the City Commission on April 6^th to ask that $40K from that $300K be spent on hiring a planner to develop a non-motorized plan.

Troy Non-Motorized Plan

The city of Troy has hired two top-notch planning consultants, Hamilton-Anderson and The Greenway Collaboration. The city and consultants hosted a kickoff meeting on Wednesday. The proposed schedule promises prompt results, so stay tuned for updates over the next few months.

Tags: economic stimulus, Royal Oak, Troy

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.