The Free Press recently ran a article on the proposed 70-mile Macomb County Loop.

Joggers, bikers and walkers in Macomb County can anticipate a light at the end of the bike path, as nearly two-thirds of the Macomb Orchard Trail is completed this summer.

And no one’s looking more forward to progress on the 70-mile loop through Macomb County than business owners and officials in downtown Utica, anticipating a healthy bump in business from a soon-to-be-completed path that leads to their doorsteps.

“It’s exciting,” Carla Grider, manager of Muldoon’s restaurant in downtown. The restaurant already does a healthy business from April to October, when patrons can eat outside on the patio. And Grider expects traffic from the trail to build on that.

It’s a pretty aggressive construction schedule. It’ll be interesting to see how realistic is truly is.

We do have concerns with some of this loop. From what we’ve been told, parts of it are on sidepaths — notably the portion along County Line Road. Wide shoulders and/or bike lanes would be the safer (and perhaps less expensive) design choice.

The sidepath along the Metropolitan Parkway actually works since the access across the path is tightly controlled. There are very limited intersections, which makes this design work. Unfortunately many other communities believe they can replicate that design without concern for the number of intersections, their sight-lines, etc.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 6:47 am and is filed under Trails. 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.