At tonight’s Royal Oak City Commission meeting, city staff will recommend funding for a non-motorized transportation plan in the upcoming budget.

This is great news.

While everyone’s welcomed to provide public comment at tonight’s meeting, at this point it’s really not necessary — especially given the lengthy meeting agenda, the wintry weather, and some basketball game.

We will be sure to attend and provide an updates from the meeting.

Both the Detroit News and The Mirror have articles about tonight’s meeting.

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.

If you’ve never heard of a bicycle boulevard, don’t be alarmed. They are relatively new and I’m not aware of any that have been built in Metro Detroit.

Recently the Streetsblog Wiki added an entry that describes bicycle boulevards. That’s a great place to start and the Berkeley video is certainly worth watching.

So where does it make sense to add these in Metro Detroit?

We think of some typical street scenarios that make sense, including lightly-traveled residential streets that:

• provide direct connection to downtowns or other major destinations, but are not fire routes.
• parallel a main arterial or trunkline road with relatively high traffic volumes.
• are boulevards or one-ways.

We’ve shown two sample bicycle boulevards for Royal Oak above: Vinsetta Boulevard and Sherman Drive.

Vinsetta is a natural. It already has high recreational use, it’s very scenic, provides a park connection, and has low traffic volumes. Converting it to a bicycle boulevard would likely involve:

• removing all stop signs along Vinsetta
• traffic calming the street so cars are naturally inclined to drive a steady 20 MPH
• reduce vehicle cut-through traffic
• improving the major road crossings for cyclists and pedestrians

The advantage for cyclists is the street would be much more friendly for riding, especially with younger riders.

It really wouldn’t slow the trip time for motorists since time lost due to lower travel speeds would be offset by having fewer signs — and they’d save gas.

The advantage for pedestrians is lower motorist speeds drastically reduces the odds for injuries or fatalities in the case of collisions — even for a reductions from 25 MPH to 20 MPH. This is especially true for child and senior pedestrians.

Of course adding the Sherman Drive takes one directly downtown making this a no-brainer. Engineering a route on the commercial properties south of Catalpa would be a challenge but certainly possible. This would connect with the Sherman Drive “alley” and then Sherman Drive itself.

Thursday was the second annual Regional Trails and Greenways Summit in at U of M Flint.

While the focus was primarily on Genesee County, the sessions were applicable to similar efforts elsewhere. And there were many familiar faces from Oakland and Wayne County, including engineering staff from the City of Royal Oak.

There was full day of excellent session topics, including road diets, complete streets, and creating non-motorized master plans. We were even treated to an rousing welcome from Bobby Crim.

For those unable to attend, Genesee County Planning will be putting all of the presentations on their web site.

Last year’s summit presentations are already on-line.

We extend a special thanks to the Ruth Mott Foundation for making this Summit possible.

The differing House and Senate versions of the stimulus bill were resolved yesterday. It’s expected that the new bill will be voted on today and signed by the President on Monday.

This final bill allocates $29 billion in transportation funding. That’s about how much the federal government allocates during a normal year. How much of that goes to Michigan and how much could be spent on non-motorized facilities is apparently unknown as of now.

We do know that the MDOT Metro Region put reconstruction of the entire I-275 bikepath on their stimulus project list. How huge would that be?

The Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance and other advocates have been working with the City of Detroit to get non-motorized projects in the city’s stimulus list. Dan Cherrin, Mayor Cockrel’s spokesman told the the Michigan Messenger that the city wants to see “bike paths” built with stimulus money. Bike paths could include many of Detroit’s greenway projects as well as the non-motorized plan’s 400-mile bike lane network.

There are also other local bike and trail related projects in the stimulus wish list compiled by the Michigan Municipal League:

• Birmingham – Completion of a renovation of partially existing trail network, $2 million
• Canton – Construction of five pedestrian bridges over the Rouge River providing interconnection of community pathway, $700,000
• Madison Heights – Red Oaks Bikepath, $600,000
• Novi – Improvement of I-275 non-motorized pathway from I696 to Wayne Co, $ 467,000
• Novi – New bike path along M-5 from south of 12 Mile Rd to Pontiac Trail, $ 1,250,000
• Rochester – Paint Creek Trail, $ 300,000
• Royal Oak – Non-Motorized Tranportation Plan, $40,000

What’s not clear is how Novi’s two requests fit with MDOT’s for the I-275 bikepath.

We should know more about what gets funded as this process continues to lumber along.