The 5 E categories are: Engineering, Education, Evaluation, Encouragement, Enforcement. To qualify as a Bike Friendly Community by the League of American Bicyclists, the town must satisfy the minimum requirement for all 18 criteria. Although Bedford scored quite well in most of the criteria, it needs to add on-road bicycle infrastructure (e.g., sharrows, bike lanes, cycle tracks) in order to qualify as ‘bike friendly’.
By Kim Siebert MacPhail
Terry Gleason, Chair of the Bicycle Advisory Committee, received unanimous support from the Planning Board on October 30 for the Bicycle Master Plan proposal, a $40,000 line item under Special Town Meeting Article 12—Community Preservation Budget.
The Bicycle Master Plan, to be developed by a contracted engineering firm, would provide Bedford with recommendations for how to become a more bike-friendly community. If adopted, these recommendations would translate to safer conditions through the addition of bike lanes and sharrows on strategic roadways.
The Planning Board said, with its vote of approval, that it sees the Bicycle Master Plan as a component of the “Complete Streets” concept emphasized in the new Comprehensive Plan. Complete Streets design takes into account the needs of everyone who uses a thoroughfare: drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists.
During his presentation to the Planning Board, Gleason distributed a metric from the League of American Bicyclists that communities use as a guide to become more bike-friendly. The metric is a “way to measure progress. . . “[a] method for making bicycling in Bedford more accessible for all ages and abilities,” Gleason said.
The metric measures the five E’s—engineering, evaluation, education, encouragement and enforcement—to gauge how well a community achieves the goals of biking ease and safety. Gleason said that currently Bedford has only received honorable mention from the League—rather than one of the 5 medal levels— because the town has zero miles of on-road biking network.
“Why do we need a Bicycle Master Plan?” Gleason asked. “If you ride around in Bedford, you’re not going to see any bike lanes or share-the-road [signs], anything like that. We’ve got five miles of rail trails, which are wonderful. It’s one of the most wonderful assets the town has. But we’ve got nothing on-road. On-road is difficult.
“Unless you address the [lack of] on-road bicycle facilities, you will have only the 1-2% passionate, ardent bicyclists out there, riding with the traffic,” Gleason added. “Typically, they’re young, male and athletic. We’re missing essentially half the population. Females are about .05% of the regular cyclists because unless you address the on-road facilities, [many don’t feel safe.]
“So you have the 1-2% fearless, experienced bicyclists and then you have about 60% of people who say when asked, ‘I would really like to bicycle, but I just don’t feel comfortable out there;’ and then there are [the rest] who say, ‘No, bicycling is just not me,’” Gleason said.
Gleason added that many of the programs begun in Bedford to encourage biking—such as Safe Routes to Schools and the PMC Challenge—have had a positive effect on ridership over time. However, he also said that he knows of some who load bikes onto the family car and drive across town to the Minuteman Bikepath because they don’t feel comfortable riding their bikes through the streets of Bedford.
Gleason acknowledged that the town’s narrow roads present special problems. “But the potential is there in Bedford to become more bike-friendly,” Gleason said. “The Master Plan will give us a long term plan and a great way to measure progress.”
The Planning Board agreed that the Bicycle Master Plan would provide a useful guide for implementing goals toward a healthier, more connected community and that it would avoid additional traffic and pollution— goals of the Comprehensive Plan as well.
If funding for the Bicycle Master Plan is approved at Special Town Meeting on November 4, Gleason said that it would “serve as a community resource for planning purposes” to develop “safe, functional, convenient, and attractive bicycle facilities throughout the Town of Bedford.”
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seems like the bicycle committee is eager to waste as much money as possible on ‘consultants’.
they just got $300,000 from community preservation for planning to pave the Bikeway extension. which then will cost anoth $1million to actually pave.
Enough already.
So are you opposed to spending money in general, or just spending money on things related to bicycling?
This is a good start. I think we have a great opportunity in Bedford to become an A+ bicycle town. We have the Minuteman Bikeway that runs through and terminates in our town, the Narrow-Gauge Rail-Trail that runs north to Billerica, and the Reformatory Branch Trail which runs west to Concord. We live in a small town (area-wise), that is relatively flat. We have a lot of things going for us if we want to build on it.
I would love to see a “grass roots” effort in encouraging kids to ride to school. The Job Lane School, Miiddle School and High School are all perfectly situated along these bike paths. If we could encourage our kids to ride their bikes to school instead of having their moms and dads drive them to school, it would be a huge double-pronged benefit: 1) they get great exercise, 2) it might lessen some of the car traffic on the way to/from school with all the pickups. Not to mention the mental stimulation of getting that exercise to wake you up in the morning, and to let off steam after school. I know. I ride my bike 12 miles to work every day, and it really works.
Pete,
We do have a grass roots bike to school program! It started back in 2009 with Principal Ackerman at Job Lane and Bike Committee volunteers. The program has grown to include annual fall and spring bike to school days, bicycle safety classes at Job Lane, and starting next spring, more advanced safety classes at the Middle School. We usually have more than a 100 students participating in the bike to school events.
A sign of progress – the number of bicycles at the Middle School, representing kids biking independently to school each day, has doubled in the last two years, and the school has requested another bike rack.
The Bicycle Committee’s goal is to make biking in Bedford more accessible to residents who want to bike but are understandably uncomfortable riding in traffic. A Master Plan will help us achieve that.