Draft Pasadena Bike Plan Maps Released

This image, via CICLE/Flickr, is from this year’s Bike Week Pasadena.

Last night, the city of Pasadena hosted a public input meeting for
its new bike plan. The big news at the meeting was the release of a
draft map of proposed bikeway facilities. Though that map is not yet
posted on-line, the city’s Senior Transportation Planner Rich Dilluvio
assured L.A. Streetsblog that it would be posted within a couple weeks.

The city plans to release the entire draft plan by the end of the
year, at which point, it will undergo a full environmental review, so
it’s probably mid- to late- 2010 before implementation gets underway.
The city’s consultant Ryan Snyder explained the planned facilities. The
more ambitious ones include bicycle boulevards…
er… what they’re calling “Emphasized Bikeways” (due to, elsewhere in
L.A. County, past misinterpretation-fed negative reactions to the term
bicycle boulevard) … on Mountain Street east-west, and five
north-south streets: Marengo Avenue, El Molino Avenue, Wilson Avenue,
Sierra Bonita Avenue and Craig Street. The draft plan calls for road diets to create bike lanes on Washington Boulevard and Cordova Street. When asked about sharrows on designated bike routes, Dilluvio stated “anywhere we can put ’em down, we’ll put ’em down.”

Overall the draft looks good. It’s not the velorucion, but
completing these facilities is very doable and will be a solid step
toward becoming a more bike-friendly city. Under quick review, it looks
like the plan could perhaps be improved by better bicycle connections
to a few popular destinations. Perhaps the bike boul… er emphasized
bikeways might make better connections with Metro Gold Line Stations.
Bike lanes and route on Fair Oaks should extend south to reach the
popular Old Town shopping area. Maybe those would be phase 2…

Other than two waterway bike paths (on the upper Arroyo Seco near
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and on Eaton Canyon Wash upstream of the 210
Freeway) the facilities are all conventional on-street lanes and
routes, so they should be implementable relatively quickly at a
relatively low cost for a relatively high benefit.

On another Pasadena bike note: C.I.C.L.E. will host its Pasadena Art Ride on Friday October 9th!