For motorists speeding up and down the narrow, twisting hills of mid-Fairfield County, it can make for a white-knuckled moment when two vehicles cross paths with a cyclist hugging the curbside.
Think how the biker feels.
Bicycle enthusiasts are feeling a bit better this morning, after the Connecticut Department of Transportation finalized a 150-page manifesto this month laying out a literal and figurative roadmap for establishing rights-of-way for cyclists, pedestrians and horseback riders, including those who bike as part of their daily commute.
The plan follows the Connecticut General Assembly passing a “complete streets” bill that reserves at least 1 percent of the cost of building or maintaining a roadway to create bicycle and pedestrian rights of way, while establishing an advisory board to guide policy.
Connecticut hopes to emulate the success of New Jersey and Vermont, which both have won recognition for incorporating bike access into transportation projects. Several Connecticut towns already have bicycle master plans in place, including Greenwich, which established its plan in 2001. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials created a “green book” guide for the development of bike rights-of-way on streets and highways and the Connecticut Department of Transportation adopted many of those tenets in its own highway design manual.
General goals include widening road shoulders where possible during paving projects to accommodate bikers and walkers and encouraging workplaces to make sure their properties include bicycle storage areas.
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With respect to commuters, the plan is peddling several goals, including providing bike racks and lockers at train and bus stations, and providing a way for commuters to take their bikes with them on trains and buses.
Metro-North charges $5 for a bike permit that does not expire, and allows up to two bikes on each car and four per train, though bikes are barred at rush hour and on major holidays.
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The new M-8 railcars being readied for Metro-North in Connecticut will include space for bicycles.
The state had undertaken similar efforts in 1999 and 2002, but bicycle enthusiasts had carped that the prior documents were beasts, difficult to plow through and top-heavy with regulatory language. And mapped bike routes lacked accompanying road signs to help steer cyclists along their way.
In addition to mapping out bike routes, the new study calls for the state to better measure bicycle use in Connecticut, including counting the number of miles of dedicated bicycle lanes and signed routes; bike “parking” spaces; and accident rates.
The plan was prepared by Hartford-based Fitzgerald & Halliday, with Danbury-based Didona Associates also contributing, with the firms gathering input at eight meetings statewide, including in Fairfield and Stamford.
In the past few years, New York City has created 200 miles of new bicycle lanes on its roadways, according to Ryan Lynch, a senior planner with the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, and cycling has increased 35 percent in the past year as a results.
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In 2007, some 830 crashes involving bicycles were reported in Connecticut, five of them fatal, up from just under 700 the year before. Danbury, Norwalk and Stamford numbered among the Connecticut cities with the highest number of bike accidents between 2005 and 2007.
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Last year, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a law requiring motorists to pass cyclists by no closer than three feet.
In the 2006 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, some 23,600 Connecticut residents indicated they biked to work. The researchers add nearly 55,000 more people to that estimate, by calculating the number of people who work at home but who likely use a bicycle in the course of their workday, or college students who bike to class or jobs.
All told, Connecticut citizens who bike or walk in place of driving eliminate about 750,000 vehicle miles traveled annually.
