You may recall that in September of 2008, Salem was named a bronze-level Bicycle Friendly Community by the League of American Bicyclists.Renewal is every four years, and at the end of year three, it seemed like a natural time to review the comments LAB staff offered.
Comments are organized around the "five Es": Engineering, Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, and Evaluation & Planning. In Salem's bronze citation we were awarded marks for Engineering and Encouragement.
Plainly the city (both City of Salem proper and the community collectively) has made progress on some of them, has perhaps retreated on a couple (most notably in the dwindling Bike Safety Education program for kids), and probably just maintained the status quo on the bulk of them.
I might return to discuss some of these in more detail - but what jumps out to you? What do you think are the most important successes, failures, or omissions? What should Salem do in the next year specifically for renewal? (At this point I have a hard time imagining being able to jump to "silver" - but maybe it's possible?)
LAB Bicycle Friendly Community Feedback 2008
Here's a short version of the comments:
Engineering
- Hire full-time Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator
- Expand network connectivity through bike lanes, sharrows, signing, and low-traffic routes. Set targeted implementation rates.
- Conform to current best practices
- Adopt a complete streets policy
- Offer more training for city staff on bike facility design and planning.
- Increase amount of secure bike parking.
- Create Community Bicycle Safety Campaign
- Insert bike and motorist education into local government and utility mailings
- Expand Bike Safety Ed for kids.
- Offer adult bicycle education.
- Create Safe Routes to Schools program.
- City sponsorship, events, and programming in bike month
- Create a Bike Ambassador program.
- Organize and promote city loop rides.
- Increase Mountain biking opportunities.
- Create stronger connections between people who bike and police officers.
- Schedule targeted "share the road" enforcement actions.
- Increase Bike Counts and establish Social Marketing for bike use.
- Deepen evaluation of Crash data and develop plan to decrease crashes.
1 comment:
From my experience (as a cyclist) I would suggest 2 things in particular:
1) PSAs, on TV or radio, for drivers, about how to safely pass a bicycle, bicycle rights, etc.
2) That more people ride folding bikes - this makes it so much easier to integrate a bicycle with other forms of already existing transportation (e.g. buses)
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