Laura Glesby Photo
Cycletrack would begin on far side of this notoriously car-centric stretch.
Plans for the curbed bike lane: filling "an important gap."
If Giovanni Zinn’s vision comes to fruition, cyclists will no longer need to take their lives into their hands while riding along Water Street beside highway-bound cars.
Zinn, the city engineer, pitched a raised cycletrack slated for a two-block stretch of Water Street to the Board of Alders’ City Services and Environmental Policy Committee last week.
The cycletrack, which will extend along Water Street from State Street to Olive Street, would sit at the nexus of a number of other planned bike tracks for the area, where Long Wharf meets the Ninth Square and Wooster Square.
The State Street side of the bike track would converge with plans to remodel lower State Street, a project that will involve adding bike infrastructure to the corridor, and it will dovetail with plans to revamp Union Station just down the road.
The other end of the track would feed into a leg of the soon-to-be-extended Farmington Canal Trail slated to reach from Olive to Brewery Streets along Water. Bikers can then continue toward the shore via an already-constructed protected bike lane that curves along Brewery Street.
A map of the planned cycletrack's position.
The Water Street segment that Zinn proposed is the missing piece from all of that current and future bike infrastructure.
“It an important gap here in our network,” Zinn said after the meeting.
The segment would also address a street infamously unfriendly to pedestrians and cyclists in an area of the city that Urban Renewal planners once razed to make room for highways.
The city received a $373,000 Local Transportation Capital Improvement Program grant from the state Department of Transportation, which covers 100 percent of the costs associated with construction for the project. It still needs to receive final approvals from the state as well as permission from the Board of Alders to accept the funding.
Water Street: Soon to be bike safe?
Crucially, the Water Street cycletrack would be raised and separated from traffic by a curb, building in a measure of protection from car crashes — except for a leg of the track across the Water Street bridge, which can’t be raised due to weight constraints on the structure. For much of the track, a strip of grass would provide an extra barrier between cyclists and cars.
As with the Farmington Canal Trail, both bicyclists and pedestrians would be able to use the cycle track.
Newhallville/Prospect Hill Alder Steve Winter expressed his support for the cycletrack at the committee meeting. He asked that the transitions on and off the track get special attention. “We know how people drive in this town. We need to be serious about that,” he said.
The committee alders voted unanimously to support the grant acceptance, sending the matter to the full Board of Alders for consideration.