Bike Plan Rolling Forward

The wheels keep turning on the ’s Bike Lakewood plan.

Wednesday night in the community room at the , the city’s director of planning and development Dru Siley, along with interns Bryce Sylvester and Nick Workman, held a community workshop to give residents a chance to speak about the proposal.

“We’re proud of the plan we’ve put together,” Siley said. “We have a proposal that’s lean, actionable and we feel it’s something we can start working on implementing as early as next year.”

Siley said the city will immediately focus on adding sharrows to the streets and increasing bike racks, as part of the its introduced last month.

Adding sharrows would be rolled into the planned repaving of Madison Avenue, and would also include reconfiguring the traffic lanes on Madison to a center turn lane and one wider, shared-use lane for cars and bikes in either direction, Siley said.

“Madison is a huge opportunity,” Siley said, adding the city has already applied for the funding to resurface the street, and will hear back from the county in February.

Another short-term issue the proposal hopes to tackle is adding bike racks.

For Ohio’s most bikeable city, Workman said Lakewood could do much better.

“If I were to rate the city on this,” Workman said, “I would say Lakewood gets about a C-.”

Siley said the city has been requiring new developers in the city to include bike racks in their plan, and co-owner Julie Hutchison said she’s been working with local artists and welders to get an on-street bike rack the size of a parking space that could hold up to 18 bikes in front of her store.

During the past year, the city hosted community workshops, conducted surveys and carried out bike traffic counts. City officials have spent the past couple months talking to business leaders and schools officials.

The plan, currently being reviewed by city council, is part of the city’s hopes to utilize an already active biking community to be recognized a regional leader for bicyclists.

“As far as I’m concerned, unless anyone can contest it, we should claim ourselves as the bicycle capital of northeast Ohio,” Siley said. “Who else is doing this research?”