Guest post by Rick Villa

You may have noticed that more and more of our streets are being converted into bike lanes. However, this is just the beginning if we don’t act. The City has recently released their Bicycle Master Plan.  You can see it by clicking here.

There are many things that we believe are wrong with this Bicycle Master Plan.  Here are a few of the objections we have:

• The City plans bike lanes on busy streets like East Pikes Peak Avenue.  This encourages more bicycle/car interfacing. This frustrates motorists and is dangerous for bicyclists. Much safer and smarter for all concerned for bicyclists to ride less busy streets, such as Kiowa in this case. Safety and common sense sometime give way to political goals, however.
• Most of the money being used for making bike paths comes from 2C tax dollars. This means every dollar spent narrowing roads is a dollar they won’t spend fixing potholes or sweeping the streets.
• The City plans to spend our tax dollars for a better riding experience for the less than 1% of the bicyclists who ride to work at the expense of the 99% of motorists who drive to work.

The City is looking for comments on their Bicycle Master Plan. Click here to take the survey.

The City’s survey is written to discourage comments that don’t affirm their opinion. If you aren’t keen on spending motorist dollars for bike paths, you have to wait until questions #8 and #9 to be let them know. You can skip the first seven questions if you’d like. The survey is biased toward getting the results they want, not actually finding out what the citizens want. The City knows that we’d prefer to have our tax dollars spent on fixing roads, not making them worse by putting more bike paths on busy streets, like what they did to Weber Street.

Mayor Suthers and his traffic department narrowed Research Parkway last year by turning traffic lanes into bike lanes. When large numbers of people made their displeasure known to the Mayor and his staff, they converted Research Parkway back. If we care enough to spend some time filling out their survey, we have a good chance of keeping them from making our streets more narrow and more dangerous. Please let the City know we’d like our tax dollars spent to make our streets better, not worse.

Thanks for your time!

Rick Villa, for your friends and neighbors at safercc.com

p.s.  The survey closes December 4th, so please go as soon as you can to fill out the survey.  Thanks!