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Bikelanes to be eliminated on Railroad Avenue?

Published on 2/18/2020
At the bicycle workgroup meeting Feb 10, the city showed the plans for Railroad avenue between Gaines St and FAMU Way. This project has funds for construction in the city's capital improvement program in 2021 and 2022.
The thinking is to create a 12' multi-use trail on the west side of the road, a median, a greenery strip separating the trail and sidewalks from the road, but no more bike lanes. The road would be 2-laned more or less like Gaines St. What would be helpful for trail safety is that some left turns are eliminated (if the affected businesses do not complain about that too loudly), which would be helpful for trail users. However there are still quite a few business entrances and side roads that provide conflict points for those on the multi-use trail. 
Click here for a higher resolution pdf version of the image below.

RailRdAve_2020Design

We are concerned about cyclist safety. We know that riding on the sidewalk is dangerous, with up to 2 times more crashes when riding with the flow of traffic, and up to 4 times more crashes when riding the sidewalk against the flow of traffic. This is a short stretch of multi-use trail that will cross a gas-station entrance, a hotel entrance, 2 side roads, the train station entrance, a dentist entrance, all with a new hotel in construction.  The trail will also not provide a good connection to the bike lanes north of Gaines St.   From the designs we've seen, the roads will have sharrows, but no space to pass, creating an uncomfortable situation for cyclists as well as drivers using the lane. Please let us know what you're thoughts are (email hans@cccyclists.org) while we try to gather more details about the plans and try to formulate the official club position on the proposed changes to Railroad Ave.





Bicycle House Tallahassee