The road to Tybee just got a bit more friendly to cyclists by John Bennett was originally published in Connect Savannah on July 10.

The Georgia Department of Transportation’s $1.85 million resurfacing project on US Highway 80 is intended to raise the roadway between Savannah and Tybee Island and make it less susceptible to flooding, which is more frequent on the causeway these days due to rising sea levels.

Local people who ride bikes may have noticed another outcome. The road to Tybee Island now has bikeable shoulders.

Previously, the shoulders were covered with rumble strips, encroached upon by vegetation, and strewn with debris. This trio of problems ensured that only the bravest souls — or people with no other options — pedaled between Savannah and Tybee Island.

In place of the previous rumble strips, GDOT has installed edge line rumble strips, placed directly at the edge of the travel lane. These are sometimes referred to as edge line rumble stripes and they still provide the same function as the previous shoulder-spanning rumble strips: alerting inattentive drivers, through vibration and sound, that their vehicles are leaving the travel lane. Yet they keep the surface of the shoulder itself smooth and suitable for cycling.

Read the full article in Connect Savannah.

The street-level impact of passing NewZO by John Bennett was originally published in Connect Savannah on June 25, 2019.

LAST WEEK a group of citizens stood before Savannah City Council and urged elected officials to adopt an ordinance that would allow Savannah to be Savannah again. Whitney Shephard was among them.

“This is the big deal. We live in a city that is an international model for walking and biking. It is why tourists flock here. But, residents deserve to enjoy that same comfort and mobility. The current ordinance actually prohibits the development patterns that make our city a destination across the world. NewZO is far more consistent with Savannah’s character,” said Shephard, principal engineer/planner for Transport Studio, a transportation planning and engineering services firm.

Short for “new zoning ordinance,” NewZO would replace the current ordinance, a relic from 1960.

As I have written in the past, some of Savannah’s most cherished public spaces — including Forsyth Park — could not exist if we wanted to create them today because there’s not enough parking to meet parking minimums.

The current zoning ordinance superimposes suburban style parking requirements on older areas of the city, which is bad for business. And bad for people.

“Today, parking requirements are largely identical across the city. That means that a new store in town has to provide the same parking as the Oglethorpe Mall or a suburban strip center. Our current excessive parking requirements — written in the 1960s — deter walking and biking for a lot of reasons,” Shephard said.

“Who wants to walk across a sea of parking to get to a cafe or shop? Or bike through a parking lot where drivers aren’t expecting to see them? By making parking requirements more reasonable, we shorten the distance someone has to walk from the street to the front door. We make that walk safer and more comfortable. We also don’t waste space on pavement but instead make it available for uses like schools, parks, or more commercial space.”

Read the full article in Connect Savannah.

The slow but sure shift in public opinion about the benefits of bicycling by John Bennett was originally published in Connect Savannah on June 12, 2019.

IT’S AN understatement to say I was preaching to the choir. It was more like preaching to choir directors when I made a presentation on the benefits of bicycling and walking to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah’s “Green Team” on June 1.

These folks needed no convincing. The group’s vision statement confirms its members’ intention to “ally with like-minded communities to support the vulnerable, and evolve a resilient and sustainable way of living in our shared world.”

I’ve never turned down an opportunity to talk about how bicycling and walking can make our city safer, healthier, and an altogether better place to live. University classes, civic organizations, neighborhood associations — if they invite me I’ll be there early and bring a screen and projector.

While most of my audiences aren’t as receptive as the Green Team, the truth is the rooms are not as tough as they used to be when I started making presentations on biking and walking over a decade ago.

Early on I learned to stash additional “secret” slides after the apparent end of the deck that I could advance to when I needed to bat down popular, but inaccurate notions about bicycling and walking that frequently came up in post-presentation question and answer sessions.

I could depend on someone to erroneously assert that people who ride bikes violate traffic regulations more than people who drive or make the misinformed suggestion that people who walk and bike don’t pay their fair share of infrastructure costs. The Green Team harbored none of these notions.

As I was concluding my presentation, Brent Buice was disproving another misconception about biking and walking infrastructure: The idea that sidewalks, bike lanes, and trails are unnecessary because people don’t use them. Buice — South Carolina and Georgia coordinator for the East Coast Greenway Alliance and chair of Friends of Tide to Town, the nonprofit working to promote an urban trail system in Savannah — led a tour of a trail that doesn’t even exist. On a sweltering Saturday at noon, around 70 people turned out for a ride that showcased an envisioned route along the banks of the Springfield Canal.

Read the full article in Connect Savannah.