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0 <br />RIDE <br />WITH <br />TRAFFIC <br />Introduction <br />TRANSPORTATIONPLAN <br />The purpose of this plan is to provide a Bicycle Transportation Component to the Transportation Element <br />of the Orange County Comprehensive Plan. What exactly does this mean? It means that this is a plan <br />intended to develop transportation facilities and programs for bicyclists. "A successful bicycle program <br />would be one that made cycling safer, faster, and more convenient" (John Forester, Bicycle Transportation <br />- A Handbook for Cycling Transportation Engineers NOT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994). The <br />transportation need that this plan seeks to address is that of providing bicycle transportation facilities <br />between the urban areas within and adjacent to Orange County that currently have adopted bicycle plans <br />(this includes the Towns of Hillsborough, Carrboro, Chapel Hill and the City of Durham). This plan also <br />seeks to provide rural areas with secondary bicycle transportation routes to provide access to the urban <br />areas within and adjacent to Orange County. <br />ORANGE COUNTY BICYCLE TRANSPORTATION PLAN SUPPLEMENT <br />This is a companion document to the Orange County Bicycle Plan and is intended for use as an appendix, <br />bibliography, and reference. The supplement is available upon request. For a complete listing of the <br />contents of the supplement see the Table of Contents for this plan. <br />1993 D URHAM- CHAPEL HILL - CARRBORO (DCHC) REGIONAL BICYCLE PLAN <br />This was the first bicycle plan developed specifically for Orange County. The Orange County Board of <br />Commissioners did not adopt the plan, but did direct that it be used as a planning guideline for the <br />development of this bicycle transportation plan. The North Carolina Department of Transportation (DOT) <br />had significant concerns about the plan. The Orange County Bicycle Transportation Plan seeks to address <br />most, if not all, of those concerns. <br />NORTH CAROLINA DOT COMMENTS ON THE 1993 DCHC REGIONAL BICYCLE PLAN <br />The greatest concerns expressed by the reviewing agencies of the DOT were that the DCHC Bicycle Plan <br />mixed transportation cycling with recreational cycling. Of particular concern to DOT was the fact that the <br />DCHC Plan did not emphasize the different skills needed by the plan's design cyclists for their use of roads <br />for transportation cycling. DOT's greatest concern is that the DCHC Plan would encourage cyclists <br />without the proper traffic cycling skills to use roads during congested times and thereby increase the risk of <br />accident to novice and child cyclists. The DOT's comments are included in their entirety in Section A. of <br />the Bicycle Transportation Plan Supplement. <br />BICYCLES AS VEHICLES <br />In order to develop bicyclist transportation facilities and programs, bicycles must be considered as <br />transportation vehicles with rights equal to that of motor vehicles. In the words of John Forester, <br />renowned Cycling Transportation Engineer, "cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of <br />vehicles." Bicycles as vehicles is the foundation of this of this plan and also the law in the state of North <br />Carolina, North Carolina General Statute (NCGS) 20 -4.01 (49). <br />Does this mean that recreational bicyclists can't use the routes developed herein? On the contrary, it means <br />that recreational bicyclists will no longer have to drive their cars to remote locations to recreational <br />