Agenda - 02-22-1999 - d2b - Laserfiche WebLink

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RIDE WITH TRAFFIC Introduction TRANSPORTATIONPLAN The purpose of this plan is to provide a Bicycle Transportation Component to the Transportation Element of the Orange County Comprehensive Plan. What exactly does this mean? It means that this is a plan intended to develop transportation facilities and programs for bicyclists. "A successful bicycle program would be one that made cycling safer, faster, and more convenient" (John Forester, Bicycle Transportation - A Handbook for Cvcling Transportation Engineers, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994). The transportation need that this plan seeks to address is that of providing bicycle transportation facilities between the urban areas within and adjacent to Orange County that currently have adopted bicycle plans (this includes the Towns of Hillsborough, Carrboro, Chapel Hill and the City of Durham). This plan also seeks to provide rural areas with secondary bicycle transportation routes to provide access to the urban areas within and adjacent to Orange County. ORANGE COUNTY BICYCLE TRANSPOR TA TION PLAN SUPPLEMENT This is a companion document to the Orange County Bicycle Plan and is intended for use as an appendix, bibliography, and reference. The supplement is available upon request. For a complete listing of the contents of the supplement see the Table of Contents for this plan. 1993 D URHAM- CHAPEL HILL- CARRBORO (DCHQ REGIONAL BICYCLE PLAN This was the first bicycle plan developed specifically for Orange County. The Orange County Board of Commissioners did not adopt the plan, but did direct that it be used as a planning guideline for the development of this bicycle transportation plan. The North Carolina Department of Transportation (DOT) had significant concerns about the plan. The Orange County Bicycle Transportation Plan seeks to address most, if not all, of those concerns. NORTH CAROLINA DOT COMMENTS ON THE 1993 DCHC REGIONAL BICYCLE PLAN The greatest concerns expressed by the reviewing agencies of the DOT were that the DCHC Bicycle Plan mixed transportation cycling with recreational cycling. Of particular concern to DOT was the fact that the DCHC Plan did not emphasize the different skills needed by the plan's design cyclists for their use of roads for transportation cycling. DOT's greatest concern is that the DCHC Plan would encourage cyclists without the proper traffic cycling skills to use roads during congested times and thereby increase the risk of accident to novice and child cyclists. The DOT's comments are included in their entirety in Section A. of the Bicycle Transportation Plan Supplement. BICYCLES AS VEHICLES In order to develop bicyclist transportation facilities and programs, bicycles must be considered as transportation vehicles with rights equal to that of motor vehicles. In the words of John Forester, renowned Cycling Transportation Engineer, "cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles." Bicycles as vehicles is the foundation of this of this plan and also the law in the state of North Carolina, North Carolina General Statute (NCGS) 204.01 (49). Does this mean that recreational bicyclists can't use the routes developed herein? On the contrary, it means that recreational bicyclists will no longer have to drive their cars to remote locations to recreational