Advocacy & Safety - Master Plan

I live in a small township in northern Ohio. The township has established a Master Plan Steering Committee to promote the rebuilding of the town center where a shopping, social or recreational trip can be made on foot. They have established a list of ten cornerstone principles with the first principal as follows:

"Design for the pedestrian and cyclist as well as the car." Someone listened!

Having expereince in master planning that is a good step but what is more important is getting some cyclists out to the meetings and having a practical dialog about how to accomplish this. unfortunately many steering committees make recommendations based on dated or incomplete information and end up causing conflicts with what may be actually functional. Best of luck.

The results of what must the best master plan I saw was in Oulu Finland.

Basically the focus was on people, with the downtown central core a pedestrian mall, well connected with wide sidewalks to other areas of downtown. There were well accommodated multiuse paths throughout the area. The auto was seen as a convenience with streets taking second place to multiuse paths. Often the shortest easiest way to go somewhere was by the paths; if you drove, it was often a more circuitous route, as frankly it takes very very little effort to drive.

The focus was on people... providing great accommodations for people and bikes, while treating cars as secondary. Parking tended to be in back of buildings.

Bike paths went under streets to allow cyclists uninterrupted free travel (no having to stop for stop signs or lights). In the downtown area outside of the pedestrian mall center, the sidewalks were quite wide to handle both pedestrians and cyclists... while the streets were somewhat narrow with low speed limits. The result was that the downtown area felt dominated by peds and cyclists vice cars.