Originally Posted by
digger531
I actually attended a DOT meeting a couple years ago about a similar topic. The discussion was about bike trails in general and the biggest complaint was all the miles of bike trails that go nowhere? We have the Wobegan trail that runs from the west side of St. Cloud to Fergus Falls. Thats over 100 miles of paved trail (and I have biked it all) that serves very few people. Maybe 1% of the local population has biked more than 20 miles of it, yet my children take the bus (actual they drive now) to school which is only 2 miles away because there is no safe route for them to bike. I watch year after year as roads get "upgraded" with no consideration for safe bike routes. I don't need to see fancy car, park, ride lanes just a nice wide shoulder with an occasional sign and a bike painted on it would be fine.
That's the way I feel about my town. We have Z-E-R-O bike lanes, and very few sidewalks. Most sidewalks are in isolated subdivisions only. The "older-style" planned area of town where small roads actually connect to larger roads, mostly have no sidewalks at all.
One really bad example is an area of town where there is lots of development - shops, restaurants, hotels, etc. etc. Traffic is HEAVY in this area. If you're staying in one of the hotels, you might like to cross the TEN-lane road to get to the restaurants (ten lanes near where it connects to the interstate, including turn lanes). But if you walk down the street you're met with simply a cove turn-around (cul-de-sac as some call it) with no actual connection to that main road. You would have to jaywalk there which is very nearly suicidal. Or you could walk a ways over and go down another street to the actual light that crosses the 10-lane road, but I'm pretty sure there are zero sidewalks, and not even sure if there are walk crossing signals or not.
It's a RIDICULOUSLY stupid piece of planning on the part of the city and developers.
*edit* this is the area:
https://www.google.com/maps?ll=34.96...,96.96,,0,1.41 8 lanes not 10, but still. You try getting from the hotels to the left, behind the Aldi, to the restaurants on the right, on foot. You have to get in your car and drive literally half a mile to get there safely. And I was right, no crosswalks or crossing signals at that major intersection up ahead. It makes me embarrassed to live here sometimes.