Advocacy Alerts

Send an email message in support of these issues in as little as two minutes:

Advocacy:

Paseo Bridge Bike/Ped Access: MoDOT is building a new quarter billion dollar bridge in the heart of Kansas City. It could provide the first safe bicycle/pedestrian crossing of the Missouri River near downtown Kansas City. We've been working on this for years and now it's going to move or die forever in the next month or so.

Advocacy:

Hwy 45 Bike/Ped Access: MoDOT is building a new highway through Parkville, Missouri. Guess what--their plans for accommodating bicycling and walking are inadequate, plus they forgot to include any funding for them.

Advocacy:

Bicycling License Plate: Many other states have 'Share the Road with Bicycles' license plates. Why not Missouri, too? In 1 minute you can show your support.

Dale Crawford (Dcraw7076@aol.com) is working on design of the new bicycle-friendly overpass at 127th and I-35 in Olathe, Kansas (see the MoBikeFed Bicycle News & comments for more details about the overpass). Crawford writes that much of 127th street will have bike lanes. Due to the way funding and design proceeded, the overpass itself will have wide curb lanes rather than separate bike lanes. Crawford is pretty satisfied with design of the overpass itself, and with the bike lanes on other sections of 127th Street.

But he is pushing for a re-design of the transition section leading up to the overpass to make it work better for bicycles. This section was designed before the grant was received that provided the extra funds to make the overpass bicycle-friendly. So it is going to take some work and some money to re-design this transition section to make it work better for bicycles. Crawford writes:

I can use some citizen help on getting "full" AASHTO accommodation through the transition zones. Granted they will be better than any other bridge I'm aware of in Johnson County, but the rest of the transition zones can be better.

I also need Olathe voices stepping up to push for a full intermodal transportation network study. We had it 2002 budget but it got cut during budget reductions after the 2003 budgets were approved assuming the study was going to happen with 2002 money. This study would improve the initial design criteria for major project so we don't have to shoehorn in bike facilities in the middle of the process.

Please email Dale Crawford to find out what you can do to help. You can also find contact information for Olathe City Officials on the Olathe web site.

Related:

News: Report on Blue River Greenway meeting

News: "Road Diet" in Toronto creates calmer traffic, better cycling

permanent link to article: "Olathe, KS, bike facilities need citizen support now"
posted by Brent Hugh at 1/02/2003 12:17:00 PM |comment on this article