Advocacy Alerts

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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.

[UPDATE: Several bicyclists, including representatives of the Greater Kansas City Bicycle Federation and the Johnson County Bicycle Club attended this meeting. The Missouri Bicycle Federation contacted all Olathe City Council members and the mayor with a statement. These measures were successful in convincing the Olathe City Council to apply for Transportation Enhancements funding to pay for additional width required on the overpass and approaches to include on-street bicycle accommodations. Read the MoBikeFed News article for full details.]

Bicyclists,

There will be a meeting of the Olathe, KS, City Council:

7:00 PM
Tuesday, Oct. 26
Olathe City Hall
200 E. Santa Fe
Olathe, KS
Council Chambers

The meeting will be about an overpass that will be expanded to become an interchange at I-35 and Lone Elm in Olathe, KS. 13 of 20 public comments received on the project have been from bicyclists requesting on-road accommodation on the overpass. No one has requested "off road" or "bicycle path" bicycle accommodation.

Lone Elm is commonly used by bicyclists, is on the county bicycle plan, and will be the only place to cross I-35 for some distance in either direction.

Despite all this, Olathe Public Works' solution is to put a wide sidewalk on one side of the road (only) and include no on-road bicycle accommodations.

In short, Public Works has completely ignored public input on the project and has, instead of the facilities the public has requested, included facilities that no one has requested.

The Lone Elm overpass will be four lanes wide (as will, eventually, the sections of Lone Elm that connect to it) with high speed limits and over 10% heavy truck traffic.

The purpose of the meeting Tuesday is to propose to the Olathe City Council that the extra money required to fund the bicycle accommodations on the bridge be requested at the top of Olathe's "Transportation Enhancement" requests. Currently no on-road bicycle projects are on Olathe's list of requests.

The Johnson County Bicycle Club and the Greater Kansas City Bicycle Federation are getting behind this. The more "bicycle bodies" we can have at that meeting the better our chance to resolve this situation in a mutually agreeable fashion.

Please make it if you can!

Click the "comments" button, below, for more details.

Related:

News: Bicycle advocate running for mayor of Shawnee, KS

News: THE VOTE: Springfield News-Leader's endorsement of Amendment 3 attacked

permanent link to article: "26 OCT 2004 [EXPIRED, successful]: Lone Elm Interchange Meeting Tuesday Oct 26, 7PM"
posted by Brent Hugh at 10/26/2004 01:23:00 AM |comment on this article