College Park is seeking to develop its bicycle infrastructure through the creation of bicycle boulevards, College Park Mayor Patrick Wojahn said.
Bicycle boulevards are controlled, designated streets that will promote biking through signs and slow speed limits to prioritize bicyclists and still allow for motor traffic, according to the city’s website.
Wojahn said the initiative overlaps with other city efforts to increase bicycling safety and awareness in College Park, such as the Street Smart campaign, which promotes road safety, and the city-university joint bike-share program, which launched yesterday. The idea behind this bike-share program is to increase the number of bicyclists in College Park, Wojahn said.
“When you encourage more people to bike, cars are more aware of cyclists … so I think that promotes safety as well,” Wojahn said. The city is still hearing feedback from residents, and the College Park City Council will begin to consider the creation of the boulevards within the next couple months, Wojahn said.
The College Park City-University Partnership, though not directly involved in the program, announced the city is seeking feedback from the community in its weekly e-newsletter from April 29. Additionally, a virtual map the city set up encourages users to give feedback regarding the boulevards and other bicycling initiatives.
Resident feedback on the program is important because “some people aren’t as comfortable biking, so we want to make sure that everyone is comfortable biking in College Park,” said Eric Olson, the College Park City-University Partnership executive director.
“We’d like to continue to increase the ability of people to bike in and around College Park,” Olson said.
The map shows that nearly 10 percent of residents near the Calvert Hills community and University Park use bicycles to get to work. Olson said this is a significant amount of people using alternative transportation.
“Biking has become more popular for transportation, and certainly a university community ought to have an excellent bike network — and have high numbers of people biking,” Olson said.
District 3 Councilman Robert Day said these boulevards could decrease the number of motorists on the road and increase the number of bicyclists, which he said is especially needed in Calvert Hills.
“We have been kind of landlocked in a way — Old Town and Calvert Hills — sometimes during the weekends, during the football season when things are kind of crazy all throughout College Park,” he said.
Wojahn said he hopes this initiative will also help to create a better sense of community and promote bikeability within the city.
