No Bike Lane on Henry Street: Yet another missed opportunity.

If you’ve been downtown during the last few days you likely saw that DPW is re-paving Henry Street. We think new pavement is great! When the job is done, though, what you’re not going to see is the bike lane that has been part of our Complete Streets plan for 8 years.

You’d think the time to consider whether to put in a new paint-only bike lane would be when you know the road is going to be repaved. According to city policy, that’s what’s supposed to happen. In 2020 the City Council adopted our Natural Resources Inventory plan, which explicitly recommends that the city “build Complete Streets planning into interdepartmental discussion before paving and striping each year.”

But that’s not what happened. Public Works did not share their paving plan with the Complete Streets Advisory Board and we’re told by Public Safety that didn’t learn Henry would be repaved until a week ago – not enough time to get the simple survey they need to mark the new bike lane.

We wrote to the City Council this week to express our frustration and disappointment with the continuing inability of our city government to plan for new bike and pedestrian infrastructure in a professional, project management process.

Read Bikeatoga’s letter to the City Council and our press release.

Henry Street is a short but critical segment of our Complete Streets network, connecting the Downtown Connector with Congress. It should not be particularly burdensome to add Complete Streets improvements to Henry St. later this year and we urge the City to do so.

Please let our City Council members know that you support the Henry Street bike lane!