MTGA Trails Toolkit

A presentation by Josh DeBruyn (MDOT) and Ronald Emery (Department of Attorney General) given on May 29th, 2008 at the Designing Healthy Livable Communities Conference.

Accommodating Bicycle and Pedestrian Travel: A Recommended Approach is a policy statement adopted by the United States Department of Transportation. USDOT hopes that public agencies, professional associations, advocacy groups, and others adopt this approach as a way of committing themselves to integrating bicycling and walking into the transportation mainstream.

This is a portion of the Kalamazoo River Valley Trailway Master Plan. It defines various trail types, designs, and treatments — both on-road and off.

Support for building a regional trail system in Genesee County has grown over the last few years and it was found that the County lacked a united guiding plan and vision for creating a trail system that connects urban, suburban and rural communities.

The manual is designed to assist transportation planners and engineers in selecting roadway design treatments to accommodate bicycles. This is the first attempt to provide comprehensive guidelines for this process. The recommendations are based on assumptions regarding policy goals and the types of bicyclists to be accommodated, the state of the practice, and professional judgement.

The following reasons are what AASHTO has to say about the benefits of shoulders in three important areas: safety, capacity and maintenance. Most of these benefits apply to both shoulders on rural highways and to marked, on-street bike lanes on urban roadways. See other side for other benefits specific to urban areas.

Bike lanes and paved shoulders have been found to have a benefit-to-cost ratio of approximately 5 to 1 (Texas Transportation Institute, 1989) and reduce crashes by 49 percent (FHWA, 1987). Another study found the provision of bike lanes and paved pathways result in a 9 to 1 benefit-to-cost ratio (North Carolina State University, 2004). Following is a partial list of benefits to bicyclists, pedestrians, and drivers.