Democratic city council candidate Sam Melden recently raised the issue of making Toledo more bike friendly. That may sound like a minor, or even fringe issue, next to the future of Jeep, or water quality, or blight. It is not. This issues goes to quality of life, urban mobility, and even the “cool” factor.
Young people want to live in cities that have some degree of coolness. The arts, attractive and affordable downtown housing, creative and properly scaled mass transit, sidewalks and bikes all enter in to the cool calculus.
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Toledo already has a comprehensive bike plan. Drafted in 2015, it maps a system of 13 primary routes totaling 99.05 miles to connect city neighborhoods, major parks, and primary destinations.
The catch is that the cost of completing the infrastructure is estimated at more than $27 million.
But one advantage of the bike plan’s design is that it can be tackled piecemeal. A city government committed to making the plan a reality could build Toledo’s bike infrastructure by breaking it into many small projects and completing them over time — maybe five or 10 years.
Another advantage is that the bike plan can complement street repaving projects. Elected leaders have recently returned to prioritizing residential street projects — the city found $9 million this year to address Toledo’s terrible streets. As streets make their way onto the annual project list, city officials should be checking to see if they’re designated in the bike plan.
The plan also is the sort of forward-thinking, modern transportation design that is likely to qualify for grants and matching funds, which also can reduce the direct cost to the city.
But Mr. Melden has called for adopting a more modest neighborhood-greenway strategy in which residential streets can be designed to prioritize bikes and pedestrians with low speed — enforced — limits that deter high-speed, high-volume car traffic. He wants to create a map that would identify all such streets in the city and allow bikes to traverse the city using these greenways, along with existing bike trails. This could be done now, with almost no money.
The city might also invest in actual bikes that would be available for free at various stations for short commutes. This is called bike-sharing and has been tried, with almost universal success, in America’s large cities — like New York, Chicago, and Boston — as well as smaller ones — like Buffalo, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Fargo, N.D.
Toledo needs political leadership with imagination and commitment to public health and the cool factor. Bikes have to be a part of our future, and Mr. Melden has given us a good place to start.
First Published August 31, 2017, 11:45 a.m.
