MILFORD, De. - While there were no bicyclists today along Marshall Street in Milford, city officials are hoping these new bike lanes that are being installed will encourage people to explore their community in a new way.
A pop up bicycle lane demonstration is calling Marshall Street home for the next two weeks to test drive a potential permanent biking plan to downtown Milford. The city has been working to update it's bicycle plan over the last 18 months, and during the research, city officials identified the street as a key artery for bike traffic through the city.
"Anything to bring the community out and have an experience, it's definitely a community builder," explained Sara Pletcher, Economic Development and Community Engagement Administrator for the city. "We want to be a bike friendly town. There is investment behind that, and this opportunity lets us know the investment is worth it, and that we're going to be putting our tax dollars where the community is going to use it and take advantage of it."
The pop up is a partnership between the city, the University of Delaware's
Living Lab, and DelDOT. Today, crews were out painting bike lanes, directional signs on the ground, and constructing curb structures to protect the new lanes. "Some folks at DelDOT made us aware of a co-op between the University of Delaware and DelDOT that do these pop up projects, these pop up demonstrations that will temporarily display bicycle infrastructure, to give the community a little bit of an idea of what could occur on their roadway," explained Rob Pierce, Planning Director for the city. "Our comprehensive plan that we update every 10 years has a lot of goals and objectives related to making the community more pedestrian and cyclist oriented. So we want to promote those alternate modes of transportation - we have several projects going on throughout town that would enhance that: our sidewalk repair program, a streetscape project on northeast front street. So we just kind want to kind of keep building upon that momentum and get people out riding more and feeling more safe. And we kind of want to create these designated bike paths that don't have people riding with traffic so all riders feel comfortable."
Similar pop up demonstrations through the Living Lab have been successful in New Castle, according to graduate student Erin Fogarty, and the project allows the city to test out the bike lanes and get resident feedback before making a long term investment.
"Delaware is a very car dependent state, and so we do these projects to make it a little easier for people to be able to walk where they are going, bike where they're going, take their skateboard, even just walk their dogs," explained Fogarty. "We do this to try and make Delaware more friendly towards multi-modal transportation." For now, the pop up will keep residents from parking along the bike lane side of Marshall Street, but only for 2 weeks. The pop up will run until July 2nd. The city is looking for feedback on the project from both those who utilize the bike paths and those who live in Milford. You can give your thoughts on the project by clicking
here.