Bloomingdale Trail Open House Tuesday 10-4, 6-8 pm, McCormick Tribune YMCA

This Tuesday there is an open house for public input on the Bloomingdale Trail design. So far much of the public input has been resistant to the idea of the Bloomingdale Trail as a bicycle commuting artery and has called for design features ranging from cobble stones to speed bumps to make the trail less of a through path. If cyclists want the Bloomingdale Trail to be the great piece of infrastructure that it has the potential to be, then cyclists need to make their voices heard.

See the link below for more information:
http://www.bloomingdaletrail.org/1/post/2011/09/bt-charrette-public...

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Permalink Reply by Ace Mann on October 4, 2011 at 4:23am

I will be stopping in to see it.

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Permalink Reply by Steven Vance on October 4, 2011 at 4:51am

Tuesday is not an open house, but a presentation of people's contribution made at the open houses on Saturday and Sunday (October 1 and 2). The Bloomingdale Trail design team will synthesize everything that happened, working hard yesterday and today to have something to show for 2 hours.

Keep in mind, there is NO design proposal for the Bloomingdale Trail. The design team, after tonight, will develop a framework plan based on the priorities that people who've attended the public meetings expressed.

In a booklet on each table at the open house on Saturday/Sunday, there were pages describing the possibilities of multi-use trails. One drawing showed a path much like the Lakefront Trail is in some places: two-way "faster" lanes in the middle, and narrow "slower lanes" on the outsides. A second drawing showed these two paths side-by-side.

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Permalink Reply by Michelle S on October 5, 2011 at 3:27pm

Phew, I got worried after reading Cameron's report that anti-bike-path people were suggesting that the BT be peds only, but it looks like a bike lane would be required in order to get CMAQ funding to make the whole project happen, according to Blair Kamin's report in the Trib today.

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Permalink Reply by Steven Vance on October 5, 2011 at 8:03pm

12 feet is the minimum width for a SHARED PATH. That means 12 feet for both people walking and people biking. That's the width of most of the Lakefront Trail. At least one audience member who spoke at the end was confused about this as well, and I don't think the design team caught that confusion - if they did, they would have clarified this.

18 feet for everything else means trees, landscaping, access points, etc...

I've addressed this on Grid Chicago in Thursday morning's post (8:10 AM).