LA CROSSE, Wis. (AP) - Robbie Young first realized riding to work was possible when he worked at an Onalaska bike shop.
When he landed a job at the business software firm SAP, Young looked for a home in the central part of the city that would make it easy to continue biking to work, the La Crosse Tribune (https://bit.ly/2mBE4fe ) reported.
Young said he doesn’t look at his 2-mile commute as saving the environment or even really saving gas - just a fun way to start his day.
“It gets the blood moving a little bit. Get some fresh air,” he said. “You get to see and experience the city on your way to work, or wherever you’re going.”
Young is among the nearly 2 percent of La Crosse County workers who ride bikes to work, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Close to 5 percent walk to work.
That may not sound like much, but it’s well above state and national averages. Only Dane County has a higher rate of bike commuters. In some neighborhoods of La Crosse, almost 40 percent of all workers walk or bike to their jobs, thanks largely to the city’s compact downtown and two university campuses.
Now city leaders are looking for ways to get even more people out of their cars as they seek to avoid a controversial and expensive highway project.
This year, La Crosse will install its first neighborhood greenway - sometimes known as a bike boulevard - with the resurfacing of 17th Street. There are plans to install signs marking bike routes. The reconstruction of Interstate 90’s Exit 3 and Rose Street will include a walking and biking footpath that will provide a new connection from the city’s North Side to Onalaska.
“In a lot of ways we are walking the walk when it comes to implementation,” said La Crosse Mayor Tim Kabat. “A highway is not the only solution. We have a lot of people who get to work other modes of transportation. That’s why we have to be as comprehensive as we possibly can.”
While state transportation officials have argued that pavement-free strategies alone will not forestall the need for an additional artery to move traffic from the northern suburbs into downtown La Crosse, there are other benefits to encouraging walking and cycling, said Robert Schneider, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies active transportation.
Schneider, who is scheduled to speak this week at UW-La Crosse on ways communities can make walking and cycling routine, bristles at the label “alternative transportation.”
“There’s one fundamental mode of human transportation, and that’s walking,” he said. “Everything else is an alternative to walking.”
Communities benefit from healthier residents, and studies show the more people walk and bike their individual chances of being struck by a vehicle actually go down. Pedestrians and cyclists frequent bars, restaurants and stores more frequently than drivers, even if they don’t shop in bulk.
“The amount that you spend on pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure - whether it’s bike lanes or sidewalks or pedestrian crossings - is much less expensive than building a freeway or interchange or other automobile-oriented infrastructure,” Schneider said. “In particular parking lots are very expensive.”
Schneider said the best way communities can encourage more walking and biking is by making it safer. That can include education, enforcement, encouragement and evaluation - although the biggest factor is re-engineering streets.
That can mean adding separated bike lanes, removing unneeded traffic lanes, adding median islands to help pedestrians cross multi-lane roads, or turning key neighborhood streets into bike boulevards with traffic calming devices to keep vehicles traveling the same speed as cyclists.
“It’s starting. It’s starting slow,” said La Crosse resident Michael Baker, who heads the Driftless Region Bicycle Coalition and rides a bike just about everywhere he goes. He owns an old Jeep, but says “it’s something just for fun.”
Creating a comfortable infrastructure is key, Baker said. Separated bike lanes would be “heaven,” though he notes clearly marked routes that connect to one another would be an improvement over the existing system.
Baker said bike lanes along one of the main highways connecting Onalaska and downtown La Crosse would dramatically increase the number of people riding rather than driving.
“Every bike that’s in the bike lane is a car that’s not in front of you,” he said.
Pedestrians and cyclists haven’t always had to fight for access to the streets.
Public roads are legal easements on private property that make it possible for people and goods to move about, and they have been around for hundreds of years, said James Longhurst, author of “Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road” and an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
“For centuries before the automobile, roads and streets were used for all kinds of things,” Longhurst said. “Public markets, a place to drive your herding animals through … play space for children.”
The law evolved to allow use by any means of transportation - feet, horses, sleds, wagons, bicycles and eventually automobiles - that didn’t hinder other’s use of the thoroughfare, Longhurst said. But in the 20th century, one mode out-competed the rest.
“For five or six decades after World War II, the assumption of how we used that space was to move cars as fast as possible from one place to another,” Schneider said.
Over the past decade or so, Schneider said leading cities around North America have begun to rethink the use of that public space.
“I’m not saying we should convert freeways into pedestrian and bicycle zones, because they have their purpose. But treating every single neighborhood street and every single collector and arterial street in the city as a thoroughfare for cars really limits what you can do for all types of transportation and really limits the type of community you’re creating.”
The discussion comes as the Department of Transportation looks to address what has become a $143 million road project through the La Crosse River marsh that was shelved after a 1998 city referendum but has lingered on the state’s list of approved projects.
The DOT is in the final stages of a planning process that began in 2016 and included dozens of meetings with the public and advisory groups.
As a result the agency identified six potential strategies designed to improve safety and alleviate congestion on the area’s three north-south corridors. All include significant new pavement, which has drawn opposition from neighborhood organizations, environmental groups, and the city of La Crosse.
While the DOT said non-pavement alternatives - known as “strategy H” - alone will not take enough vehicles off the road to prevent future congestion, officials encouraged local communities to move ahead.
The La Crosse Area Planning Committee, the intergovernmental group charged with setting transportation policy for the metropolitan area, has set out to do just that, asking the 16 member municipalities to identify concrete steps they can take in the next two years to encourage more compact development and to encourage more ubiquitous bike and pedestrian facilities.
Only four representatives attended the February meeting, and only two - the city and county of La Crosse - had prepared presentations.
Onalaska Mayor Joe Chilsen talked about the possibility of a walking path between Eagle Bluff Elementary School and Green Coulee that would allow children to avoid a busy stretch of highway. But that project is far from funded, and Chilsen later said the idea is the work of a citizens’ group, not the city.
LAPC Executive Director Tom Faella said he will include the discussion on the March agenda, which is intended to focus on parking and transit strategies.
“The interest is there,” he said. “It just was a bad day for some people.”
But actual results vary.
Holmen, the county’s fastest-growing community, has included bike and pedestrian facilities in several recent and planned highway projects.
“The village . is being quite proactive,” said village president Nancy Proctor. “Everything we’re doing now, we add a bike lane.”
Shelby town chairman Tim Candahl, chairman of the LAPC, said the town, the county’s sixth largest municipality, would like to encourage walking and biking but hasn’t taken a pro-active stance because of a lack of trails.
“We’ve got to have places for them to go,” said Candahl, who rides his bike each day from the far south side to his workplace in downtown La Crosse. “We don’t have a plan in effect right now that would address that.”
Young notes that SAP, where bike commuters make up 13 percent of the workforce, does things to make it easier: There are showers in the building, covered bike parking and a casual dress code. He said communities could work with employers to encourage more workers to walk or bike to work.
Young doesn’t think local infrastructure improvements will do much to get people who live in far-flung suburban communities to start riding into the city every day, but over the long run it might influence behavior.
“As new employees come in maybe they make the choice to live in the city,” he said. “Maybe we stop making it so easy to drive from Holmen to La Crosse.”
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Information from: La Crosse Tribune, https://www.lacrossetribune.com
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