City officials are evaluating the possibility of installing bike lanes inside City limits and bike repair stations on the Adkisson Greenbelt. The Chamber Young Professionals (CYP) are leading the push for the expanded bike/pedestrian infrastructure.
The CYP presented its proposal on Tuesday to the City of Owensboro’s Technical Advisory Committee and Metropolitan Planning Organization.
Jared Revlett, Chair of CYP’s Community Development Committee, said they are asking the City to use money from the $468,000 grant it received to reduce carbon emissions for the project.
Revlett said the committee began researching the interests of the community in the summer of 2022, and those who answered a poll expressed the importance of the walkability and bikeability of the community.
According to survey results, the community prioritizes designated painted bike lanes, connectivity improvements to the Greenbelt, and overall safety for bike riders throughout the county.
The CYP proposal on Tuesday included two main ideas.
The first is adding 10 bike repair stations along the Greenbelt, allowing riders to fix their bikes and continue on instead of having to leave and likely finish riding for the day. Each repair station would be equipped with screwdrivers, air pumps, tools to fix a flat tire, and other essential equipment. All equipment would be chained to the station.
“They all come with a little QR code on them, so if somebody doesn’t know how to change a tire or they don’t really know how to use any of the tools that are out there, they can scan that QR code, go online and look at those to be able to do that,” Revlett said.
After talking with City of Owensboro Parks & Recreation Director Amanda Rogers, the committee found 10 locations they said would be apt for the stations — such as near Owensboro Health Regional Hospital and Higdon Road, Kendall-Perkins Park, Smothers Park, and Moreland Park.
Revlett said the “all-in” cost is estimated to be $18,575 — but noted that is not a tax-exempt estimate.
The second portion of the presentation was the implementation of bike lanes, and idea Revlett said started with GRADD’s unfinished bike/pedestrian plans from 2018.
“We tried to look at some of the areas that haven’t been completed yet,” he said. “Now with this grant money to reduce [the City’s] carbon footprint, we wanted to see the possibility of getting these activated.”
Most of the proposed bike lanes would connect the Greenbelt to other community amenities such as English Park, downtown, and Chautauqua Park.
The proposed bike lanes are:
- Cravens Avenue to West 5th Street to Castlen Street/Hanning Lane, which connects the Greenbelt to English Park
- Hanning Lane to West 1st Street, which connects English Park to Smothers Park
- KY 54 from East Byers Avenue to Leitchfield Road, which connects the Greenbelt to Chautauqua Park
- CS-1029 to Alsop Lane to East 4th Street/East 2nd Street, which connects the Greenbelt to downtown
- Old Hartford Road to 22nd Street to Daviess Street, which will provide bike access from the east side of Owensboro to the center
“Everybody agrees that the Greenbelt is great, but it really connects to nowhere. This project would help connect the Greenbelt areas, some of the neighborhoods that are on the outlying parts of our community to areas of downtown, and those types of things,” Revlett said.
Daviess County Judge-Executive Charlie Castlen said that in previous conversations, city and county officials stopped developing plans for bike lanes because they would take away street parking.
“One of the big concerns that we had is the loss of on-street parking. There are some neighborhoods already that have very limited parking places,” Castlen said.
City Engineer Kevin Collingnon added that they would have to find a way to compensate for the loss of traffic lane space. The standard street width is 30 feet, according to Collignon. With a bike lane recommended to be 5 feet on each side of traffic, that would only leave 20 feet of driveable lanes.
“If you had a bike lane on each side, then there goes your parking in a lot of situations. That’s why we ended up with with sharrows in a lot of locations — which is the marking in the center of the of the line that says share the lane with the bicyclists,” Collingnon said.
City Manager Nate Pagan noted that the CYP proposal also falls in line with recent survey results from the Parks and Recreation Master Plan about connecting the Greenbelt to other parts of the city.
“It very much aligns with other feedback that we’re getting from a similar master plan that we’re doing from all of our parks system,” Pagan said. “So it’s something we’re evaluating to a limited degree but we’ll be doing more.”
