Letter: More Cycling Routes Planned Around Town in Coming Years

The following notice was modified from an ' announcement and posted at the editor's suggestion.

Albany has included funds for painting and signing cycling routes in the Capital Improvement Program. These routes are defined in the Active Transportation Plan. The Capital Improvement Program runs for five years but the paint and signs project is funded over the next two. What this means is you can expect to see more cycling routes rolling out all around town in the next couple of years.

Even though the paint and sign project is only budgeted for $80 thousand out of the $25 million total capital improvement budget, that was always the point.  Painting and signing cycling routes has a high benefit for the cost. Even so, AS&R failed miserably when it tried to get painting and signing into the capital program in 2008. It subsequently built the case by successfully advocating for the Climate Action Plan to call for accelerated implementation of the cycling network, and then the Active Transportation Plan to specifically prioritize the painting and signing cycling route components over other, more expensive physical changes.

So this year, when the capital program was first proposed without a painting and signing project, AS&R pointed to the Active Transportation Plan. Staff kindly responded by recommending a delay in the adoption of the program to consider whether to include painting and signing, and then decided to do so having identified funds for the purpose. Council kindly provided the time for this consideration to occur, and then adopted the result last evening.

Congratulations to everyone who worked on this success, four years in the making. You have made a difference to the future of cycling in Albany.

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