Opinion: Chapel Hill should stop planning and start building

Riding a bicycle in town has been a dangerous experience for many. Between 2013 and 2014, three cyclists died and 44 accidents occurred.

The town of Chapel Hill wants more people riding bicycles, but it must rapidly build much needed infrastructure to make its desire a safe reality.

The extensive town bike plan, adopted in June 2014, is chock full of ideas to change street infrastructure to be more bike friendly. Its laundry list of needed changes amounts to $14.3 million. About half of the dollars needed to build these street and sidewalk improvements were approved in the town’s bond referendum.

But not all is ready to launch. It seems that the town’s affinity for plans is hindering its ability to move concrete and actually protect a vulnerable group of travelers.

The town’s transportation and connectivity advisory board requested the town’s planning department conduct a traffic study for Ephesus Fordham District and East Franklin Street. Even though the bike plan outlines what infrastructure is needed for the area, the board’s attention to detail is limiting time and resources that could be spent on actually building new projects.

The town’s progress on making infrastructure changes should be a reflection of the most pressing needs of its cyclists.

Now that some funding for projects exists, the town should work with various advocacy organizations such at the ReCYCLEry and the Bicycle Alliance of Chapel Hill to identify the projects that should be expedited.

One of the greatest barriers to more people cycling in the town is how safe they feel doing so. The allocation of a bike lane in the right place may persuade or dissuade someone from choosing to bike to the grocery store or to the coffee shop.

A website will be created to keep track of ongoing projects, according to Town Business Management Director Kenneth C. Pennoyer. This website ought not to go the way of the town’s wikimap, a tool supposedly meant to facilitate infrastructure planning that the town has largely underutilized and has yet to act on.

It would serve the town well to have a full-time employee working to implement the bike plan. In fact, this is a recommendation made in the plan. But according to a Chapel Hill town employee, the responsibilities of this role will be handled by someone with other duties.

To its credit, the town has done an incredible job with the planning of this serious undertaking. However, the way transportation is funded in North Carolina and the United States acts to hinder the municipalities’ progressive plans. Of the state’s $4.3 billion transportation budget, less than 10 percent was spent for transportation infrastructure not expressly meant for cars.

There are few places better to ride a bike in the United States than university towns.

Hordes of twenty-somethings need a quick and simple way to traverse their campus, and oftentimes parking for cars is in short supply.

Chapel Hill can transform its streets to look more like Amsterdam’s or Copenhagen’s, and it has positioned itself to do so. Now it needs to act.