September 13, 2022
Dear Common Council Members and Mayor Lewis:
To make Ithaca a fully pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly City -- for better transportation access, better public health and for reducing carbon emissions & pollution from transportation -- Bike Walk Tompkins and the Center for Community Transportation urge you to take action on the following.
1) Fund traffic calming and roadway infrastructure for bicycling. While other cities made great strides in improving bicycling infrastructure in pandemic, Ithaca has made painfully slow progress. These infrastructure improvements should not wait until more residents are biking -- if you build it, they will come.
Please include full scoping of our entire Better Bike Network for Ithaca proposal, for incorporation into the City's much-anticipated new Transportation plan.
And in the 2023 budget, please appropriate at least $500,000 for the following:a - Funding for Vision Zero/Traffic Calming projects throughout the City;
b - Study/design of our proposed Better Bike Network "6 Mile Creek Trail" bike/ped corridor connecting downtown to the Wegmans area;
c - Study/design of the N. Cayuga St. corridor for bicycling infrastructure improvements, including vertical delineators protecting the bike lanes in key spots, and a fully-paved shoulder all the way to E. Shore Dr., more safely connecting Fall Creek and IHS to Stewart Park.
2) Approve an MOU for Bikeshare in Ithaca this fall. Bikeshare was wildly popular in 2018-19, but Lime left in 2020. The Center for Community Transportation (CCT) has hired Jeff Goodmark as Director of Micromobility to launch Ithaca’s new, community-run bikeshare using pedal assist e-bikes. Upon learning of a time limited offer from our anticipated vendor, the CCT has assembled funding to bring an initial fleet of 100 e-bikeshare bikes here and make them available within a few weeks! We understand that staff will be bringing a proposed MOU to Council very soon to support this. Looking toward 2023 bikesharing, CCT will continue fundraising for the rest of the Ithaca bikeshare fleet, electric rebalancing vans and other needs (about $650,000) to extend service at least to the rest of the Flats. An affordable, locally-run bikeshare is important for transportation equity and essential for the City's sustainability goals. Bikeshare should not wait for bicycling infrastructure to be improved – in fact, starting bikeshare now will help show the demand for such improvements.
Please work speedily with Transportation Engineer Erin Cuddihy to get a bikeshare MOU in place, avoiding any delay in making bikes available in the City this fall.
3) Enact a local 25 mph speed limit.
Sadly, pedestrian and bicyclist traffic injuries and deaths have skyrocketed over the past few years. We know that reduced motor vehicle speed increases chances of a pedestrian or bicyclist surviving a crash. A growing body of evidence suggests lowering the posted speed limit has a measurable effect on average driver speeds, even without additional infrastructure changes which would further improve the situation. Since August 12, when the Governor finally signed A1007a/S2021a, it has been legal for Upstate municipalities to lower their area-wide speed limit to 25 mph without any special permission from the state. Ithaca Common Council had passed a resolution in support of this change in 2019 and again this spring, calling on our state legislators to push for its passage. Enactment of a City of Ithaca law and changing of local speed limit signs is now needed.
Please approve and implement a 25 mph area-wide speed limit for the City.
4) End snowy, icy, impassable sidewalks and crosswalk edges. In winter, the City's streets after a snowfall regularly feature piles of heavy snow at the edges of crosswalks and snow and ice on many sections of sidewalks. Other Upstate cities, such as Syracuse and Rochester, have figured out how to solve this. BWT is part of a Coalition for Snow-free Sidewalks & Crosswalks which includes the Finger Lakes Independence Center, the County Office for the Aging and Eric Lerner's Pedestrian Snow Project which is advancing this issue. Many residents are responding with their own letters to Council.
Please include in the City's 2023 budget funding for a 6-month study fully scoping the problem of snowy sidewalks and crosswalk edges in the City, as well as a pilot program of clearing selected sidewalks and crosswalk edges in the winter of '22-23.
5) Decriminalize jaywalking.
Why do people jaywalk? Often, because it is a safer place to cross the road than the crosswalk. Jaywalking laws are doing nothing to improve safety in Ithaca, and we know, from experience in other cities, that these laws tend to be applied in a racist way.
Please remove anti-jaywalking laws from the City code.
Thank you for your attention to these important requests. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.
All best,
Margaret Johnson, Director, Bike Walk Tompkins
Jennifer Dotson, Executive Director, Center for Community Transportation