Adding Bike Lanes to Our Streets

The Kingsport Times-News recently published an article about Kingsport’s reconfiguration of Center Street in downtown. However, much of the controversy is about what the configuration did to Center Street. The City of Kingsport and the State of Tennessee Transportation Department narrowed the street from four travel lanes to two travel lanes, a middle turn lane, and two bike lanes.

The addition of the bike lanes has been very controversial. Many downtown businesses are excited about the new transportation options and see it as an economic opportunity. Others in the community see this as a nuisance and bad transportation engineering.

When we talk about downtown revitalization and mixing residential, retail, and restaurants, having multiple modes of transportation is important. People need to be able to get to their destination safely regardless of their personal conditions. Maybe they are unable to drive anymore, or a young person cannot yet afford a car. Providing bike lanes and sidewalks along streets helps to ensure that people safely gets to where they need to go.

This is a conversation that we haven’t had here in Elizabethton, but are we ready to take the next step? Should we be looking to create additional modes of transportation? Already we have many streets with sidewalks, but we don’t really have any bike lanes in our community. The Riverfront Linear Path and the Tweetsie Trail both have contributed a lot to the biking atmosphere in Elizabethton and have helped provide safe routes through the city. Adding bike lanes to our existing streets will expand out biking infrastructure, encouraging citizens to bike and create opportunities to be healthy. Bike routes can be added to many of our local streets for only the cost of paint and they can be added to our collector routes when they are repaved.

Bike routes can also have an economic impact. An example is Austin, Texas, where the city started adding bike lanes to their entire local, collector, and minor arterial street network. This network is projected to increase the city's traffic capacity by about 25,000 trips per day. This means more people traveling past businesses with minimal expense to add these lanes to the City’s infrastructure. New York City is another example where a redesign of Union Square included the addition of protected bike lanes resulted in 49% fewer commercial vacancies in the area.

What role should bike lanes play in transportation in Elizabethton? What else should we be doing to encourage people to choose a car alternative form of transportation? Let’s talk about it!