City Continues Work on Non-Motorized Transportation Plan

The city of East Lansing is working to make its streets safer by updating its non-motorized transportation plan.

“I would say it’s important for every city to have a non-motorized plan, but especially in a city like East Lansing where you have a very diverse mix of people,” Julie Kroll, traffic engineer group manager at Fleis & VandenBrink, said. “You have students, you have elderly, you have people that don’t have vehicles, you have a lot of transit users. And so making sure we’re accommodating all of those users and having a plan implemented so that we’re not just picking and choosing what we’re doing, but we have a focused direction and this is how we’re going to implement this plan.”

The city has already made significant progress on its non-motorized transportation plan in recent years, but recognizes there are additional opportunities and needed updates.

“The goal here is to develop a non-motorized transportation plan update,” East Lansing Senior Project Engineer Stephen Clayton said. “The plan was previously developed, this is an update to it. We’re targeting and trying to introduce a lot more tools to the toolkit, so to speak, of non-motorized transportation, specifically for bikes and pedestrians, those are the two main forms.”

The updates to the plan focus primarily on better ways to encourage non-motorized transportation and traffic calming within neighborhoods.

“[A non-motorized transportation plan] is important for East Lansing because there are a lot of residents that use non-motorized transportation as their primary mode,” Clayton said. “So it is important to have infrastructure available for people to have non-motorized transportation plans and it kind of aligns with the goals of East Lansing, the priorities of East Lansing. And it’s obviously safer, that’s a main component of it as well.”

Most recently, East Lansing’s Department of Public Works hosted an open house concerning the plan on Wednesday, June 5 from 4 to 6 p.m. This was the second open house regarding the plan, the first included regional and local stakeholders. 

This open house was phase three of a four phase schedule to implement the plan. 

“We’re kind of in the final stages of the process, in the recommendation space, so it should be finishing up in the next couple of months,” Ann Marie Kerby, planning manager at Cincar Consulting Group, said. 

The city and its partners are searching for community feedback to create a well-rounded plan that addresses the concerns of residents.

“It really helps direct what we want to prioritize in the overall plan,” Kerby said. “It’s not just the public residents, but also key stakeholders, the transportation commission is part of it too, so all of those voices are really important because we’re really looking for, I mean, they know it best. They know what areas they feel are unsafe and what areas they want to prioritize.”

Community members were welcomed at the open house to take in information about the project, learn about the best practices for non-motorized improvements, look at the targeted areas of improvements, ask questions and provide feedback.

An online survey and interactive map were previously set up for community members who weren’t able to attend the open houses.

Survey results show that residents are interested in finding ways to connect the existing bike facilities, find a way to buffer bike lanes and enhance targeted intersections for pedestrian safety.

Kroll is focused on getting feedback from the specific neighborhoods in East Lansing.

“We did a data collection in all these neighborhoods, so I have baseline data, but I’m trying to get input from the neighborhoods,” she said. “I don’t live in all these neighborhoods, but they do. So tell me what are the concerns, what’s going on in your neighborhood, what’s your day-to-day, what are your issues.”

Jann Angell and Pamela Liebold, members of the Whitehills neighborhood, attended the open house to identify their concerns and possible solutions.

“On any one day, I’ll be outside weeding and they drive by very fast, and it’s too many [driving fast],” Angell said. “It’s a residential area, but the city kind of uses our street as more of a major thoroughfare because it’s so wide, it was built in the ‘50s when everything was very spacious, and now people think it’s an Indianapolis speedway.”

Angell and Liebold share the same concerns of too much traffic and people driving too fast through their neighborhood.

The women took it upon themselves to go house to house receiving signatures from residents agreeing with these concerns. 

“It’s a lot of traffic and we need to slow down,” Liebold said.

With input from Angell, Liebold and other residents, the next step for the city is to implement the correct tools to address these problems.

Some of the recommendations to improve pedestrian safety that the plan may include are bump-outs, filling in sidewalk gaps, raised crosswalks and leading pedestrian intervals.

“For pedestrian improvements, I think one of the big ones for me, it seems simple but I think it will be really helpful, is the leading pedestrian intervals,” Kerby said. “So allowing pedestrians to get out in front of traffic 3 to 7 seconds ahead of vehicles. Basically, the light will turn for them before it turns for anyone else so they can get out on the crosswalk.”

This allows the pedestrian to be a lot more visible to a vehicle.

In terms of bicycle improvements, the plan is looking at implementing protected bike lanes, shared-use paths and bike boxes. A bike box is an area at the head of a signalized intersection that allows cyclists to get ahead of traffic, and therefore be more visible to motorists.

“Bike boxes are a safer way to make bikes more visible to vehicles cause they’ll kind of sit out in front of vehicles at the intersection,” Kerby said. “We were looking at some other cities, and Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids have them.”

Once there is a finalized plan, it will be presented to City Council for approval.

“This plan would be used by the city as a roadmap for our projects,” Clayton said. “When we have infrastructure upgrade projects, we can use this plan to help guide the non-motorized aspects of those projects or include non-motorized aspects into the capital improvement projects that we have in the city.”