MDOT recently held an open house on August 10th, 2017 open house to discuss their Grand River Avenue reconstruction project.
Although this project is already under construction, the re-striping will be changed before it is completed in September. The seven-lane road between Cass Avenue and I-94 will be road-dieted to five lanes and (mostly) protected bike lanes. On-street parking will be removed except in locations where it is needed by small businesses. In those limited locations, bicyclists will loss the protected bike lane and have to share a 14-foot vehicle travel lane.
That is not certainly not ideal. However, the MDOT project team was unwilling to remove another lane of travel at this time, especially given the uncertainty of the new arena and its new traffic patterns. City planning did propose an alternative pavement marking where the protection drops that would alert motorists and encourage them to stay left.
Some small businesses did attend and affirm their need for on-street parking since they did not have off-street options. There seemed to be a respectful acknowledgement from both bicyclists and these owners that the road design wasn’t ideal but a fair compromise to benefit both parties.
Bicyclists also raised concerns about the maintenance of existing protected bike lanes. The city confirmed that they now have specialized equipment to sweep these lanes that are too narrow for standard width sweepers.
These Grand River bike lanes provide a key connection between many destinations, including Downtown, Woodbridge, Beacon Park, RiverWalk and more. East of Cass Avenue, a two-way cycletrack is planned to connect through downtown. It is anticipated that they will eventually get extended for the entirety of the Grand River.
With the completion of this year’s E. Jefferson, Cass, Warren, and Grand River Avenue projects, Detroit appears to be one of the top five U.S. cities for miles of protected bike lanes, up from 76th in 2015.
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2 replies on “MDOT to add protected bike lanes to Grand River Project”
76th in the country for protected bike lanes in 2015? I thought Detroit had 0 protected bike lanes in 2015.
There was 0.3 miles of protected bike lanes installed on E. Jefferson at the end of the 2015 construction season.
http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/michigan/2015/10/31/detroit-biking-streets-urban/74861054/