Weekly Update

The Bicycle Plan implementation is moving forward. The performance measures committee met and developed a lot of options for how we can measure success (or lack of), and we will meet again to decide which are things we can track on a regular basis, and what our goal/targets should be. One example is bike counts. What kind of increase should we expect in those numbers over the next few years? I'll put the performance measures on the TPO Bike Program website for comment as soon as we've got a draft ready.

The bike map committee met today. One thing that came out was wanting to hear from the public on any backways/shortcuts that you take in different areas, either to save time or avoid bad roads. And if you think that the conditions of a certain road have changed since we last printed the map and the rating should be changed, please let me know that too. Sometimes it was hard to decide if a road should be yellow or red--traffic may be light, but speeds are high, for example. We do plan on zooming in a bit more on the city side of the map to provide more detail. The trade-off is losing some of the bike routes. We'll explore whether we have room for insets for those.

The marketing/programs committee will meet on Monday, August 10th at 3:30 p.m. in the MPC large conference room, 4th floor of the City-County Building. This group will be working on these two action steps:

• Spread the word about the bike program and bicycling, encouragement and safety (bring it into the 21st century--updated strategies like facebook and video).
• Special events and programs that encourage bicycling, including bicycle rides, Bike to Work and Smart Trips Month events.

Please attend if you would like!

I am updating the list of where bike racks purchased through our grant program have been installed and preparing a way for us to assess how much they are used (doing random counts throughout the year). If you would like to help us by checking bike racks at various times to see how many bikes are parked there, let me know kelley.segars@knoxtrans.org We have installed 411 racks around the region, so we could definitely use some help.