According to the comment form handed out at the most recent public meeting for the Division/Church St Corridor Study, the deadline for submitting public comments is this Thursday, February 28.

The Division/Church (Business Route 51) Corridor Study is looking at ways to reconfigure this major traffic artery from the southern Stevens Point city limits to the I-39 onramp to the north. According to a handout available on the City of Stevens Point website, Division/Church will be reconstructed in the years to come in order to improve safety, to fix deteriorating pavement, to provide suitable lane widths for truck traffic, and to provide better infrastructure for bicycle and foot traffic. You can learn what happened at the first public meeting by reading the PPSP report about it here.

Another public meeting on this project will take place sometime this spring. My understanding from the first public meeting is that project staff will show off some reconfiguration possibilities at the next public meeting as part of the conversation of how to reconstruct this corridor. I am presuming that comments provided now will influence the sorts of possibilities to be represented in the engineering diagrams on display at the next meeting.

It is always easiest for comments to influence a transportation project when they are provided at the earliest stages of the design. Although I expect there will be future opportunities to comment on the Division/Church Corridor Study as the process continues, there will be no better opportunity for Poky Pedalers to have your opinions influence the design process than now. This is why submitting comments to project staff by this Thursday is important.

PPSP has submitted four letters to the project staff stating my own opinions about the sort of bicycle infrastructure I want to see implemented as part of this reconstruction. These four letters discuss:

• the opportunity provided by this project as a whole,
• improvements for bicycle traffic on Division/Church from the southern city limits to Patch St,
• improvements for bicycle traffic on Division/Church north of the railroad bridge, and
• requests about the information to be made available at the next public meeting.

You can access my letters and learn the addresses for submitting your own comments by visiting the PPSP webpage about this project. You can navigate to this webpage by clicking the Speak Your Poky item in the menu bar above and selecting the Division/Church St Corridor Study from the drop-down list. Poky Pedalers are welcome to borrow ideas from the PPSP letters when creating your own comments.

What sort of bicycle infrastructure do you want to see built on the Division/Church corridor? Get those thoughts down on paper or in an e-mail and send them to the project staff. Today. The deadline is this Thursday, so don’t put this off any longer.

PPSP will continue to update the Division/Church Corridor Study website under the Speak Your Poky menu item in order to keep Poky Pedalers informed about progress on this project, about future public meetings, and about other opportunities to voice your opinions.

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