The Urban and Rural Steering Committees for the Portage County Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning Project will each meet this Wednesday, March 6 in Conference Room 5 of the Portage County Annex Building (1462 Strongs Ave). The Urban Committee meets from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM, and the Rural Committee meets from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM. Both meetings are open to the public.

The agendas are similar for both meetings, differing only in the focus on urban or rural issues. The meeting packets, which include the agenda plus some other information, are available in a post on the Portage County Bike/Ped Plan website. The content of these packets is listed later in this post. Packet PDFs can also be downloaded directly from the following links:

• Urban Steering Committee meeting packet (1.9 MB PDF)
• Rural Steering Committee meeting packet (2.2 MB PDF)

I outline these agendas below.

After some preliminary housekeeping items, there will be a summary of the public workshop that took place last week. I gave my impressions about this all-day workshop in a recent post, but it will be interesting to hear the viewpoint of the consultants responsible for creating the bike/ped plan who moderated the workshop.

Next, there will be a presentation of the current status of the Safe Routes to School planning effort. According to information contained in the meeting packets, traffic conditions around all Portage County K-12 schools have been examined, and some recommendations will be discussed at the Wednesday meetings.

The next agenda item is listed as “Discussion of bicycle study area selection and overview of methodology”. I am not clear on what is meant by “bicycle study area selection”, but I figure this will be clarified as this discussion gets underway.

This will be followed by a general discussion on bicycling and walking issues and potential solutions. From the meeting packet information, this sounds like an opportunity for committee members to state their concerns and ideas with regard to bicycling and walking conditions around the county.

Each meeting will conclude by indicating the next steps in the bike/ped planning process.

The meeting packets themselves contain the following info:

• the agenda,
• an agenda overview with a bit of explanation of each item,
• draft minutes from the January 29 Joint Steering Committee meeting,
• overview maps relevant to the Safe Routes to School discussion, and
• several maps specific to one school – SPASH for the urban committee and Amherst schools for the rural committee – including a current site audit map and a suggested improvements map.

My impression is that the Urban and Rural Steering Committee Meetings on Wednesday will inform us of some of the substance already created by this bike/ped planning project and will prime the pump for getting the committees to start weighing in on issues that affect bicycle and foot traffic throughout the county.

If Poky Pedalers decide to attend either meeting (or both meetings!), you will probably learn a great deal about the challenges we face to improve our bicycling and walking networks in the Stevens Point urban area (including Park Ridge, Whiting, and Plover) as well as in the surrounding villages and townships of Portage County.

To envision the possibilities for improving our bicycle and foot traffic infrastructure, the knowledge obtained at these meetings will be a useful starting point.

I am looking forward to Wednesday’s meetings. I hope to see lots of Poky Pedalers there.

Disclosure: Bob Fisch, Chief Bike Fun Officer of Poky Pedaling Stevens Point, is a member of the Urban Steering Committee for the Portage County Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning Project. Posts about this project appearing on the PPSP website are part of a broader PPSP effort to keep readers informed of bikey news in our area. Nothing posted on the PPSP website should be considered to be official communication from the Portage County Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning Project. The official website for this project can be accessed at http://portagecobikepedplan.wordpress.com.

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