Poky Pedalers should circle the evening of Tuesday, December 3 on their calendars. That’s the date of the Open House for the Portage County Bike/Ped Planning Project, which will be held at the Lincoln Center.

The Open House is free and open to the general public. The displays are expected to be tailored to those with little knowledge about the process that has gotten the project to this point. Even those hearing about this planning project for the first time should be able to walk in, understand the maps, tables, and charts on display, and ask questions of and provide comments to the project staff. The content of the Open House will be based on the preliminary draft of the full plan document, which just became available.

This Open House is also one of the few remaining chances to voice your issues and concerns about biking and walking around the urban and rural areas of Portage County that might have been overlooked over the past year of effort on this plan. The newly released full plan document is a draft – the plan will be finalized in the next few months – so there is still opportunity for your opinions to affect the final version.

Earlier that same day, a joint meeting will take place involving of all the committees for this project – both the Urban and Rural Steering Committees as well as the Technical Committee – in order to review the draft plan document. This meeting, which is also open to the public, is probably more useful to those who have been regularly following the progress of the plan.

The joint meeting is more likely to delve deeply into specific details of the plan document, whereas the Open House is more likely to give a broad overview of the important features of the plan. For most Poky Pedalers, I would recommend choosing to attend the Open House.

Both the joint meeting and the Open House will take place on Tuesday, December 3 at the Lincoln Center (1519 Water St). [Please take note that these events will not be taking place at the Portage County Annex building.] Here are the times of these meetings:

• Joint meeting of Urban/Rural/Technical committees: 4 PM to 6 PM
• Open House: 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

If you want to review the draft plan document in advance, links to it are available on the official project website. I have reproduced these links below. (These three downloads use something called Dropbox. If you click the ‘download’ button and select ‘direct download’, it should download the file to your computer. That’s what worked for me, anyway.)

• Text from bike/ped plan document (over 170 pages, but only 4MB to download)
• Maps from bike/ped plan document (only 13 maps, but 20 MB to download and will expand to almost 30 MB)
• Safe Routes to School appendix (not included in the other files, almost 200 pages and 30 MB to download and will expand to almost 430 MB – that is not a misprint)

The project website also contains the agenda for the joint meeting and the minutes from the November 11 Urban and Rural Steering Committee meetings, which are pending approval at the joint meeting.

Hopefully, lots of Poky Pedalers show up to the Open House and share your opinions of about what you see: what you like, what you don’t like, and what is missing. Your feedback is valuable for ensuring that the county bike/ped plan becomes a useful blueprint for how to improve biking and walking in the urban and rural areas of Portage County.

As always, if you want to get more information about the project, including reports of past meetings and news about upcoming meetings, Poky Pedalers can visit my Portage County Bike/Ped Plan page under the Speak Your Poky menu bar item.

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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