J Magazine Winter 2019

While Jacksonville is one of the country’s most
dangerous cities for bicyclists, the city is planning on
making Downtown a safer neighborhood for cyclists
A wheel
commute
If Downtown is the last place
you’d think of taking a bike
ride, in the next couple of
years, you might reconsider.
The city is implementing improvements
as part of its context-sensitive
streets and mobility
plans that will create a
network of bike paths to make cycling through
Downtown streets both convenient and safe.
Right now, riding a bike Downtown is neither.
Jacksonville is one of the most dangerous cities
for bicyclists, with six cyclists killed last year
and four as of September. And that’s an issue
the city is trying to address as it works to turn
Downtown into a residential neighborhood.
This year the city adopted a Pedestrian Bicycle
Master Plan and the 2030 Mobility Plan
is under review by the state and is expected to
come before the City Council in the spring. The
plans lay out the strategy for integrating bicycle
friendly features like protected bike lanes and
bike racks into the Downtown infrastructure.
Attorney Chris Burns, an avid cyclist, welcomes
the city’s interest in making Downtown
bicycle-friendly. He is chairman of the city’s
Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee,
which helped develop the Master Plan.
Burns said the city needs to incorporate bicycle
lanes and crosswalks into the traffic design
of Downtown streets.
“We need to design these things for people
who are not super sophisticated about riding,”
Burns said. “I’ve been riding 40 years, and I do
in excess of 100 miles a week. I’m pretty comfortable
in situations most people are uncomfortable
with.”
People who cycle Downtown need to be comfortable
with delivery trucks, stop-and-go traffic
and parked cars, Burns said. It’s not uncommon
for cars to make right turns in front of cyclists, or
to open car doors into the path of a bike.
Motorists might be alert to cyclists in a residential
neighborhood, but they don’t expect
them on Downtown streets, Burns said. Cyclists
contribute to the problem by darting in and out
of traffic and ignoring traffic lights and signs.
But the biggest problem facing cyclists who
want to ride Downtown is getting there.
By LILLA ROSS // Photos by BOB SELF
WINTER 2019 | J MAGAZINE 41