Please reach out to me at rickbeilm@bloomington.in.gov or 812.349.3529 to discuss more. Thank you.

And by "reaching out to you" I mean, "reaching out to us" my apologies for misspeaking. :/

HI Andrea, Thanks for reaching out to you. I agree with you, the bike lanes on Smith are in a state of disrepair- and considering the volume/ speeds of the motorvehicles on Smith- it is, not ideal. Smith is challenging- it's narrow, you have a grade difference around the street, you only have sidewalks on one side of the street, and the City doesn't have much leeway with the right of way that is directly adjacent to the street. I don't say these things to sound like and excuse, I say these things because it means that any project that will fix the flaws that resulted from how the road and surrounding areas were developed are extremely expensive to fix. In the presence of limited funding, largely the only way we could sufficiently remediate these issues is with a larger Capital Improvement project. As a interim measure, we have also discussed the idea of changing how the bike lanes are marked on Smith so that they are marked as sharrows, or with a dotted line to indicate that bikes need to be accommodated, and passing distance should be 3 feet(I'm still not sure how that would look). We're a few years out from resurfacing Smith, and at present, the City has no plans to allocate Capital Improvement funding towards Smith Road improvements; but as we are re-evaluating the process for how trips are prioritized- I think it would be promising to look at factors of residential density, traffic volumes/road width, routes to schools, proximity to bike/pedestrian networks as a starting point. Let me know if you would like to discuss more.