Come one and all for an SBC membership meeting at Moon River Brewing Company at 21 W Bay St. We’ll be in the basement starting at 6 for about 30 minutes of info, and socializing to follow.

We will be recapping our successful leadership retreat this past Saturday at thincspace, with updates on the plan for 2010-11. We will also have an exciting demonstration of some new marshal equipment for the September 4 Midnight Garden Ride (have you registered yet?)!

Join us, won’t you?

Please let us know if you can give us a hand for any of the available time slots by filling out our volunteer information form; please note any limitations in the “other” box. Volunteers will get a t-shirt and our sincere thanks!

You have through July 22 to participate and provide your comments and suggestions!

If you miss the July 22 deadline, Chatham County residents may contact MPO staff directly to share comments, and there will additional opportunities for input and feedback during the development of the plan over the course of the next year.

View our original post, or go directly to the MPC’s transportation and Non-motorized Transportation Plan pages to read about and access the surveys.

So, if you provided comments in the meetings at the MPC building recently, fantastic! If not, a new online version is available now through July 22. See below for full details.

Hello bicycle and pedestrian stakeholders and interested parties:

The Coastal Region Metropolitan Planning Organization (CORE MPO), which is the transportation planning entity for the Chatham County area, invites public participation in the development of the Non-motorized Transportation Plan, covering all of Chatham County. This plan will identify projects and policies that are needed to encourage walking, bicycling, and other self-powered methods of transportation. Types of projects included in the plan may be facilities such as sidewalks, bike lanes, or multi-use paths, but may also be streetscaping or other amenities to create a more human-scaled environment in certain areas. Learn more about the Non-motorized Transportation Plan at: http://www.thempc.org/Transportation/Non-motorTranspPlan.html.

The following options for participation are available through July 22, 2010, on the transportation pages of the MPC website (http://www.thempc.org/transportation.htm):

• Online, interactive mapping of issues and preferences. (This collects the same type of information as the on-paper, in-person mapping exercise that some of you attended at MPC this past spring. If you marked our paper maps earlier, there is no need to re-enter this information on the online map.)
• Survey on Bicycle Planning.
• Survey on Pedestrian Planning.

In addition, Chatham County residents may contact MPO staff directly to share comments or to take the surveys over the phone.

There will additional opportunities for input and feedback during the development of the Non-motorized Transportation Plan, over the course of the next year approximately.

The Non-motorized Transportation Plan is one element of the CORE MPO Total Mobility Plan, a long range, multi-modal transportation plan, which is simultaneously under development.

Please contact Jane Love, at 912-651-1443 or lovej@thempc.org, for additional information about the Non-motorized Transportation Plan. For more information about the overall Total Mobility Plan, contact Mark Wilkes, at 912-651-1451 or wilkesm@thempc.org.

As we hinted, next Thursday, June 17th, the City of Savannah, CAT, and a host of community organizations including your Savannah Bicycle Campaign will hold a National Dump the Pump Event to encourage residents to use alternative forms of transportation.

The main event will be the 2nd Annual Dump the Pump Challenge; a race between a cyclist, bus commuter and car commuter from the 12 Oaks Shopping Center on Abercorn to City Hall. Each competitor must obey all applicable traffic laws in racing to City Hall, where a local elected official will crown the winner.

Savannah Bicycle Campaign Executive Director Frank McIntosh as defending champion will again represent bicyclists in the competition. “In a city as flat and bikable as Savannah, there are a huge number of trips that are as fast or faster by bike as they are by car”, said McIntosh. “As the results of last year’s race proved, this can be one of them. I’m not guaranteeing victory—our bus system is extremely fast and efficient—but I feel good about my chances.”

McIntosh and the other competitors will be joined at the finish line by participants in the Savannah Bicycle Campaign’s monthly bicycle commuter group ride, Two Wheels to Work. The group ride, which is free and open to the public, will leave from Habersham Village Shopping Center parking lot at 7:30 a.m. and end at the finish line around 8:00am.

The finish line itself will be stocked with donated fruit from Polk’s Produce, free coffee from our friends Jittery Joe’s, and will be a carbon-neutral undertaking courtesy of a tree planting by Half-Moon Outfitters. For those thinking about trying an alternative commute for the first time, all Chatham Area Transit busses will operate fare free all day.

For more information on the event, contact Garrison Marr at (912) 651-6470 or garrison_marr@savannahga.gov.  Click on the image for a printable poster you can display at work.

The headline statistic is that there was an observed increase of 110% in total cyclists over the four intersections combined from last year, although a few factors made this year’s total higher than last year.

• First: SCAD wasn’t almost on Spring Break during this count as they were last year.
• Second: in contrast to the unseasonably cold March days on which we counted in 2009, the weather was fairly nice during this count.
• Third: the greater number of volunteers this year allowed this year’s total to be chiefly observed, rather than extrapolated over the course of the 10 hour study window.

This means that this year’s data was probably a more representative count than last year’s; or more simply, last year’s count was almost certainly artificially low.

Still, a win’s a win, and this is a huge increase, not only in total number of riders observed, but also very importantly in the proportion of women and the proportion of riders protecting their noodles with lids. Stay tuned for the next census, as we hope to see those trends continue.

Washington Avenue and Price Street Bike Lanes at City Council
In the wake of that success, more lies on the horizon. Engineering is complete and public comment has been issued on bike lane striping on Washington Avenue between Waters and Bull.  As noted in the WSAV story from last night including our own Frank McIntosh and City of Savannah Parking and Mobility Director Sean Brandon, Washington Avenue would be the first new bike lanes installed in 10 years.

The project awaits only a resolution at City Council this Thursday.  SBC will be there to say thank you to the city for the fine work they are doing to live up to the commitment they made in their first Bicycle Friendly Community application and following up on the recommendations there, including addition of East-West bicycle facilities and, potentially given the will and favorable neighborhood approval, a southbound bike lane on Price Street in the coming months!

Next up, every other street!
The process of updating the Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Long Range Transportation Plan has begun, and they are soliciting comments on bicycle and pedestrian projects in the county. They specifically want to know where people are currently walking and bicycling and where they might if given the appropriate facilities. Mapping exercise is this Thursday April 22 at 5pm at the MPC building (see below), and an online version should be available soon.

Development of the Non-Motorized Plan element of the Total Mobility Plan MPO staff encourages public participation through the any of the methods listed below. With the
exception of the online survey, these mostly are multiple ways to do the same thing; it is not necessary to participate in more than one mapping option unless you want to. The online survey will include some questions that are not as location-focused as the mapping options.

Mapping exercises at the CORE MPO Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) meetings
o Apr. 22, 2010, 6:15pm, in the MPC Hearing Room, 112 E. State Street, Savannah, GA. CAC meeting begins at 5pm and will include additional information between 5 and 6:15pm which may be of interest but will not be directly related to this process.
Mapping exercise at the CORE MPO Advisory Committee on Accessible Transportation (ACAT) meeting
o Apr. 26, 2010, 1pm. Meeting begins at 1pm and mapping exercise will be at the end of the meeting, some time before 3pm.
MPO staff will announce the availability of an online survey and an online, interactive map soon.

Contact staff directly anytime:
Jane Love, Transportation Planner
912-651-1443
lovej@thempc.org

Where would you go? Everywhere? Us too — that is why we will be pushing again for adoption of Complete Streets policies for the MPO and all its included governmental entities. That’s why we will stress the importance of developing safe bike access on bridges that are the only points of access to the islands in particular. That’s why we’ll be there and that’s why you should too (or at least fill out the survey when we let y’all know about it).