On Thursday evening the Keene City Council, of which I am a member, adopted, on a vote of 11-4, a plan to widen sidewalks, create bicycle/multi-modal transportation lanes, and expand greenspace in the downtown core of our city.
This is part of some renovations in our downtown infrastructure, made necessary by the need to replace the century-old pipes and storm drains that currently exist in the area. The vote that has just taken place designates the broad overall plan for how Main Street and Central Square are to be laid out once the digging is over.
It was always a questions of, how do we put back the surface infrastructure once all the pipes have been replaced? Do we put it back the way it was, reusing a downtown design that was drawn out in the 1980s, to meet the automobile-centric, suburbanization-focused development needs of that era? Or do we modernize the street layout to reflect 21st century values, like walkability, green development, and inclusive urbanism?
In the end, the Council went with a lot of Column A and some of Column B.
The option that was picked - something called the Multilane Hybrid Option - wasn't my first choice. It wasn't my second, third, forth, fifth, or sixth choice, either.
It was my seventh choice. Don't ever say I'm not one who's able agree to a compromise.
In the end, while I would have preferred a plan with far more substantial changes to our traffic pattern and greenspace, the Multilane Hybrid Option was able to meet the concerns of a strong majority of City Councilors, all of whom have spent a whole lot of time considering the different points of view of a whole lot of people on this topic. That's why, in many ways, this plan reflects the point of view of people who wanted very little change at all.
However, the reason this plan has my support is because it does include protected travel lanes for bicycles and other non automobile-based forms of transportation. I also appreciate that this plan expands the amount of greenspace in Central Square by about 40%.
These new bike lanes - sorry "multi-modal transportation lanes" - are a huge win for green transportation in Keene.
Multi-modal means not just bikes, but scooters, skateboards, small electric vehicles of various types. These are affordable and environmentally-friendly means of getting around our community that will become increasingly attractive transportation options for all sorts of people, especially now that Keene has committed to creating the space in our downtown streetscape that protects riders from the dangers posed by automobile traffic.
Currently, Keene's bike and multi-modal transportation network has a lot of promise, but I could give you a list of significant gaps that are preventing it from being used to its full potential. This plan fills an important gap that goes along Main Street and around Central Square, where its illegal to ride a bike or scooter on the sidewalk and quite dangerous to ride it on the road.
Based of this latest action of the City Council, the sidewalks in this area will now be expanded and will include an outside lane, where multi-modal traffic is separated from the danger of automobiles by a row of parked cars and from pedestrians through the judicious use of trees and shrubbery.
This is a big win for Keene, and puts our downtown on a path to reach its full potential as the delightful, green, populous, and prosperous urban core of our broader Monadnock Region.
Apropos of nothing, here is a picture I took in Barcelona this past April.
