[BikeLongmont] June meeting minutes

[Nenad]

Hi,

To start, let me remind everyone that tomorrow at 7:45 at the Civic
Center, Andy Clark of the League of American Bicyclists will present the
Bicycle Friendly Community award. There is a breakfast station for the
Bike to Work Day there, which is another incentive to show up!

Being afflicted with a 9AM meeting at work, I'll stop by, but will
probably leave before the presentation.

Last Tuesday at the City Council meeting, Nick Wolfrum presented the
Bicycle Friendly Community plaque to the major. Nick gave a nice speech
and mentioned our group and the website for all those that are glued to
the Channel 3.

I took some pictures of the sign and there was also an official
photographer. I'll post the pictures on our website if I get them.

One of the main items in the June meeting was our participation in the
Multi-modal Transportation Plan Steering Committee. City is mounting an
effort to look at all the facets of transportation, except air and
freight. The plan is to consider each transportation mode alone and also
consider how they interact.

The committee will meet several times through the end of this year. The
majority of work will most likely be conducted via email. The dozen or
so members should cover a wide variety of interests and backgrounds. 
They have a spot for bicyclists on the committee which will be filled
from our group.

We decided that our representative will be Craig Smith who kindly
volunteered to be the victim. Buzz will see if he can get a spot as a
one of two business community representatives.

City bike maps are slowly progressing. The city will provide a softcopy
(PDF) version as well. One of the reasons it is taking so long to make
the maps is that previous maps were not done digitally. There is hope
that by switching to the digital process, future updates will be much
easier.

We talked a bit about bike lanes and parking and agreed that it is much
better to have bike lanes, even though they may be sometimes blocked by
inconsiderately parked cars. In many streets, there is really no width
(11ft min, 13ft preferred) to have lanes with really ample width.

To have an actual separated bike lane, even when there is width, the
city would need to put another stripe, effectively doubling the striping
costs. Given that the money is unfortunately finite, we all agreed that
it is better to have more streets striped once than fewer streets with
separated bike-only stripe left of the parking lane.

We also gave final goahead for the election questionnaire. You've seen
from the postings to the group that the questions have gone out. So far,
we have about 30% response rate. Check out the 

http://www.bicyclelongmont.org/primaries2004.html

For the future, there was discussion about piggybacking onto another
organization's 501c3 nonprofit status. This would enable us to engage in
fundraising and perhaps get more done. Lauren will investigate.

For the next year, we may do a bit more to help organize Bike to Work
Day, coordinate and get more businesses to organize stations. This would
need to be started in January.

The next meeting is on July 14.

I hope everyone had a nice ride to work tomorrow. Unlike some previous
years, we might actually have a really nice day!

Regards, Nenad
...your friendly Bicycle Longmont coordinator...