Howard County Bike Master Plan

    For anyone who wants to have more bike friendly paths in our County should be encouraged by a recent action the County to move ahead in this direction.  Here is the information from the Bicycle Advocates of Howard County:

"It took Bicycle Advocates of Howard County 8 years of lobbying and 4 years of effort to get a Bicycle Master Plan signed by the County Executive and approved by County Council in April this year. Now comes the hard part – we need to get the projects funded and built. Bicycle Advocates of Howard County will be testifying at the County Executive initial budget hearing for FY 2018 in 2 weeks to get this process started

Right now we have scattered short bike paths that don’t connect to much.  It’s hard and sometimes unsafe to go on a bike ride or bike your kid to school or bike to work.  A coalition of groups led by the Bicycle Advocates of Howard County and the Horizon Foundation is asking County Executive Kittleman for a near-term investment in 50 miles of connected bike routes (including 9 miles of paths pedestrians could use too) called “The Bikeway”  The Bikeway would provide a continuous bike route that would run from Ellicott City to Laurel and from Clarksville to Elkridge.   It’s good for health, the environment, and business! (see details about those benefits here).

The routes come from the Bicycle Master Plan (with the exception of some short connectors).  The Bikeway provide a great north-south and east-west axis foundation from which we can continue building the entire plan.  It’s within one mile of 56% of county residents, and we can build it with $3 million in bond funding for 3 years. This is what we’ll be asking for in the FY 2018 budget.

If you want to support this effort please tell County Leaders by filling out this online form: http://bit.ly/HCbikeway"

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