“At night, it can get a little seedy,” Sanwald said. “I pick up the pace a little bit when it gets darker.”

Sanwald’s route might change soon, though.

The city plans to restructure a portion of Kalamazoo Street in the summer of 2013, which includes adding bike lanes in efforts to make the city more pedestrian-friendly.

“(Adding bike lanes) doesn’t sound like a half-bad idea — I would prefer to use that,” Sanwald said. “I think any kind of greater support we can give to maintaining basic infrastructure is good.”

The construction is planned to start in early May and continue until mid-August.

The road covers the portion between Marigold Avenue and just west of Harrison Road.

Although the thoroughfare is heavily used by students, the portion only consists of two vehicle lanes, and shouldn’t cause much congestion for the rest of the community in the three months the roads are closed, Department of Public Works Engineering Administrator Bob Scheuerman said.

Scheuerman said although replacing a sewer in that area is the driving force of the project, the city’s nonmotorized transportation plan allows the city to add pedestrian-friendly elements wherever possible, and the Kalamazoo Street reconstruction is the perfect opportunity to continue the improvements.

The nonmotorized transportation plan, which officially was introduced last year, embeds these elements into city infrastructure projects — something that wasn’t a focus in years past, Mayor Pro Tem Nathan Triplett said.

“(The plan) really laid out a blueprint of where we want to be,” Triplett said. “We would look at these (infrastructure) issues one at a time, and some of these things would slip through the cracks.
Every time a development project comes forward, we say, ‘Okay, what does this piece of infrastructure look like with bike lanes, public transit, sidewalks.’”

A recent example of this is the Albert Avenue construction that took place last summer, where the street was widened to allow for easier cyclist travel.

Since the portion of Kalamazoo Street is home to a large concentration of students in University Village Apartments, making travel to campus as convenient as possible is a high priority for the city, Triplett said.

“The arteries that connect the city proper to campus are areas where nonmotorized transportation is especially important, because of the high volume of students walking, biking and accessing public transportation,” Triplett said. “(Pedestrian accessibility) is important everywhere, but especially important in areas heavily trafficked by students.”