The future of bicycle and pedestrian traffic on campus and throughout the city will be changing in the coming years.
A project combining the efforts of MSU’s Department of Campus Park and Planning and the city of East Lansing will evaluate how to extend the Lansing River Trail through the MSU campus and connect it to Meridian Township and East Lansing’s bike and hike trail system.
The group of MSU staff, faculty and students, East Lansing and Meridian Township officials, area residents, the Michigan Department of Transportation, Rail to Trails and Ingham County Parks representatives began working on the project in earnest in July and came up with two different possible master plans.
Two open houses on the plan’s future were held Tuesday afternoon to present the cases.
“This is a big project and it’s going to be done in pieces,” said Deborah Kinney, a landscape architect for the Department of Campus Park and Planning. “We’re hoping to apply for a variety of grants to implement this and have the bulk of it completed in three to four years.”
That is something that is music to the ears of area cyclists such as Chris Davis, a Lansing resident and frequent user of the Lansing River Trail.
“This is making it safer for bikers and pedestrians to easily get from one side of campus to the other,” said Davis, who liked both master plan options presented Tuesday. “I’ll absolutely use it.”
But before construction begins, project designers are trying to get public input on the plan. They hope to come up with a design that will be beneficial to everyone by improving safety, increasing nonmotorized transportation options and improving campus navigation while preserving the land as much as possible.
In order to do so, design consultants from the Ann Arbor-based company, The Greenway Collaborative, Inc.. and the Colorado-based company, Bicycles &, Inc., have created plans that, if approved, could relocate several crosswalks, change the pathways of roads and possibly move Sparty about 90 feet.
“There is a laundry list of problems on campus that this project should take care of,” Norm Cox of The Greenway Collaborative, Inc. said.
“Some simple moving of roads and curves can eliminate a lot of the potential problems. We’ll be using a lot of special pavement colors and textures to warn both pedestrians and bikers when they are coming to intersections.”
The project is being funded in part by an MDOT Transportation Enhancement Fund Grant, but Todd Kauffman, a transportation planner for MDOT, said the department has a minimal amount to do with the direction of the project.
“As a department, we leave the decisions up to the community who will use it,” he said. “Our role is to administer the contract and make sure, since it’s a federally funded, that certain rules of the contract are abided by.”
The group hopes to have a master plan approved by March 2002. For more information on the project, visit www.greenwaycollab.com in the coming weeks.
