South Portland committee unveils projects aimed at inspring residents to ride bicycles

SOUTH PORTLAND — For many locals, the most promising feature of the new $65.1 million Veterans Memorial Bridge that opened last week linking Portland and South Portland across the Fore River is its 12-foot-wide pedestrian and bicyclist pathway.

It was two years from the start of construction to Thursday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, and the pathway won’t be finished until October, but it’s a promising start, according to members of South Portland’s Bicycle-Pedestrian Committee.

“That will have real improvements for pedestrian and bike traffic,” said resident Jeff Woodbury at a public forum staged by the committee in December. “Now, we’d like a way to actually get there safely from Cash Corner and Lincoln Street.”

Making that link is one of many projects unveiled by the year-old committee days before the bridge opening in a 53-page progress report delivered to the South Portland City Council. The committee also hopes to bike racks across the city, and to find new ways to inspire residents to take up two-wheel transportation.

The 11-person committee was formed, according to City Planner Tex Hauser, “in response to a particular issue regarding bicycle use on the Casco Bay Bridge.” Unlike the new Veterans’ Bridge, the Casco Bay Bridge does not have a dedicated bike lane, forcing bicyclists to commute uncomfortably close to passing traffic.

“The trouble is, that bridge is really a highway,” said Haeuser. “You would never anywhere else have a bike lane where cars are going by at 50 miles an hour and the only thing separating them from the bikes is a white line.”

Working with state Department of Transportation, the Portland Area Regional Transportation Coalition, and local police, the committee recently put up signs notifying bicyclists they can use the pedestrian walkway on the bridge “with caution.”

“There is a direct correlation between providing actual infrastructure and just signage,” said Carl Eppich, a committee member who also works for the Portland Area Regional Transportation Coalition. “With actual infrastructure, people tend to feel like using a bicycle is something that’s official and sanctioned, and not just something that’s for people who don’t have cars.”

The committee also recently solved an issue that came up in a survey it conducted over the winter, where residents of the Betsy Ross House had to cross the Greenbelt Trail to get to the building’s parking lot. That blind crossing created conflict between bicyclists and residents who, Haeuser joked, “were not very good at jumping out of the way.”

Although, as Eppich said, signs are not always the best substitute for well-planned infrastructure, Hauser said the city is coping with trying to make room for human-powered travel decades after “everyone forgot how to walk.”

The two sign solutions, said Councilor Rosemarie De Angelis, who founded the Bicycle-Pedestrian Committee during her term as mayor, are examples of progress being made.

“This is a committee where things are actually getting done,” she said.

The committee is currently waiting on word about two regional transportation grants, having made it past a first round review. One, called the Main Street Multi-Use Path, would extend the path across the Veterans’ Bridge 1,850 feet to the Fire Fighters’ Memorial Park at the end of Cash Corner, making the link Woodbury said is so vital to make the bridge as useful as its opening ceremony promised.

The second grant aims to install 165 two-bike “lollipop” bike racks and 33 eight-bike U-racks at 47 school and municipal locations across the city. The committee also is working to draft ordinance language that would mandate installation of bike racks at new development in excess of an as-yet-to-be-determined size.

City councilors already have committed the 20 percent local match requested if one of the regional grants is awarded to South Portland.

Haeuser said another “unusual” grant is in the works through the National Endowment for the Art. Working with the Maine Center for Creativity, the organization currently transforming the appearance of the Sprague oil tanks, the grant would fund “sculptural bike racks” and “creative placemaking” designed to “shape the community’s physical and social character” in ways the committee hopes will “delight, educate, inspire and move to action” city residents in the use of non-vehicular modes of transportation.

And, if that doesn’t work, more practical aspects of the NEA grant include converting the Mill Creek Park building beside the Military Service Memorial into a student-run bike “lending library,” cooperative bicycle workshop, along with “South Portland’s only open artist studios and public space gallery.”

“I am very proud of the committee and the work it has done,” said committee member Alan Mills. “I come away from our Wednesday-morning meetings very high that we are making our city a better place to live.”

“The [Maine] Mall is obviously for cars, but there are a lot of places that we can still connect, like Red Bank Village, where kids cannot bike to schools, to make things safer,” said Woodbury. “This city has a lot going for it, but it’s our job to keep pushing things like that.”