City ponders new bike lanes

SANDPOINT — The city is mulling a proposal to add bike lanes on two of its busiest streets.

At Wednesday’s Public Works meeting, Jared Yost of the Bicycle Advisory Committee presented his group’s plan to add five-foot wide bicycle lanes on Boyer and Division avenues.

Yost said the proposed bike routes, which are essentially non-existent in the city, will help keep bicyclists, drivers and pedestrians safe.

“It commits the bicyclists to go to a certain location instead of being all over the road with drivers not knowing where they are,” he said. “It puts them in a spot where drivers can expect them to be, so it’s safer for both the drivers and the bicyclists.”

While he would like to see uninterrupted bike lanes on both streets, Yost said he and the committee are willing to work with the city and members of the community to find a solution that everyone can be excited about.

“Our goal is to have bike routes, and I’m not going to say official striped lanes, but we’d like to have some kind of bike routes on Boyer from Schweitzer Cutoff down to the lake and on Division from its intersection with Baldy all the way down south.”

The most controversial aspect of the proposal asks the city to prohibit on-street parking on portions of Boyer, which would give cyclists an uninterrupted lane down the entire street, according to Yost. If that plan is deemed unfeasible by the council, Yost said there are alternatives, such as shared road markings, that would make the parking ban unnecessary.

Despite its growing number of bicyclists, Sandpoint has allocated only a portion of one street as an official bicycle lane, although one other street has a lane for both pedestrians and bicyclists, according to Public Works Director Kody Van Dyk.

“There are no bike lanes in the city, other than on Boyer, north of Larch,” Van Dyk said. “Those are the only striped bike lanes in Sandpoint.”

Van Dyk said the omission of bike lanes was not a calculated move on the part of the city, but rather an issue of being out of sight, out of mind. He said that until recently, nobody came forward with an official request for the lanes.

During last year’s budgetary process, the city earmarked $3,000 for BAC to stripe bike lanes, which Van Dyk said would likely be more than enough to canvas both streets. If the city approves the plan, Van Dyk said he could stripe the roads as soon as weather permits. He also said both streets are wide enough to safely add the lanes.

The Public Works Committee voted to give Van Dyk authority over which plan is best for the city, but the full council will have the final say on the matter at its May meeting.