Lynchburg officials and planning partners have collected hundreds of data points to determine where there are gaps in the city’s transportation system and how those connections can be improved.
But the maps of potential bike lanes and sidewalks won’t be complete without input from Hill City residents, said Kelly Hitchcock, deputy director of planning for the Central Virginia Planning District Commission.
“We rely on people to say, ‘That data makes sense, but here’s what you don’t know about a key destination or community asset.’ Data can tell you so much, but people can tell you more,” Hitchcock said.
The city will host a public meeting on Wednesday to gather ideas from community members and present the research they’ve conducted so far. The meeting will run from 4 to 6:30 p.m. in room 304 of the Miller Center.
The goal of the Lynchburg Multimodal Plan is to create a consistent methodology for analyzing transportation needs and use that methodology to improve transportation networks that are already in place rather than starting from scratch, Hitchcock said. Current infrastructure — including the city’s 13 bus routes — can work better if planners can make it more accessible, she added.
“There are people who say, ‘I would like to ride my bike to work if the bike lane extended to my neighborhood. I would like to walk to the grocery store if there was a little bit more buffer between me and the traffic,’” said Josh Quintero, Lynchburg’s communications manager. “We’re maximizing what transportation can be.”
The project is a collaboration between the Central Virginia Transportation Planning Organization, departments within the city of Lynchburg and the Greater Lynchburg Transit Company. It aligns with the city’s 2013-2030 comprehensive plan, which identified multimodal support as one of the guiding principles for transportation.
Hitchcock said multimodal transportation is crucial to those who don’t have a car to ensure that everyone can access food, health care, school and other essential services.
Quintero added that the multimodal plan is also a central strategy for the city’s economic development. If people can easily access community resources and leisure spots such as the Blackwater Creek trails — and save the environment and some gas money along the way — they’re more likely to want to live and work in Lynchburg, he said.
A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s about equivalent to the emissions produced by running electricity in your home for a year, according to the EPA’s greenhouse gas calculator. Trading a car ride for a walk may seem like a small act, Hitchcock said, but habits can add up over time to make big environmental impacts.
Even so, she said, “This is not an anti-car plan. This is really about a recognition that a transportation network should create an accessible community.”
For example, she said, a mom pushing a stroller, an athlete training for a marathon and a senior citizen using a wheelchair all benefit from even sidewalks. One small improvement can make traveling easier for everyone — the question is where those improvements should be made, she said.
That’s where the Lynchburg Multimodal Plan and its two data-packed maps come in.
The first map breaks Lynchburg into quarter-mile blocks and gives each block a score to measure its transportation needs. Researchers measured connectivity, access, demand and usage in each block using data such as population density and proximity to schools, grocery stores, parks and other commonly visited locations.
The second map outlines where changes could be made to better meet transportation needs. Researchers are proposing three tiers of improvements:
- A “spine network” in the areas with the most critical need that should receive bicycle and pedestrian improvements;
- “Secondary connectors” that could serve as links to the spine network, needing either bicycle or pedestrian improvements;
- Sidewalks called “neighborhood fill-ins” that would close gaps to the connector and spine routes.
Roads identified as the spine network include Boonsboro Road, Old Forest Road, Lakeside Drive, Rivermont Avenue, Timberlake Road, Wards Road and Fort Avenue, along with multiple streets downtown, according to the map on the project webpage.
Those maps and other details of the research methodology will be presented on Wednesday, Hitchcock said. There will also be big boards with blank city maps so residents can point to the locations where they’d like to see changes made.
Community members can also pinpoint areas of concern on an online survey that will be open until Sept. 30. The survey is accessible on the project webpage and already has more than 70 locations identified on an interactive map as bicycle, transit and pedestrian barriers.
The goal is to adopt a transportation plan by the end of the fall season, according to the project webpage. From there, Quintero said, plans will work their way through city government as all community development projects do. For right now, the focus is on creating consistency in how plans are evaluated.
“The city doesn’t want to have different methodologies or different decision making processes when it comes to community-wide projects like this,” Hitchcock said. “We’re taking this opportunity to put it all on that same scale of decisions and considerations of how you address these things moving forward.”
