I wanna go for a ride so bad

[Bike Writer]

Limewave and Owlie, I feel for both of you and empathize to the nth degree!

Malalvai, it's not very long but it is a complicated piece of work. When completed it'll be a mile which is almost nothing, however our Main Street is currently used as a route from Whitmore Lake to Ann Arbor by many cycling and touring groups and clubs. This project goes from Main St, westerly for a mile when completed. It ends up at an elementary school. The key is that about 30% of our population in Northfield Township lives off of Barker Road which the trail will proceed along. Barker Road links several neighborhoods to downtown (in total about 1,000 home sites) where there is a bank, post office, library, grocery store, hair salons, barbers and other small businesses. Our township has almost 5,000 individual parcels of land in it but of that about 3,000 are homes, the rest are farms, business etc. So this is in a critical area for pedestrians and bicyclists. Currently no sidewalk exists in contigious fashion along it's length. There is some starting and stopping of sidewalk that helps to keep people off the road, however is some of the most dangerous areas there is none at all. Like under the freeway overpass, over the rail road tracks and over Horseshoe Creek and this crosses a freeway exit ramp and a freeway entrance ramp. On a daily basis I saw kids, adults, people pushing baby buggies and foks in wheel chairs or scooters using this route to get to downtown. It's really insane that a school would have been built without a way to get to it by foot or bike. Same with our library. If you did not drive a car to it you were forced to walk or bike in the road to get to it.

The road is fine for adults on bikes but not for kids. In this short span there are many obstacles. An at grade rail road crossing, a county drain/creek to cross, a freeway exit, an underpass, the freeway entrance and wetlands close to the school end of it. So even with a short path like this there were an incredible amount of challenges. Elevated boardwalks were constructed over the wetland portions last year and this years phase has all the rest of the obstructions to deal with. Thank goodness for engineers, the plus side of this is that even on a short path the rider will experience a variety of fun things to go over. Bridges and boardwalks make a path more interesting.

The fact that this is a first in our community is a big deal, the fact that it's located in a population center is a big deal and finally the fact that this has the opportunity in future phases to link to other networks of pathways is GREAT! The link through downtown along Main Street will mean that people can bike from Whitmore Lake to Ann Arbor and hop on the Border to Border Trail through Washtenaw County. On the westerly end of the path future phases continuing on west will link us to the Lakelands Trail that traverses through several of our neighboring communities to the west. Also the Lakelands trail is just one segement of an east/west trail that will cross the entire state of Michigan. Vast sections of this route are completed, what is needed now is to link these together between communities. Discussions with our neighboring community have produced good results, they are just as excited as we are to close the gap. We would have a mile section to pave and so would they and it would be linked together. There are few obstacles along that route as most of it travels along heavily wooded sections of a dirt road. The ride experience would be great. Once on the Lakelands Trail it winds along the Huron River and is an old rail trail that passes through little burgs and villages and along a chain of lakes with bridges and tunnels to make for an interesting ride.

When the Barker Road path project is completed it will have a price tag of about $650,000 that came mostly from grant funding, it's been a dream of mine that is becoming a reality and I could not be more delighted to see this very visible improvement come to our community. So many of our citizens will be serviced by it and it will greatly improve safety for our kids. I'm tickled and delighted with the progress today and proud as punch! Even if I can't ride a bike today, color me happy

And yes, as Supervisor of our Township this project was initiated by me, I helped to write the grants and basically drummed up a ton of community support by going on a tour touting this project, I pitched it to every group and club in our community and the project gathered steam and a lot of support. It's been a tremendous effort but I couldn't be happier.

Sorry this post got so long but it's a passion for me.