Sheboygan County Leads the Way: Bike/Ped Plan

By Joe Peterangelo, UW-Milwaukee

This article is reproduced with permission. The original article can be found in the Winter 2009 Issue of WAPANews Online.

A cutting edge pilot program is transforming Sheboygan County into a national model for bicycle and pedestrian planning. Sheboygan County is one of four pioneering communities selected to participate in the federal Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program (NTPP), which has granted the county up to $25 million to invest in infrastructure upgrades and education/outreach projects aimed at getting people out of their cars and onto their bicycles and feet.

At a time when U.S. communities are struggling to deal with the overlapping problems of an economic crisis, volatile gas prices, excessive traffic congestion, and an obesity epidemic, the goal of NTPP is "to demonstrate the extent to which bicycling and walking can carry a significant part of the transportation load, and represent a major portion of the transportation solution." The program was established in 2006 and will receive funding until 2010, although many of the infrastructure projects will not be completed until 2011 or 2012.

The four communities selected to participate in NTPP all have a track record of progressive bicycle/pedestrian planning. They were chosen with the goal of representing the diversity of U.S. communities and with the belief that they each had the potential to make significant advancements during the four-year term of the pilot. The other participating communities are Columbia, MO, Marin County, CA, and Minneapolis, MN.

Before the pilot began, Sheboygan County was the most auto-oriented of the four participating communities, with personal vehicles accounting for 89% of the transportation "mode share." They did have some cycling infrastructure in place, however, including one major bike trail along Highway 23 and the interurban trail that runs most of the distance between Chicago and Sheboygan.

Sheboygan County is also the most rural of the four participating communities. The transportation issues and obstacles facing Sheboygan County residents vary dramatically from those facing people who live and work in an urban center like Minneapolis. For this reason, each pilot community has the potential to serve as a model for similar communities throughout the country.

NTPP in Action
With NTPP underway, the first thing Sheboygan County did was to make a county-wide call for input and project suggestions, asking residents to identify their top concerns related to cycling and walking in their community. This public input helped shape the county's updated Pedestrian and Bicycle Comprehensive Plan, which was adopted in September of 2007.

The new plan included recommendations for almost $60 million of infrastructure projects alone, but the first projects that were undertaken were educational in nature.

"Education and outreach projects are easier to move forward with federal funds than infrastructure projects," explains Mary Ebeling, the NTPP Program Manager for Sheboygan County, "and educational projects create a lot of change in themselves."

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) is one such educational project that has been very successful in Sheboygan County. SRTS is a national program whose purpose is to make walking and cycling to school a safe and attractive option for U.S. children. In Sheboygan County, they are providing safe bicycling events and workshops at schools and now have regular "Bike and Walk to School" days. The results have been very positive, with participation rates as high as 99% at one area school. Sheboygan County is also providing "bicycle-friendly community" workshops throughout the county, and has started an annual Bike and Walk to Work Week, which created a double-digit spike in bicycling and walking for work trips during that week last year.

Infrastructure projects have begun as well. They've installed bicycle racks on buses, which is consistent with the goal of NTPP to make connections between bicycling, walking, and transit. They've conducted a "sidewalk inventory" and are fixing and connecting breaks in the sidewalk networks of target communities within the county. And they're working on a county-wide bicycle lane plan, which will lead to striping 60-80 miles of roads in the county with new bicycle lanes.

This year, more infrastructure projects will get underway. They will install bike racks at county-owned facilities, commercial districts, and some area churches, and will swap non-standard racks at schools with new, modern replacements. They'll also be paving shoulders for lanes and creating some shared-lanes.

"We're doing a lot of retrofitting," says Ebeling, "and that also includes a new off-road facility that will be a 10 or 12 foot wide bicycle-pedestrian trail along a busy roadway."

Evaluating Success
Congress has a goal for the NTPP to show the extent to which bicycling and walking can be part of "the transportation solution."

"And we have a goal of a double-digit change in the mode share from driving to walking or biking," says Ebeling. "We're doing quarterly data collection and analysis, which involves manual counts in different locations throughout the county, year-round." In a cooperative effort among all four pilot communities, the University of Minnesota has been tapped to administer a "before" and "after" survey County-wide to analyze the data for NTPP to determine what kind of overall impact all the effort is making. Alta Planning & Design is assisting the pilot communities with bicycle and pedestrian traffic analysis and modeling based on the manual counts the county is conducting.

If the project is successful, more communities may receive funding to participate in the future. That is what happened with the Safe Routes to School program, which also started as a pilot program. Mary Ebeling says that with so much happening with NTPP, she is most excited to see the dots connecting between all of the different projects they are working on.

"It's the whole picture together that will make the shift," she says. "This is an amazing and unique opportunity and people are very excited about it. I want it to be the most successful project possible and I think we've positioned ourselves well for that."

As luck would have it, this year's WAPA conference will take place in Sheboygan on March 26-27, so you can go see Sheboygan County's bike/ped transformation for yourself as it is still taking shape.

For more information, contact Mary Ebeling, Sheboygan County's NTPP Program Manager, at ebelimre@co.sheboygan.wi.us.