Comments for “Connect Fairbanks: FAST Planning Non-Motorized Plan Update”
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Parks Highway Path Rehabilitation
I wish AkDOT had a mechanism where when people are constantly forced to use a freeway shoulder, they have to build a bike lane there. Another spot where's there no alternative, an alternative a mile away, that requires a mile backtracking after using it, is not an alternative. People are forced by narrow, poorly-plowed roads to use this Path. Improve it, make it contiguous, include wayfinding totems. Right now it's illegal to cross Fairbanks without a car. This leveraged federal money is supposed to provide facilities. Make it happen!
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City of Fairbanks Bike Lane Signing and Striping
This "black diamond ski route" freeway offramp is so terrible and maddening. This is the best North/South bike route anyone bothered to do. You've got to bike over a giant rail yard, the climb isn't too bad. Then the path dives to the left. Periously steep, narrow, thread the needle of bollards and then you can start worrying about the uncontrolled truck traffic, which has no warning you're coming and is literally semis ending their long-haul from Anchorage so they don't have situational awareness. If you started in Downtown Fairbanks, to the Southeast, you've just biked around three sides of the square, with a great deal of elevation change. It's maddening. You could also bike around the other three sides of the square, Illinois to college. But you can't cross your city. There's a highway and railway in the way, it's illegal to cross them and there's scant help by the city to get legally through.
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Old Steese Improvements
This road and its improvements are harder to call criminal negligence. You're never going to have a highway with frontage roads be great for bikes. Speed limits and calling the frontage roads parking lots doesn't fix the disconnect. Road is bad for cars, it's bad for everybody. If you made it easier to cross, you could divert more bikes/peds onto great Steese bike path. But eventually they want to go to the stores and to the parking lots which function as frontage roads on the highways. There's literally nowhere else to go, almost the entirely of this area is developed and is either paved or built up. So fix it. But don't just repave it, give all the property a new sidewalk fresh out of autocad, then watch as the crossings are terrible, the cars keep marauding through subsiding, unmaintained or cleared lots, and the road is a mess. You just built a great road off autocad on Helmericks/Trainor, Bentley Trust road is there too, figure something out. Make it hard for cars to use Safeway lot to beat intersections and make it easy for bikes/peds to avoid intersections.
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Peger Road: Chena River – Airport Way
This whole terrible stretch of Peger feels like an extreme mountain bike course, but flat. You got bunny-hopping crevasses and frost heaves. You have the underbridge crossing with its literal flooding, ice accumulations, asphalt dogleg on the west side gaining 15 feet of elevation in 50 feet of path. Could be a 45 degree angle but they put up fence posts that risk impaling anyone. Blind bridge entrances and exits. Narrow bridge entrances, easy to knock people down onto impaling fence posts. They hate bikers on this road. The tourists climbing embankment, fences, trying to avoid the river flooded crossing, running across the uncontrolled highway. Noone looking over DOT's shoulder on this dangerous nuisance? Do you just ticket the jaywalkers and wash your hands? Incitement to vehicular manslaughter. Still no Chena Riverwalk. :'( More Chiraq jersey barriers. Are we actually occupied by the Army? Even the base at least gets landscaping, why not the metro area? Once I walked a Southerner from UAF to home, just south of Peger/Airport, in deep cold. He was almost hypothermic when he reached home and would have surely turned back from the horrible, unsigned infrastructure without my guidance. Perhaps he would have been another victim of the Fairbanks roads, wandering blindly, breath fogging his sight, signs unlit, brush-obscured. The wrong path would dead-end without apology in hobo camp woods and he would be too cold and delirious to wander out. There is no right path, only broken down and inadequate infrastructure. FAST Planning, fix this road!
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Johansen Path Reconstruction
Is this actually a legal connection? It seems kinda legit, there's an expansion joint on the bridge, bollards on the unsigned gravel path down towards the road. But you gotta be bold right now, even past the frost-buckled pavement. You gotta believe that this tiny little path traveling by dry cabins and junked cars is actually going to end up at the intersection. I personally prefer this south alternative to the bike path north, there are many paths where it is quicker and more convenient. A little less of the murderous Peger intersections.
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Lathrop Street Bicycle Facilities
Okay, biking West towards Fred Meyer. Looks like you're already planning improvements a little further West. Good to connect. Northbound bike pathing makes sense for Transit because you can fix all your hospital access. But the housing is generally southeast of here, they're going to hate backtracking by heading Northeast and its murderous to send them up into a million lane changes fighting emergency traffic when they really want to go West, to Fred Meyer, Pioneer Park, or the University.
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Clay Street Bicycle Facilities
Vital project. You built a new bridge and there is an existing bike path along the highway. Sure it isn't plowed, there's a weird dogleg through jersey barriers, more Chiraq hostile architecture, citizen as vulnerable prey in state-created concrete corridors. Most people can't jump off a bridge to escape the predator at the middle of a 300-foot fenced off zone. Part of the reason people disappear in Fairbanks is because the roads are twisty and have no wayfinding totems or signage guiding them.
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College Road Pedestrian Crossings
The farmer's market crossing, where the people in cars squeeze in and buy good vegetables, how charming. The taller trees and bend in the road help shade the oven sidewalks. Too bad there's zero safety controls, zero pathing, nothing to tell you where to cross, nothing to cross, lunacy, a highway by design, a parking lot by use; no real signal control, people parking everywhere, running across, many with kids. Zero infrastructure. Recent improvements decreased safety by increasing car speed. The road goes through the neighborhood but has zero connection to it and the lack of pedestrian access makes it wall off the other side.
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College Road Pedestrian Crossings
Mini-Airport. You leveraged the federal dollars to "improve" which somehow just meant repave and benefit profiteers. Now the hostile automobile traffic ruins a inhospitable, if wide, concrete oven that people visibly wilt trying to walk to the fair. Maybe now there might be some more money to actually let the children who live nearby cross so they can walk in a park. Zero benefit to the community from federal leverage to date. Part of the sidewalk caved in, Fairbanks maintenance threw a plywood sheet over it a few weeks. You were the rightful recepients of the curses from scarcely-warned users, at least one reporting real injury on social media. Pedestrian crossing are the least you can do. You were supposed to put in a bike lane but the absolute lack of East-West connectors even for cars sunk that. Commuters have less potholes but this is a cruel road that makes many Fair and concert visitors think Fairbanks is uglier and worse than it actually is. More likely this comment will be read and at best categorized into a percent of favorable, then if there's free money maybe you only have to walk a half mile of solar-heated concrete oven just to cross the street before backtracking.
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City of Fairbanks Bike Lane Signing and Striping
One time at the Wilbur Street/Airport way intersection, I had to stop and reprimand a city maintenance truck, which was parked in the bicycle use path. Many users do not like to hook a right angle and cross at the signal when the free earth provides a straight line. Most of these users wouldn't be on the murderous Denny's frontage road into the callous blind turners of Wilbur if it weren't for absolutely inconsistent and unsafe bicycle pathing on Airport frontage roads. Why can't you put bike paths on parallel streets? Then put wayfinding totems so people know to go the block south. Right now you're killing people and you're going to mess up intersections all over the city so you can ticket them in addition to killing them. Creating bad use and then solving it with hostile funneling pathing. It's so backwards. Now I gotta click out and zoom over to Old Steese and say more about how all over down, bike routes dead-end into high-traffic highways --
"Figure it out" -- AkDOT, probably -- you are literally killing people by dumping them into dead-ends like this. End the path at a park, end it at a prison, end it somewhere on the other side of the highway. Backtracking risks exhaustion and frostbite in unplowed snow. Where's the pathing? The prison deserves bike service too! -
City of Fairbanks Bike Lane Signing and Striping
Hilton exists, is a great parallel to Airport. Already an unofficial bike street. It's a great road until the apartments, until all the incoherent usepath streets hit 10th. There is not a wayfinding totem or neighborhood identity pole to be seen, it is barren as desert. This form and process are ridiculous, 6 figures of planning money ($100,000 plus) to propose bikers seeking to avoid Airport/frontage traffic should bike all the way up to Cushman, "because we have to fix that intersection anyway." Why are bikes hub and spoke routing based around recreational traffic?
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City of Fairbanks Bike Lane Signing and Striping
Lot of what's wrong with this process and plan visible with this intersection. For all practical purposes, the bike route continues unbroken, on a scenic riverfront route and on roads. But there's absolutely no support: no safety. No triggered crosswalk, no bike box, no wayfinding. Up behind the Carlson it feels like another planet. Meanwhile there's literally an existing pedestrian bridge and usepath -- since 1991 people have been trying to make this a formal path. But nothing on the map and look south to Airport, no West there. There is no East/West bike connection. At some point you actually have to build infrastructure!
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This is a dangerous crossing for cyclists following the bike path along the Parks.
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This paved path is nice except ATVs throw rock of various sizes onto the path creating an hazardous situation.
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Please put a non-motorized/pedestrian path along Yankovich Road from Ballaine to the Large Animal Research Station, UAF. Yankovich road has very little space for walkers, bikers, runners etc. it is very dangerous!
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Airport Way needs a continuous bike facility, either a separated bike/ped path or marked, continuous bike lanes on one of the frontage roads. There is a ton of right-of-way, especially on the west side of town. There should be plenty of room for a bike facility.
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When Old Steese is rebuilt it should include bike lanes that extend through intersections. Unmarked shoulders would be better than nothing, but they leave it unclear how bikers should cross right-turn lanes to go straight through intersections. Modern bike lanes make this clear.
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The shoulders on University Ave should be marked as bike lanes that extend through intersections. The new shoulders are a big improvement, but they leave it unclear how bikers should cross right-turn lanes to get through intersections.
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An extension of the bike path on Yankovich is a desperate safety need and is long overdue. There are many bicyclists in the area; I've witnessed too many trying to ride on the shoulder and have accidents trying to navigate the transition from the dirt shoulder to the road.
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there is lots of extra turns and fences in this area....can we straighten out the path across the intersection until there is too much traffic on the north side is some future time.
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connect fountain head area to this road for a grea walk for visitors and residences to get to commerical area with less out of direction travel
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ped connector here from College to the big box land. There is a non-formal path already.
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Noyes Slough Pedestrian Bridge
great loop connector, provide access to walk on the slough in the winter. It is great fun to naviagte the water corridor
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Minnie needs sidwalks on both sides if possible....and snow removal
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ped/bike train crossing form staion to Minnie street would be wonderful and make access for peds from downtown area and create many loop option for recreation users. There are not that many Train movements.......