For advocates of bike-friendly infrastructure changes, the gears of government turn slowly

Indeed, it was just last month that the city considered removing protected bike lanes on Butler Avenue and Beaver Street, installed after a deadly collision between a bike parade and a vehicle in 2021.

The discussion came as the city looks to decrease the number of vehicle trips throughout Flagstaff as part of its climate goals, and after the city approved the Active Transportation Master Plan last year.

Both those plans aim to achieve a rate of 54% of trips within Flagstaff taken by biking, walking or public transit within the next two decades. But while the Flagstaff leads other peer cities in trips made by walking, it lags far behind other cities in terms of biking.

Adam Shimoni, a former member of city council, has dedicated much of his career to pushing for better infrastructure to support and protect pedestrians and cyclists. After departing the Flagstaff City Council last year, Shimoni now sits on the board of Flagstaff Biking Organization.

But for Shimoni, as with many other advocates, the pace of progress has been slow.

“We have a very enthused community of cyclists, people are excited about riding, they want to ride, they do ride. But we do not have the infrastructure to actually make it safe for people to ride and comfortable to ride,” said Shimoni, who came to Flagstaff in 2005 to attend Northern Arizona University. “From my perspective, nothing has changed for the most part over the years.”

The city has a long history of pining for better infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians.

Since the 1960s and '70s, the city has created several comprehensive plans laying out needed changes and improvements to bike infrastructure, said Sam Meier, a local bike advocate and archivist.

Such plans have called for everything from traditional painted bike lanes to dedicated bikeways, separate but alongside some thoroughfares through the city, even as far back as 1979.

But through the years, those plans have generally languished, Meier said. And plans produced by the city have also noted the lack of change to infrastructure.

“In the early plans especially, there's a lot of like, ‘Hey, we've been talking about this for a while, but we haven't really built out as much as we could,’” Meier said.

Last year, the city approved the Active Transportation Master Plan, yet another comprehensive plan outlining ways to improve bicycle and pedestrian connectivity and safety, and needed infrastructure and policy changes to achieve those goals.

Bike advocates are hoping that with the new plan, which was eight years in the making, this time will be different.

City senior transportation planner Martin Ince was in large part responsible for the writing of the new active transportation plan. Ince said he and city staff were certainly aware of the slow progress on bike infrastructure over the years, and the phenomenon of the city creating plans but not following through on them.

“We've had plans before, and when you finish a plan, that's the start of things, not the end of something. Otherwise it will just sit on a shelf,” he said. “But we were pretty acutely aware that we have to start moving on some of these things after it was adopted.”

Ince said one aspect of the active transportation plan that differentiates it from past plans is that, this time, the city does have a pot of money for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. When voters approved the renewal of the transportation tax in 2018, it was determined that $29 million of the money would be dedicated toward such improvements.

“So as much as anything, the plan was sort of talking about how we're going to spend that money,” he said.

But when it comes to infrastructure, Ince acknowledged that $29 million doesn’t go far. A proposed project to create grade-separated bike paths along Butler Avenue, for example, is estimated at $10 million. The city is currently seeking a federal grant to help pay for that project.

“When you look at what we have missing, what our needs are, what our priorities are, it doesn't go as far as we want it to. So that's one part of it. Like we could use twice that, three times that, easily,” Ince said “But the flip side of it is that it's much better to have $29 million than nothing, to have a plan and then have to go searching for money for it.”

And Ince said there are lots of opportunities for the city to get grant money to support those efforts. Supporting alternative forms of transportation has been a priority for the Biden administration providing a plethora of federal grant opportunities.

He added that there are also many less expensive ways the city is looking to improve alternative transportation, such as changing engineering standards or changing city code. And the city is already working to enact some of those changes.

Estella Hollander, a member of Flagstaff’s bicycle advisory committee, was similarly optimistic. Hollander said she sees progress being made, even if it has not yet taken the form of concrete infrastructure.

“I do think at least how people are talking about bicycle infrastructure has shifted. Council's talking about protected bike lanes and better infrastructure and reducing vehicle lanes to make this more of a balanced approach,” Hollander said. “So I think that has shifted a lot and we are moving in the right direction.”

Indeed, issues surrounding bike safety and promoting alternative kinds of transportation have been at the forefront for several years.

In 2018, controversy erupted over the renewal of the city’s transportation tax about how much of the money would be dedicated to motor vehicle infrastructure versus improvements for cyclists and pedestrians.

The city’s climate plan also put renewed emphasis on alternative forms of transportation, and safety concerns for cyclists were once again highlighted after the 2021 collision where Flagstaff resident Joanna Wheaton died.

Flagstaff’s first bike lanes

As in many cities, Flagstaff’s current accommodations for cyclists got their start decades ago, said Meier, who in 2021 presented to the city council on the history of bike-related efforts in Flagstaff.

At that time, painted bike lanes were non-existent and the urban trail system had not yet been developed.

But during the '60s, two separate groups of residents began calling for the creation of more bike facilities in concert: a group of local cyclists called the Ponderosa Peddlers, and students at Northern Arizona University.

“What happened on campus in the 1960s that led for students at NAU to be interested in pushing for bicycle infrastructure was that South Campus was constructed,” she said.

The expansion of that campus suddenly meant students had to travel much further for classes, but at the time, the transportation network on campus was lacking. Students on campus began advocating for bike lanes and paths between north and south campus, while students living off campus pushed for better connectivity between campus and the rest of the city.

The Ponderosa Peddlers, a group of local bicycle street racers, also began pushing the city for better bike infrastructure throughout the city.

“They were the ones who first went to the city to say, ‘Hey, you should do an assessment of what's happening here and we should build dedicated infrastructure for cyclists in the city,’” Meier said.

Under pressure, the city proposed its first bike lanes on Beaver Street with a project that planned to create a two-way bike lane along the road, in place of parking. But she said the effort was halted by local business interests that worried the elimination of parking along the street would impact business, and the effort languished in court for years.

“At the same time at NAU, people continued to be interested in having these bike lanes constructed on campus. And because NAU can control its own land differently than the city, there's actually some progress made by students and others pushing to have bike paths constructed,” Meier said.

Those early efforts for bike infrastructure coincided with larger national trends in the same direction, encouraged by the nascent environmental movement and geopolitical events such as the 1973 oil crisis.

In 1973 and 1978, the state produced two reports on bikeways within Arizona communities, outlining a series of bicycle infrastructure improvements that could be made within Flagstaff and other cities.

Then, throughout the late '80s and '90s, the city produced reports on what could be done to create better bike networks throughout Flagstaff, related both to the urban trail system and within wider community vision plans.

“What's really interesting, if you look at the early plans, is they identify mostly the same roadways over and over. Like Beaver Street is continually identified as a really important street for people to get to campus, or Route 66, previously called Santa Fe Avenue, is also identified as an important corridor to get across town,” Meier said. “The Beaver-Butler intersection in particular has been a sort of like known entry point to campus for a long time. Back in the '70s, that was one of the first routes that NAU students wanted built: a route on Beaver Street, because it's a major way to get to campus. So I think that's an aspect that's frustrating to me."

But one challenge throughout the years has been a generally accepted view that those using bikes to travel are somewhat of an aberration.

In the '60s and '70s, many believed the only residents traveling on bikes were either hardcore street racers or children getting to and from school, Meier said.

And Meier said much of those sentiments toward those who use a bike to get around have survived to this day with the stereotype of a white, male, middle-class cyclist.

“I certainly see people who fit that stereotype, but if you're riding your bike in winter, in the rain, in the wind or in certain parts of town out towards the mall, that's not who you see on the road on their bikes,” Meier said.