New bike lanes on Ninth Street are designed to improve safety for cyclists along a popular route connecting the area near campus with downtown Lawrence — even if the lanes run for only three blocks. Bike lanes run on both sides of Ninth from Tennessee to Indiana streets.

The city’s newest bike lanes are being considered a relatively inexpensive down payment on a larger investment down the road.

The lanes — stretching just three blocks along both sides of Ninth Street, west of downtown — cost less than $1,000, and sacrificed fewer than 10 on-street parking spaces.

More important to transportation officials: The lanes represent progress on a long-term effort to establish bicycle lanes, routes and other dedicated pathways to help two- and four-wheeled travelers coexist safely throughout the city.

“We know we’re not going to be able to do the whole thing at once,” said Bart Rudolph, transportation planner for the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Office. “If we waited to do that with a bike lane project, we’d never get anything done. So when we do have an opportunity to make one section safer, we may as well do that.”

The newest lanes came at the request of Michael Almon, who’d helped develop the Lawrence-Douglas County Bicycle Plan outlining goals and objectives for adding bicycle lanes and related projects in the area.

The plan calls for dedicated bike lanes along Ninth from Iowa to Vermont streets, so when the city moved forward with a project to repave the street between Iowa and Tennessee streets, Almon pushed to have bike lanes added.

Lawrence city commissioners sought advice from the Bicycle Advisory Committee and the Traffic Safety Commission before agreeing to include the bike lanes in the $678,211 repaving project.

Running bike lanes through the entire project was not an option, given the street’s established width.

Even squeezing the 5-foot-wide bike lanes into a three-block area — from Indiana to Ohio streets — required:

• Eliminating some on-street parking along the south side of the street.

• Narrowing each of the road’s four 12-foot-wide lanes, where necessary. The two outer lanes are now 11 feet wide, while the two inner lanes are 10.5 feet wide.

• The narrowing of the lanes allowed the city to retain parking along the north side of Ninth, from Ohio to Indiana streets. That’s where the new dedicated bike lane runs alongside on-street parking spaces in front of Owens Flower Shop and Jensen Liquor.

While the new bike lanes may appear to be short, they will go a long way toward improving safety for cyclists, said Chuck Soules, the city’s director of public works. That stretch already is popular among cyclists because it runs between downtown Lawrence and Mississippi Street, which is a major connector to both the Kansas University campus to the south and Sixth Street to the north.

Cyclists routinely mix with some 18,000 vehicles per day on Ninth.

“That corridor is an important area to have separate bicycle facilities, because of the amount of (car) traffic and the amount of cyclists,” Soules said.

Lee Merrill, president of the Lawrence Bicycle Club, expects the new bike lanes to get plenty of use and do plenty of good.

The new lanes will show passing drivers just how much space cyclists need for a safe ride, he said, which is something drivers just may keep in mind down the road after the bike lane runs out.

“They’re great, because they raise awareness,” Merrill said. “We all own the roads. We all have to work together to share them, and to make the great community that we do have.”