photo by: City of Lawrence screenshot

Members of the Multi-modal Transportation Commission listen to City of Lawrence staff during the group's meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023.

Lawrence has more than $300,000 in dedicated funding budgeted for new pavement markings improving safety at bicycle and pedestrian crossings, and this week the city’s Multi-modal Transportation Commission decided on some recommendations for where that money should be spent.

Specifically, members of that board decided at its meeting on Wednesday that they first want to prioritize $273,250 in bike lane pavement marking improvements that city staff has identified, followed by crossing improvements along shared-use paths on local streets and at sidewalk crossings.

Work to decide where new crossing improvements should be installed has been in progress since March of 2023 when the commission recommended approval of the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Design Guidelines, city engineer David Cronin told the Multi-modal Transportation Commission Wednesday. Cronin said in the months since then, city GIS staff has looked at the entire network for marked crosswalks at controlled intersections, such as those that would be stop-controlled or signal-controlled, and crossings outlined in the city’s Safe Routes to School plan. Employees have also looked at on-street bicycle crossings throughout the city.

What they found were 43 locations where updated bike lane markings could be added — some of them with “chevron” bike lanes, offering extra protection for riders by increasing the amount of separation from vehicle traffic and from parking along roads, and others with green-painted bike lanes meant to increase the visibility of cyclists.

A fair number of those crossings are proposed along Bob Billings Parkway, according to the agenda materials from Wednesday’s meeting. One area where city staff is recommending the addition of bike lanes on both sides of the road is at the intersection of Bob Billings Parkway and Wakarusa Drive. Numerous driveways along Bob Billings are also recommended for the “chevron”-type bike lanes.

photo by: City of Lawrence screenshot

This image shows a potential location for bicycle lane marking improvements along Bob Billings Parkway.

City staff also identified 48 sidewalk crossings that meet the criteria for pavement marking improvements, which would have an estimated cost of $100,230. Improving the markings for another 49 shared-use path crossings along local streets, meanwhile, has a significantly lower estimated cost of $38,360. Cronin called some of these figures “high-level, ballpark costs.”

There is only $337,253 available for crossing improvements, however, which means there would be about a $75,000 shortfall if the commission opted to recommend making all the improvements Cronin outlined. That was a concern board members spent plenty of time discussing at Wednesday’s meeting.

“That doesn’t seem like a lot of money; I guess I’m curious of your plan to finish the work,” board member Charlie Bryan said of the shortfall. “Would it be to fund this in another year?”

The answer to that question was yes, Cronin said, or to complete the work as the city addresses other adjacent maintenance projects. But he added that the funding in the Municipal Services and Operations Department’s operating budget for maintenance is very limited, so much so that even maintaining existing road markings has “been a challenge,” and it’s not the type of project that typically appears in something like the city’s Capital Improvement Plan.

For now, it seems that the plan is to knock out at least two of the three types of crossings with the available funding. Bryan’s motion approved unanimously at Wednesday’s meeting calls for earmarking roughly $315,000 of the total budget for improvements on the bike lane and shared-use path recommendations, then using whatever money is left over to take care of sidewalk crossing improvements identified as a high priority.