Pictured is the preliminary map of an “Active Transportation Plan” City of Marysville officials presented to the public service committee Tuesday. The plan lays out current and proposed future walking paths and bikeways. Highlighted in yellow are schools and the YMCA, while green areas are city parks.
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The City of Marysville is creating a plan for residents who like foot-powered transportation.
City officials presented their “Active Transportation Plan” at Tuesday’s public service committee meeting. The preliminary plan lays out where officials would like to see multi-use paths and street bike routes.
City Manager Terry Emery said the public service staff has worked for some time to put this plan together.
“They’ve worked really hard to enhance connectivity in and around and throughout the community,” Emery said.
Utility Engineer Kyle Hoyng said the plan stems from the Park and Recreation Master Plan survey conducted in 2016. Results from the survey showed walking and biking trails were the most needed, and wanted, amenity among residents.
The city had been working on bolstering its walkable routes to Bunsold Middle School and the city’s various elementary schools, though Hoyng said he wanted to broaden the scopes of the projects.
Hoyng brought that idea to Public Service Director Mike Andrako, who put together the plan draft that came before the committee this week.
The plan shows a mixture of one-street biking and installation of multi-use paths crisscrossing the City of Marysville. The plan also highlights places of interest for bikers or runners, like the schools and YMCA. Those destinations would be better connected to the rest of the city via pedestrian walkways.
Hoyng said the city has had the schools, health department and police department look at the draft. Andrako told the committee he took care to keep bikes off heavily trafficked areas within the city, like Fifth Street. Sixth Street was chosen as the primary east to west path, since it’s less travelled and has better access to city parks.
“We may look to remove some stop signs on East Sixth to make it a little more bike friendly,” Andrako said.
Most of the streets near Uptown that are included in the plan will have what Andrako called “sharrows,” or road markings to indicate to motorists that bikes are more likely to be present.
Bikes, Andrako noted, are already allowed on most city roads, but sharrows will simply “remind motorists that bikes are more likely to use these roads than other roads.”
Also shown in the plan, colored blue, are places the city hopes to install signs for cyclists on other roads that offer guidance to schools or the hospital.
The plan also shows where officials hope to construct new paths connected to current trails throughout the city.
“A lot of that takes property acquisition,” he said. “So it’s not as easy as just building paths in a field, but you can at least see where I plan on building everything.”
Andrako said a lot of the new trails would be dependent on developers installing the trails themselves. The plan would give incoming builders something to reference when installing their portion of a trail.
“If they see a plan like this, it makes a little more sense,” he said.
Committee member Alan Seymour asked what the timeframe for the plan would be. Andrako said the trails presented would likely be built over the course of many years.
Andrako said the city is accepting input for the plan, as the map presented to the committee was not final. Despite that, he said some projects are already in progress or about to start, like the connection from Mill Valley to the reservoir.
Committee member Tracy Richardson noted the plan would give Scotts Farms residents a way to walk to the Uptown. The map has a path being built from Scotts Farms to Cherry Street, then following that to Main Street.
“That’s a big population to get connected to the Uptown,” she said.