Ithaca to revisit bike lanes on Cayuga

Plans for a bike lane on newly-paved North Cayuga Street can be revisited at the council level after the Board of Public Works decided to allow council the ability to reopen the process Monday night; the same day paint was laid down.

Talks on the bike lane's future on North Cayuga Street can now re-open despite a vast majority publicly supporting the project in previous meetings. With the contracts already signed and the paint already dry, the more than $10,000 in improvements will be carried out as planned for the time being, as reversing the work already done could cost up to $15,000. Though the paint and the lines could be reversed simply through not maintaining them, the offset center line meant to accommodate space for the bike lane will limit parking to one side of the street.

Mayor Svante Myrick noted immediately reversing the decision would draw some backlash and advised that the lines already painted be left in with their future to be decided on another day.

Should Ithaca's Cayuga Street get a bike lane?

"I'm philosophically and fundamentally troubled by infrastructure decisions motivated solely by the interests of local residents," Myrick said. "I spend a lot of time talking to residents and I can tell you if that is how we made all our decisions, there wouldn't be a block in our city without speed bumps or a dead end street and every other street would be a thruway."

Since the paint had gone down, five members of Common Council were included in a letter by Josephine Martell — who lives in the affected area — as saying they did not support the bike lane.

Several elderly residents, according to her letter, have moved partly due to the loss of parking, and urged the re-opening of the public process despite meetings and public hearings related to the topic. Board of Public Works member Bill Goldsmith said the information would have been better received much earlier in the board’s “well-publicized” process, and expressed frustration in the opposition to the project becoming public the day installation began.

“We’ve spent a lot of time here,” Goldsmith said.

There had been controversy surrounding the lining of Cayuga Street dating back to the ‘90s and, after the calming of traffic on Tioga Street for the city's unrelated Safe Routes to School Project and recent improvements to Utica Street, traffic has since migrated to Cayuga Street as a primary route for others to quickly access not only downtown, but the south side of the city as well.

City Engineer Tim Logue said parking surveys of the street were completed well in advance, with the determination only the 800 block of Cayuga Street and Lincoln Street would be cramped and that the ample side street parking available would accommodate the overflow.

Current plans for the project are to diversify the North-South flow of traffic along the road to include bicycles, cars, trucks and, eventually, include a bike lane on North Cayuga Street stretching all the way from Cascadilla Street to Boynton Middle School. Kent Johnson, a Junior Transportation Engineer with the city, said this will be completed with a yet-to-be painted portion of North Cayuga Street, starting at York Street, to complete the Safe Routes to School project expected to roll out in the coming months.