The first meeting of the Gray “Bike-Ped” planning group was a great success! The group’s membership includes avid bikers, walkers and trail runners. We started out talking about the ways we like to use the roads and trails around Gray, and then looked at a slide show of an effort in Portland to create “neighborhood Byways”, which offered some great ideas for the sorts of things we could think of in our town. Signage, road striping to alert motorists to the presence of bikers, and safer pedestrian crossings were some of the ideas we were interested in.
Next we talked about the things we thought should be the main focus of a Bike-Ped plan in Gray. These included the following:
- Creating paths in the village area to make it safer and more attractive to navigate through there on bikes or by foot.
- Extending the sidewalk on Libby Hill Road from the High School to the Middle School (no sidewalk exists currently)
- Creating bike lanes on and off major roads
- Creating more established routes connecting key places in town (for example, from Libby Hill to Crystal Lake
- Conducting bike and pedestrian safety training
Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, May 29, from 7pm – 9pm upstairs in Pennell Town Hall. Our group now has 13 members, but we’d love your involvement, too! Call Anne Gass at 657-4935 or email at agass@maine.rr.com for more information.