EVERETT — More bicycle corridors are coming to central Everett soon by way of reconfiguring Madison Street and modifications to north-south Fleming Street parallel to Evergreen Way.
The Fleming Street corridor starts this week, and adding a buffered bike lane to Madison Street is scheduled to start next week. These will add seven miles of bikeways.
The Fleming corridor uses Fleming, College and Federal to navigate cyclists from Madison to a pedestrian and bicycle overpass of Mukilteo Boulevard at Forest Park. Mukilteo Boulevard is treated as an east-west bike route.
Traffic islands will be added along the Fleming corridor* to narrow it at spots. Submitted construction documents show about one dozen median islands will be along the route to help slow down car traffic. City engineers said the median locations may be adjusted after neighborhood feedback but are necessary to make the corridor a bicycle boulevard.
The Madison route is a simple pavement overlay with a restripe to add buffered bike lanes, but making this creates "a critical east-west connection" for cyclists, city Active Transportation Engineer Christina Anna Curtis said, as it ties it with the 24-mile Interurban Trail used by regional cyclists. The trail reaches Seattle.
The city took public feedback and reconfigured the Madison plan. Street parking is being kept, and instead the center turn lane will be removed to make room for the bike lanes when the road gets a restriping. The bike lane will have a 2-foot-wide painted gap separating bikes from car traffic.
Paired together, these will give a combined addition of seven miles of designated bicycle corridors this summer. Another project in coming months along Wall Street downtown gives Everett 0.2 more miles of bicycle corridors by years' end to make the city's whole bicycle network 31 miles long.
The $700,000 project along Fleming gives the city a north-south corridor for cyclists. A federal grant is paying for a majority of this project.
City traffic engineers hope to funnel cyclists down these roads to give riders safe routes that make them less vulnerable to being hit.
The project along Wall Street connects riders between the rear of Angel of the Winds Arena to Everett Station and adds bike detection relays. A Sound Transit grant of $1.9 million should cover the entirety of the cost, city engineers said.
The city will also be adding more bicycle wayfinding signs this year as part of directing riders.
Since adopting the bicycle plan in 2011, Everett has built 33 of the 68 projects it identified. These four will bump up the meter to 37 by year’s end.
Some of the bigger completed projects included turning Hoyt Avenue into a north-south bicycle corridor, enlarging the waterfront trail by Grand Avenue Park and adding a bike route along Smith Avenue.
One future project builds a bike corridor along California Street that connects the U.S. 2 trail to Broadway. More details about this $9.1 million project is online at www.activeconnectionseverett.com
A longer-range project will make Sievers-Duecey Boulevard a bicycle corridor that connects with Madison west of Evergreen Way. This will help bring bicycle commuters into the aerospace hub of Southwest Everett.
Corrections
*- In a May 10 story on bicycle routes in Everett, the story discusses traffic islands along the Fleming Street bikeway corridor of Fleming/College/Federal but was not precise. The islands will be along the corridor, but not placed on Fleming Street itself. In the same story, it stated angled parking on one side of California Street will be changed for parallel parking. No parallel parking will be built.
The Tribune regrets the errors.
