This spring, the City of West Bend quietly dismantled its bike route. The signs are down. The sharrows will wear away or be paved over. I think there’s a good chance you didn’t notice. I think there’s a good chance you don’t care. And I don’t care as much as you might expect, though I was involved in the design of the route. I never believed it would lead to an increase in ridership. I wanted only to give Bike Friendly West Bend the best opportunity to succeed. By the time I was drafted into that advocacy group by Craig Hoeppner, the city’s parks director until 2019, it was clear that BFWB would never get what it really wanted. Physically separated infrastructure is the gold standard of bike routes, and in fiscally conservative West Bend that simply was not a realistic goal. So, from the outset I was working on a consolation prize.
Known to some as the “orange loop,” the route was never intended to stand alone. BFWB envisioned four interconnected loops to create a network throughout the city. We gave them color-coded names to make them easy to discuss as we pored over the map of our future system. It looked like a big city transit map with routes that connected schools, parks, and other places of interest by utilizing low-traffic residential streets and the Eisenbahn State Trail. Ultimately, it was too ambitious for West Bend’s elected officials, who refused even to vote on the proposal in 2017. It was too ambitious even though it could be established with just signs and paint.
In 2021, the orange loop was implemented by itself. It was a mostly east-west route to complement the mostly north-south Eisenbahn State Trail. We will never know whether the original concept would have had more success. Would ridership have been more robust if more neighborhoods had been linked together? I doubt it. The orange loop and the others that might have followed all suffered from an absence of physically separated infrastructure. Prospective riders were not convinced that signs and sharrows provided the safety they needed.
City staffers weren’t sold on the safety of the route either. They insisted on some alterations to the orange loop that I thought made the finished product less effective and, oddly, less safe. For example, the route ran on the sidewalk between the Eisenbahn State Trail and Eastern Avenue instead of on Decorah Road itself. But any cop in town will tell you that most car-versus-bike collisions in West Bend occur in crosswalks as riders come off the sidewalk and into the path of motorists. Between Eastern Avenue and Sheridan Drive, the route had to run on Redwood Street, one block north of Decorah. By demanding that the route avoid Decorah, the city missed an opportunity for traffic calming on the north side of the busy high school campus. If the route had served the campus as the original design intended, would more students have viewed it as a transportation option?
By late 2020, Bike Friendly West Bend was so desperate to implement a bike route that it accepted all of the compromises to its original plan. And the voices within BFWB who believed the tired mantra, “If you build it, they will come,” were wonderfully naïve. There was a presumption of demand for cycling infrastructure that far exceeded actual demand. The success of the Eisenbahn State Trail as a destination for recreational riders was erroneously taken to forecast success for on-street bike routes. But the prospect of sharing even low-speed, low-volume residential streets is now such a horror for the average person that the BFWB plan probably was doomed from the start.
This morning I talked to Jay Shambeau, the city administrator, about the bike route’s past and present. I was surprised to learn that there may still be a future for it. Dismantling the route was motivated largely by poor road surface conditions, especially along Kilbourn Avenue, where some of the fading sharrows are painted on broken asphalt. Reconstructing Kilbourn is one of the city’s most immediate priorities. We could see the bike route return after reconstruction is complete. The signs haven’t been discarded, just stored. But the most important sign has to come from you. If you want a bike route in West Bend, then you have to let City Hall know.
