Learning to share the road, and embracing community-wide policies that address the needs of bicycles and pedestrians, can come in fits and starts. Saratoga Springs, NY, has been circling around various policies for shared access for at least six years now, but at the inaugural meeting of “Shared Access, Saratoga” on March 10th, officials and advocates agreed the time was ripe for coordinated action.

Seeing that a number of organizations were working on improving Saratoga’s roads, but not necessarily in concert, Tri-State teamed up with a local cycling advocate, Tobin Alexandra-Young, to gather the various stakeholders together. The first meeting, headed by facilitator Peter Glassman from Mediation Matters, had quite a breadth of voices—the current and former town planners, the city engineer, a public safety officer, a police officer, an elected official, a local contractor, as well as advocates from a variety of groups—Saratoga Safe Routes to School, Saratoga Healthy Transportation Network, Skidmore College’s Cool Cities Working Group, and AARP.

As the conversation developed, it became evident that some good efforts had been started, but never followed through. The contractor, Sonny Bonocio, told the group about an $80,000 “Downtown Transportation Plan” that had been written in 2007, but never adopted because of the inclusion of big-ticket items like roundabouts. Now it sits on a shelf, he said, despite the fact that it included many good suggestions for minor changes to the transportation network, including signage, “bulb-out” sidewalk extensions, and improvements for trucks. It also came out that there was a bike-ped policy from 2006, and a Complete Streets policy from 2009 that had been drafted, but was never passed by the City Council.

Participants started by putting a list of issues on the table that included:

• Developing a comprehensive map of gaps in the sidewalk network and “safety hot spots”;
• Finding funding sources for capital improvements, perhaps through a dedicated sidewalk fund paid into by developers, and taking better advantage of the Safe Routes to School program and other state and federal sources;
• Improving education for all users of the road;
• Starting a bike-sharing program, particularly to connect the downtown and college.

Planners also pointed out that there was a real opportunity for advocates to voice their interests during the planning process, an opportunity that isn’t being taken advantage of at the moment.

Saratoga Springs is home to some of the rock stars of sustainable living: Jeff Olson, of Alta Planning, James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, and Ben Serotta, founder of one of the premiere custom bike manufacturers in the nation. Ironically, the town also made national headlines in 2009, when a mother trying to bike to school with her son was met by law enforcement officers who tagged her for violating the school’s “no biking” policy.

The second meeting of Shared Access is scheduled for April, and the question on the table is the big one—”now that we have this list of identified issues, what do we do about it?”