Ferndale has new (not quite finished) bike lanes along Woodward

Editor’s note: BlueSky user @bettybarcode pointed out that, despite long-held conventional wisdom, Woodward was not in fact home to the first concrete-paved mile of roadway in all the U.S.A. I’ve updated the post, mea culpa.

Woodward Avenue, the iconic thoroughfare known as M1 that helped birth the automobile era and is today home to the daylong classic-car traffic jam known as the Dream Cruise, has been narrowed from four to three lanes in both directions in Ferndale through the addition of sometimes-protected bike lanes.

From a symbolic perspective, this is a revolution. And as is the case whenever the status quo is threatened, there has been plenty of grumbling from the Extremely Online, pro-car set. And yet! Somehow we’re all still here.

Life proceeds as before.

Unfinished bike lanes

While the dust continues to settle, it’s worth noting that the project, which has blessed motorists with smooth new pavement to go with nifty two-way curbside bike lanes on both sides of Woodward, is not yet complete.

“The project is scheduled to be completed in 2024, as originally intended,” Diane Cross, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Transportation, told me. “Due to some unforeseen issues, permanent pavement markings and some additional signing will be completed in 2024. This remaining work does not increase the project costs.”

That includes some long stretches where the bike lanes are clearly marked with dotted lines and demarcated with painted islands or divider lines, but no bollards. Those will also be installed in spring, Cross said.

Much of the controversy, if you want to call it that, stems from the lengthy construction project, which had both north- and southbound sides narrowed to two lanes for months during the fall (after all, there’s nothing like being stuck behind the wheel to make people extra grumpy) and due to the disjointed nature of the bike lanes in Ferndale and neighboring Pleasant Ridge. But the two are separate projects.

How the bike lanes were funded

At $9 million, Ferndale’s project is by far the more substantial of the two. The funding includes $5.6 million from MDOT for resurfacing, more than $1.17 million from the city from gasoline tax revenue earmarked for public transportation, $139,500 from the Pleasant Ridge DDA, and more than $2 million in Transportation Alternatives Program grant funding awarded to the two cities (a portion of this project includes bike lanes on southbound Woodward in Pleasant Ridge).

The Pleasant Ridge cycle track is limited to northbound Woodward, from Sylvan to I-696 and splitting off onto Main Street leading to downtown Royal Oak. It’s funded by more than $1.3 million in federal TAP grants, with local matching funds from the city’s DDA district property tax revenue. Unlike Ferndale’s bike lanes, the cycle track is built with pavers at sidewalk level and is further separated from the roadway by streetscaping, including many newly planted trees, and by parking spots.

Unfortunately, the nature of the separate projects and other logistics means the bike lanes between the freeway and Eight Mile Road are not contiguous on either side of Woodward. Pleasant Ridge’s project leaves a gap between roughly Sylvan and Oakridge Streets, while on the southbound side, there are bike lanes starting at 696 but ending as the roadway narrows and not starting again in earnest until Maplehurst Street.

“We had to route the southbound cycle track through the alley between Maplehurst and Oxford due to traffic capacity/operations,” Cross said in an email. “We would have needed to widen SB from Oxford to Woodland to not have any adverse traffic impacts, which was beyond the scope of work (and would have added significant cost).

“Four southbound lanes are needed from where the service drive merges at Oakland Park to 1,500 feet south of Oakland Park. With the required 500-foot lane reduction taper, the cycle track was able to ‘resume’ on Woodward at Maplehurst.”

So there’s your lesson in modern traffic engineering. I will say that when the orange construction barrels finally cleared, and Woodward went from two lanes to three, the first thing I noticed was that people were once again speeding. Even with one fewer lanes to drive in, motorists still have plenty of room to operate their vehicles and drive faster than the posted 35 mph speed limit.

For most times of the day, anyway, two lanes through Ferndale was plenty, and as much as drivers may have grumbled, it was nice to see people minding the speed limit for once.

A compromise, but well worth it

A rendering of the Pleasant Ridge cycle track as seen from above.

Plenty of people have commented about the slalom-like nature of Ferndale’s bike lanes, which follow the contours of the curb indentations that were formerly reserved for curbside (car) parking. True, they’re not as nice as the sidewalk-level cyce tracks Pleasant Ridge has built, or that the city of Detroit installed along Livernois just south of Eight Mile.

The bike lanes we have were a compromise, done to coincide with the state’s planned resurfacing of Woodward and much cheaper than rebuilding the sidewalks and streetscaping to accommodate a similar cycle track. Hopefully that comes sometime in the not-so-distant future.

For now, we have new bike lanes that mostly connect Eight Mile all the way to I-696. I see them as a huge positive, offering a much improved north-south bicycle route through our fair Ferndusky and shortened pedestrian crossings at the few crosswalks we do have along Woodward. I have no doubt they will prove popular, see plenty of use and be an economic boon to our city, just as the bike lanes on other Ferndale streets have been.

I’m eager to use them (so far I’ve run in them, but I haven’t yet used my bike there), but I think I’ll hold off on reviewing them for their usability and safety until they’re truly, officially completed this spring. There figures to be a learning curve for both users and motorists, but so far, aside from the occasional car or delivery truck parked in the bike lanes, most drivers seem to be staying out of them and parking in the new spaces as intended.

For those who continue to complain about the bike lanes, I don’t know what to say. Perhaps you’d be happier if Woodward looked more like it does in, say, Bloomfield Hills — a straight-up divided highway that gashes through town and invites high speeds, with no sidewalks and no pedestrian crossings anywhere.

No thanks.