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"Pop-Up" Trail to Model KRVT Connection

Rebekah Kik
/
City of Kalamazoo

After years of discussion about how to connect the east and west sides of the Kalamazoo River Valley Trail, the city says it will try out a route in June.

City Planner Rebekah Kik says a temporary, "pop-up trail" will launch the morning of June 18 and stay in place through the weekend. The city will use cones, barriers and signs to direct foot and bike traffic through the pathway.

Kik says plans for a downtown KRVT connection have existed since 1999, but the project has repeatedly stalled. In part that's because the proposed route would eliminate some parking spots.

Kik says the experiment will help the city to see how the proposed route functions and whether the design needs more work.

Below is a text version of WMUK's interview with Kik.

On what the city hopes the temporary trail will accomplish

We wanted do a pop-up trail because there has been just so much planning fatigue on the whole Kalamazoo River Valley Trail. Do you know that this had been first conceptually designed in 1999? So it’s been 15 years and it’s still not here. So what we really wanted to do was get the lines off of the map and get it on the road, so that people could give us some real feedback.

I mean businesses, vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, everyone can really weigh in on, ‘oh that’s a great route,’ or ‘maybe we could tweak it like this or like that.’ Sometimes we don’t get the opportunity when we’re trying to design something to really test it out and that’s what we wanted to do.

On what the pop-up trail will look like

We’ll have signage that gives you the entire route so that you don’t feel lost. But it’s also going to be a protected bike lane, so it’s going to be eight feet wide, it’s going to have cones – there’ll be three different kinds of cones, depending on where you’re at. So when you’re traversing the alley it’s going to be lower cones. When you’re on the roadways, we’re going to have taller – they’re called grabber cones. You may have seen them – they’re kind of thin, but they’re about three feet tall.

And then on some of the bigger roads like Park and Westnedge and Kalamazoo Avenue, we’re actually going to use the larger construction barrels.

On how much a permanent connection would resemble the pop-up trail

The final trail will be so much better protected. It’s actually going to be a lot bigger, too. Our design standards are for a fourteen-foot-wide trail. So that would give two five-foot bike lanes next to one another, with a two-foot buffer on each side. And we have intended to do landscaping, and it would be a hard concrete surface as it comes through town.

On why the connection hasn’t been built despite being in the works for a long time

I think a lot of it is perception from businesses – rightly so, that if we were to take off parking – which is a consequence of the trail, we will have to remove some parking from some places along Water Street. And so it’s come down to a lot of education and a lot of talking about the benefits, the economic benefits of bringing the trail through downtown and where we could we relocate parking spaces so that we’re not taking away from one business or another.

On whether the pop-up trail experiment will give planners enough information about how well the route works

We hope so. If for some reason that we don’t, we’re certainly willing to – ‘Hey, maybe we should do this at another time of the year,’ you know – getting feedback from the cyclists and the business owners if they tell us, ‘Yeah, that’s great, you did it in June but our really busy time of the year is August,’ or maybe you should run it during a festival and see what happens then yeah, maybe we should. Maybe this is not the only one off. Maybe we bring it back several times before the final design.
 

Sehvilla Mann joined WMUK’s news team in 2014 as a reporter on the local government and education beats. She covered those topics and more in eight years of reporting for the Station, before becoming news director in 2022.
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