Princeton officials will experiment by installing temporary bicycle lanes on a half-mile stretch of Wiggins Street/Hamilton Avenue from May 19-29.
The municipality will create 5-foot-wide lanes for bicyclists in each direction, leaving about 10-foot-wide lanes for vehicular traffic during the test period. The span will run from Sylvia Beach Way at the back of the Princeton Public Library to Walnut Lane, municipal engineer Deanna Stockton said on April 30.
“It really is an experiment,” said Councilman Tim Quinn, the liaison to the Princeton Bicycle Advisory Committee and a bicycle rider himself.
On-street parking along Wiggins Street/Hamilton Avenue will be suspended during that time, Quinn said. He estimated that about 35 parking spaces would not be available. He said officials would speak with representatives of the Kimble Funeral Home, Hamilton Avenue, a side street, about “how that’s going to work in the event they need to use the road.”
Quinn touched on some of the outreach the municipality has done, and will do, with residents in the part of town where the bicycle lane experiment will take place.
“The initial neighborhood reaction of people we’ve talked to has been positive,” he said. “We view this as a win-win for everyone.”
The targeted section of Wiggins Street/Hamilton Avenue is seen as a key artery for a network of bicycle lanes and paths municipal officials would like to create to make it easier for people to ride a bicycle around town.
“We just felt like it would be a good idea to try to demonstrate some demand, to see if we can detect a change in ridership if we have the bike lanes,” Councilman David Cohen said on May 1.
Another purpose behind the experiment, Cohen said, is to “let the community see how they feel about losing the parking on a temporary basis and see how much of a hardship it is for them.”
Earlier this year, when officials raised the possibility of creating temporary bicycle lanes on Wiggins Street/Hamilton Avenue, one thought was that would encourage more Princeton High School and John Witherspoon Middle School students to ride their bicycles to school.
“But without dedicated bike lanes, nervous cyclists are less likely to ride on that road,” Quinn said.
Officials intend to keep track, with bicycle and pedestrian counters, of how many people use the road and sidewalks before, during and after the experiment, Quinn said.
“So I think as much as whatever data we are going to get out of this from our counters,” he said, “we’re also going to be able to study people’s reactions to the idea of bike lanes and how they feel about it.”
As a municipality, Princeton follows a “complete streets policy.” That means whenever the town improves a road, officials will consider the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists “equally” with those individuals driving cars, Quinn said. He said that in the past five years, he has noticed an uptick in the number of people riding a bicycle to get around town.
“I see people, in snow and rain, riding, who are using the bike as their primary mode of transportation,” he said. “So with this experiment, I think we’re trying to both see what happens when the barriers go down, when we offer people an alternative to ride on what is a very popular through road that parallels our busiest street. (And) to see what happens when we change things around and offer people dedicated bike lanes to ride in.”
