OCEAN CITY — Resort officials learned last week state funding has been approved for the installation of a designated bicycle path for an important section on the north end of town considered a lynchpin for the citywide effort.
In an effort to continue progress in making Ocean City more bicycle-friendly and get more bikes off Coastal Highway and onto safer side streets, resort officials have been working for over a year to implement a bike path for the entire length of town. Town officials have been exploring ways to enhance alternative means of transportation with plans for new bike route alignments. The goal is to minimize the need for bicycles to co-mingle and interact with cars, buses and trucks on the resort’s major arteries including Coastal Highway and Baltimore and Philadelphia avenues, for example.
The Transportation Committee and staff have been working for about a year to put together a piecemeal bike path from one end of the town to the other with varying results. Locals know there are several ways to travel by bicycle from one end of the town to the other while avoiding major roadways for the most part, from side streets and alleys to private parking lots, but a plan is in place to make official the unofficial safe bike routes.
An unofficial bike path has essentially been established for the entire length of the resort, although there are still a few spots that are dependent on easements from private property owners and other issues.
However, the first significant piece of the puzzle fell into place last week when the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) signed off on a grant to implement a bike lane on Sinepuxent Avenue, which roughly runs parallel to Coastal Highway from the Delaware line to Montego Bay. Currently, Sinepuxent Avenue has a 60-foot right-of-way with two 16-foot travel lanes and five-foot sidewalks.
The proposal for Sinepuxent is to reduce the width of the travel lanes from 16 feet to 11 feet, allowing for the creation of a five-foot wide designated and marked bike path along the length of the roadway. City Engineer Terry McGean learned last week MDOT had approved the grant funding for the project at over $57,000. The next step is to submit a project work plan to MDOT and take receipt of the grant funding. If all goes according to plan, the new bike path along Sinepuxent Avenue could be in place before Memorial Day 2017.
Establishing an official bike path along Sinepuxent Avenue will require some changes to traffic patterns and resort officials are already planning on getting out front of the curve. Currently, there is a stop sign at every single numbered street, creating a stop and start route for bicyclists and motorists for that matter. The plan calls for removing the stop signs along the north-south section of the roadway and re-establishing them at east-west intersections. However, in order to make bicyclists and drivers aware of the pending changes, town officials are planning on moving the stop signs soon.
“Right now, those stop signs run north-south and the plan is to move them to the east-west locations,” said Mayor Rick Meehan. “We want to do that now so people get used to it before the bike path is installed. I think we need to give notifications to those homeowner associations up there like Montego Bay and Caine Woods so they are well aware of the changes.”
Councilman and Transportation Committee member Tony DeLuca, a staunch proponent of the bike path network, agreed the stop sign configurations needed to be done soon.
“We don’t want to create more safety issues than we’re trying to solve with this,” said DeLuca. “We don’t want there to be suddenly stop signs where there weren’t any for 20 years.”
