The funny thing is that Silver has always been a good place to ride, especially for the two miles between Interstate 25 and Carlisle Boulevard. What makes it so pleasant, and such a nice contrast to the parallel avenues of Gold, Lead and Coal (you may detect a pattern here) is that it’s designed so that cars can’t use it as a through route, but bicycles can. At two key points, Sycamore Street and Yale Boulevard, car traffic is diverted.

There is one nasty stretch crossing University Boulevard, the same place where one of Charles’s street lights would be helpful. However, this is the same University Boulevard where I saw a cyclist get killed by a driver who ran a red light back in 1999 (at Las Lomas Road, just half a mile to the north).

The new, official Bicycle Boulevard would include this section of Silver, and would extend four miles northwest and two miles east. But oddly enough, the cyclists are not asking for more of what makes Silver so nice: barriers and diverters to discourage through car traffic. All they’re asking for is signs and paint. You’d think they’d take a hint from what actually works.

When I lived there I used to fantasize about bike/ped bridges taking Silver across I-25 and the Santa Fe Railroad tracks, but that would probably cost more than $400K.

It’s far from great, but the idea of simply marking residential through streets is a good one. It’s cheap (signs and green paint). It alerts drivers through the signage and repeatedly seeing cyclists.

It also tells cyclists that if they follow the signs, they can get somewhere interesting, safely.

The obstacles are often residential streets that are purposely designed to inhibit through traffic. But if you’re creative, you can usually find a way through. Our local DOT’s should survey riders on the best such paths and mark them.

In Berkeley, we have one bike-only traffic light (bikes can go straight through but cars have to turn right) which lets bikes on the Channing bike boulevard cross Martin Luther King Way, which has lots of traffic. At other major streets, people on bike boulevards just have to wait for traffic.

The bike boulevards have existed for over 10 years, and we have built this one traffic light. At this rate, the bike boulevard system should be complete in about the year 2500.

And the big slow down in establishing one is MONEY. Given the money, a city or town that wants to establish a bike boulevard could go from community input and planning to breaking ground inside a year, and be done in two years.

That fits inside the footprint of activity we want in a stimulus bill under these conditions.

Stimulus implementation is not the time for dreaming and planning– that’s what federal reauthorization is all about.

To adapt the wise words of one D. Burnham, now is the time to make small plans. For walk-bike activists in communities across America, the key to successful stimulus implementation will be identifying a discrete number of shovel-ready bike-ped projects for which the community can rally and demand funding.