How a Wisconsin suburb is making itself bike-friendly

Note: May 18 is national Bike to Work Day — the following story shows how one municipality is promoting cycling through physical design.

Fitchburg, a 35-square-mile municipality just south of Madison, Wisconsin, developed for decades in the automobile-dependent manner of most American suburbs. But in the past few years the 25,000-person community has started planning for compact, mixed-use development, rail transit, and plenty of biking.

In October 2012, with the help of a PlaceMakers team led by Susan Henderson, the City of Fitchburg adopted the SmartCode — the first municipal approval of the SmartCode in Wisconsin. Early this year the City took another step, approving code changes aimed at making roads in the “SmartCode District” more accommodating to cyclists.

Madison-based Avante Properties intends to begin development next year of 210 acres in the approximately 400-acre Nine Springs neighborhood — “the largest piece of undeveloped
land in proximity to downtown Madison,” according to Avante President Chris Armstrong. The company will market Nine Springs as a bicycle-friendly development.

“We’ve encircled the development with a multipurpose trail, essentially a bike trail,” Armstrong says of his plan. Besides being connected by that trail, the Nine Springs project will sit at the crossroads of the region’s north-south Fitchburg-Oregon Rail Trail and east-west Capital City Trail — important amenities in the Madison area, where biking has become very popular.

“We worked with the Wisconsin Bike Federation on some fundamental bike needs,” Armstrong says. “We think it’s a great tool in attracting offices” and complementary development.

Avante’s enthusiasm for walkable, bikable, mixed-use development is one of the factors that has motivated Fitchburg’s planning in the past few years.

Less tech, more urbanism

In the late 1990s, the City envisioned a development called Green Tech Village on the 400 acres. It was thought that the site, less than five miles from downtown Madison, would be ideal for a neighborhood and a concentration of technology firms. That hope faded after the tech collapse about a decade ago.
Nonetheless, the site, which lies along a rail corridor owned by Fitchburg and the nearby Village of Oregon, has continued to be seen as a logical place for substantial development.

Steve Arnold, a member of the Fitchburg Common Council since 2005, helped lead the community in the direction of smart growth. “We have 150-year-old farms, with families that have been on the same land for five or six generations,” says Arnold. The goal of Arnold and his allies, including Jay Allen, mayor from 2009 to 2011, has been to preserve many of Fitchburg’s rural expanses while introducing compact, walkable development along the rail corridor. Eventually he hopes commuter trains will run on those tracks, serving some of the 1,000 or more housing units and 1 to 1.5 million square feet of retail that Avante intends to build.

The City’s Planning Department, with a staff of three planners, prepared a smart-growth-oriented comprehensive plan, adopted in 2009. It includes goals and policies such as these:

• Plan development along a mass-transit corridor.
• Develop a compact urban community that is visually and functionally distinct from its rural and agriculture community.
• Commercial and residential units will be mixed in higher density areas, to promote live-work areas and to offer day-to-day needs within a neighborhood.
• Provide for a 20-year urban service boundary .... reviewed every 5 years for adjustments.

In 2009 the City hired PlaceMakers to produce a locally calibrated SmartCode. “The process included undertaking a synoptic survey of areas within the Madison region that the City wished to emulate,” says Susan Sloper, Fitchburg’s community planner. A highlight of that endeavor was a 5-day charrette.

Revising a brand-new code

“We got two-thirds of the way through the charrette,” Henderson recalls, “when an alder said, ‘We need a bike module; this is a biking community.” Fortunately, PlaceMakers’ expenses came in lower than anticipated, leaving several thousand dollars available for the City to hire Street Plans Collaborativeto devise the bike module.

In June 2011, Mike Lydon and Tony Garcia of Street Plans spent a week in Fitchburg, cycling the area, meeting with city officials and the developer, and presenting preliminary findings from the firm’s “Handlebar Survey.”

“While we were hired to develop a stand-alone module to ‘plug in’ to the City’s existing SmartCode, we soon found this to be an unwise course of action,” Lydon says. The SmartCode typically classifies bikeway facilities as a ‘thoroughfare type.” He says that can be confusing. In Lydon’s view, bicycle lanes and other bikeway facilities should be applied to boulevards, avenues, and streets —not treated as thoroughfare types themselves.

Because Fitchburg needed a clear way of inserting bike facilities into the regulatory apparatus, Street Plans prepared revisions of the SmartCode. A new category that includes bikeways and transit routes was established.

Into the code, Street Plans inserted tables dealing with bicycling. Those tables are separate from but parallel to the main elements of the code. One table lists all the biking components, such as bikeways and bike parking, allocating them by Transect zone.

A table was added that deals with all of the thoroughfares, including bikeway facilities. For some types of thoroughfares, Street Plans devised multiple options on how to reapportion space within a right-of-way without changing the overall width that the SmartCode specified.

For example, where the code calls for diagonal parking, Lydon showed how angled parking could be converted to parallel parking — freeing enough space to create cycle tracks, parking protected bike lanes, or buffered bike lanes. (Buffered bike lanes are bike lanes accompanied by a painted strip, generally 3 to 4 feet wide, between the bike lane and the motor vehicle travel lane. A cycle track is a lane that’s reserved for cyclists, parallel to the road.)

Among new urbanists, opinions differ on some bike planning techniques. Henderson is generally reluctant to sacrifice diagonal parking, noting that retailers are more successful when angled parking is provided; it allows more customers to park directly in front of the store.

The SmartCode adopted by Fitchburg in 2010 had bike parking standards that were based on how much automobile parking was required; Lydon got rid of that linkage. He maintains that bike parking needs have little relation to car parking needs. Moreover, if automobile parking requirements are reduced in future years, the overall supply of bike parking would be forced to drop — the opposite of what cyclists would probably need. In the end, Sloper says, Fitchburg tied its bike parking standards to the size of the buildings and their uses.

Lessons learned

Fitchburg’s experience shows that bike planning should be calibrated and integrated into the base code from the very beginning, says Lydon.  It should not be added on later as a separate document (or “module,” as SmartCode specialists call it). “If this integration had been done in Fitchburg,” he says, “it would have made the initial code more balanced from a transportation perspective, and ultimately the two efforts could have been done more efficiently.”

Henderson agrees. “It would have been better if Mike had been part of the charrette,” she adds. That way, contrasting perspectives on how to fit bike facilities into the code and the community might have been ironed out among all the participants — rather than leaving bike planning to a separate, later process. In a charrette, issues such as whether to install cycle tracks, and where to place them, can be debated and resolved while everyone who has a stake in the matter is in the room.

Henderson sees cycle tracks as sometimes problematical because they can end up pushing the building facades farther back, resulting in a loss of a sense of enclosure. On the other hand, one of the Avante development’s main roads, which is being constructed this year, is expected to carry 27,000 vehicles a day — a reason why bike riders may want to be off the road. The cycle tracks will be four feet wide, raised to the level of the sidewalks they abut.

Fitchburg made the SmartCode an option — one that property owners can use if they like. It’s not mandatory. Avante was eager for the SmartCode, partly because it allows the lots in Nine Springs to be developed with a flexible mix of retail, offices, and housing. PlaceMakers also worked with Avante to revise the earlier Green Tech plan, improving its urban traits. Lydon says Street Plans wrote the bike planning mechanisms so they can be applied in other parts of the city, if more land comes under the SmartCode.

If and when rail service comes, a station has been designated within Nine Springs. Says Arnold: “It would be about a 10-minute train ride to downtown Madison.”