Columbus City Council has rolled out a new plan to improve bike and scooter infrastructure in the city.
City Council on Monday approved the Bike Plus plan, a long-term plan to add more bikeways to the city and encourage more people to use bicycles, scooters, skateboards and rollerblades for transportation and recreation. It seeks to eventually create 189 miles of on-street bikeways, 270 miles of shared use paths, and 28 miles of urban trails and greenways.
Councilwoman Lourdes Barosso de Padilla, who chairs the city’s Public Services and Transportation committee, said the plan is one of many strategies the city is using today to plan for the Columbus of tomorrow. Some estimates suggest as many as 1 million people will move to central Ohio by 2050.
“It's really about building the infrastructure for what we know is coming, and it's about behavior change for our residents,” Barosso de Padilla said.
The plan notes that “creating a safe network that reduces car dependence and promotes active transportation will help manage congestion and lower emissions in our growing city.”
It identifies 20 miles of bikeways that will be prioritized in the next five years, including building connections or protected intersections on parts of Summit and Fourth streets, Spring and Long streets, Rich Street, South High Street and Frebis Avenue.
Barroso de Padilla said that even before the plan was approved, the city installed a protected bike lane on East Broad Street. That project is a grant-funded, one-year pilot to test different materials to protect the lane, she said.
“We started to create those protected bike lanes because we knew we couldn't wait,” Barroso de Padilla said. She added that it will take a while to put the full plan into action. She said council will likely budget some money for the expanded bike infrastructure each year.
The Bike Plus plan reports that Columbus is a great city for biking because it’s flat and already has an extensive trail system.
It lays out the future of five types of bikeways: bike boulevards, which are neighborhood roads shared by bicycles and vehicles; dedicated bike lanes; protected bike lanes that have barriers; shared use paths that typically run alongside roads and are used for walking, jogging, and more; and urban trails and greenways that connect parks and neighborhoods.
The plan calls for bike boulevards only on roads with traffic volumes less than about 3,500 vehicles per day with speed limits of 25 miles per hour and says protected bike lanes should go on roads with higher traffic volumes and speed limits.
The research for the Bike Plus plan found that as of this year, most people don’t have a way to comfortably bike, scoot, or “roll” – mostly meaning skateboard or rollerblade – to grocery stores, schools, libraries or parks.
It also found that an estimated one-in-three trips people take within the city are two miles or less and could be biked or scooted if people felt safe.
From 2018 to 2022, Columbus saw 661 fatal or serious injury crashes involving people biking, scooting or rolling. More than two-thirds of serious crashes involving bikes and scooters happened at intersections, according to data from 2019 to 2023.
City Council on Monday also approved a contract with a new bike and scooter rental vendor, VeoRide. Veo will replace Lyft’s CoGo Bike Share program as well as several electric scooter rentals that currently operate in the city. The CoGo contract expires in March, and Veo is expected to be phased in by that time, Barroso de Padilla said.
Veo will pay all of its operating and maintenance costs and will share a portion of the revenue from rides with the Columbus Department of Public Service, according to council documents. The California-based company will also pay the city a fee for each bike or scooter.
