Howard County traffic engineering chief Diane Schwarzman's old one-speed bike rarely gets out of her Ellicott City garage, but lately she's using a borrowed, more sophisticated two-wheeler to pedal along Columbia's streets and pathways with a few professional colleagues.
"The street is the same," she said about the experience of riding a bicycle where she normally drives a car, "but you realize the characteristics of the paved surface." The officials said riding bikes themselves helps them plan for altering streets to make them safer for cyclists.
That's becoming increasingly important as county planners see bicycles as a traffic-friendly part of the transportation mix for the redeveloped downtown Columbia, and as a part of County Executive Ken Ulman's push for environmentally sound and healthy ways to get around. Now, every road the county works on is first examined for ways to add improvements for bicycle riders.
"When you ride a bike, you see things differently than when you drive a car," Mark DeLuca, deputy public works director, told the County Council last week.
A group of traffic planners got a cyclist's-eye view as they took a ride Friday along a winding route of county and Columbia streets and pathways.
In the humid heat, DeLuca, Schwarzman and county engineers Ray Mercado and Kris Jagarafu emerged from a shaded path onto a freshly paved and striped road, where a bicycle lane stripe marked a path between parked vehicles and traffic.
Sweaty in their fluorescent, lime-colored highway safety shirts, the three engineers and a T-shirted DeLuca had ridden about four miles from county offices in East Columbia to inspect the work. They were pleased with what they found by traveling at a slower pace than in a motorized vehicle.
"I saw a blue heron at a pond back there," Schwarzman exclaimed.
The cyclists were hot, though, and lamented the lack of showers at their offices. DeLuca said the county would also like to encourage builders and business owners to include small showers or locker rooms when new structures rise.
The riders used a pathway to ride from their office building near Route 175, south to Oakland Mills Road, then through several more Columbia streets to another path that took them to Oakland Mills. They avoided six-lane Broken Land Parkway.
DeLuca said he had been a cyclist years ago, "but not for a long time." He now lives in River Hill, eight miles from the county's temporary offices in east Columbia, and the new emphasis on bike travel convinced him to try again. DeLuca said he rides his bike to work or brings it and rides during the day about once a week now.
"That's a segment of the transportation pie that we haven't paid a lot of attention to," DeLuca told the County Council during a discussion of bicycle use. Howard's plan to make Columbia more bike friendly includes proposals to widen the footbridge and bicycle path across U.S. 29 to build a wider connection between west and east Columbia.
"We're trying to move in that direction," DeLuca said. "We want to make every road in Howard County bicycle friendly. Having the bicycle advocates there is a tremendous help for us."
Jack Guarneri, president of the Bicycle Advocates of Howard County, said the club is encouraged by efforts to incorporate bicycle-friendly features like wider shoulders, paths, helpful signs and paint striping. Still, he said many western county roads where bicyclists like to ride are dangerous because they're narrow and have no shoulders.
Even in more dense areas, he said, many roads designed without bikes in mind present a problem.
He cited River's Edge, a development of several hundred large homes just a mile from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab — one of the county's largest employers. Guarneri works there, and complains that the only way to get there from the development is by using U.S. 29, a high-speed state highway that is unsafe for cyclists to use
Guarneri praised the work done on Stevens Forest Road, noting that Columbia's network of pathways and some streets can be used to traverse large areas, though often good connections are lacking.
"It allows people to get out of that part of Columbia on a bike path," he said, but dedicated cyclists want more. "Columbia is part of a network of Howard County. That's why we need a master plan [for bikes]."