Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan nearly complete

In a few years, you may be able to hop on your bike in Jasper to take a ride down a dedicated trail to Huntingburg. As you pass pedestrians and children on bikes you could make the decision to head over to Ferdinand and then take a jaunt to the Dubois County Park before heading home.

You can’t do it yet, but the first step for adding nearly 58 miles of paved multi-use trails for bicyclists and pedestrians as well as marked routes on existing county roads is nearly complete.

Representatives of VS Engineering and the design firm Taylor Siefker Williams presented the final draft at a public meeting held Wednesday at Huntingburg’s Old Town Hall. About 25 people — many wearing shirts or even socks declaring their appreciation for pedaling — attended the meeting and asked a few questions in the open house format event.

Paid for through local donations as well as a grant from the Indiana State Department of Health, the plan is a platform for the county and local municipalities to use to pursue grants to create pedestrian and bicycle paths across the county through three methods. This is important in developing quality of place as part of Governor Eric Holcomb’s Next Level Agenda plan for Indiana. He listed trails and connectivity as important parts of the infrastructure development across the state.

With the impact of Covid relief funds, grants to impact quality of life as well as increase public health through more outdoor opportunities are becoming available. While the county has been considering some type of trail connectivity between Jasper and Huntingburg in the past, this plan allows for the creation of a network of trails connecting most of the county and provides routes that could lead over into neighboring counties.

It is an extensive plan unprecedented for a rural county but one that officials see as paying off in talent attraction as well as the overall health of the county.

During the meeting Wednesday, Ron Taylor walked the attendees through the planning process as well as the three different implementation methods.

Taylor explained that the easiest and least expensive option on the table is to add signage designed to alert drivers of bicyclists on existing highways as well as add bike lanes by painting lines. He explained that these routes would be for experienced riders who are logging hundreds of miles a week.

For less experienced riders and pedestrians, the plan calls for the county to develop similar signage and lanes on county roads with speed limits of 45 miles per hour or slower. He likened these routes as those that would be available for a family to ride a couple miles to a local ice cream shop.

The third option for extending the trail system is to build nearly 60 miles of new shared-use paths. These paved non-motorized paths would be eight to 12 feet wide and separate from area roadways.

The firms identified six potential shared-use routes to be considered that would add about 57-miles of dedicated paths to the county. The largest is a 17-mile connection from Jasper to Patoka Lake that follows portions of Patoka River. Most of the others are less than six miles in length and would connect existing paths in towns and cities to each other across the county. These include connections between Huntingburg and Jasper; Jasper and Ireland; Huntingburg and Ferdinand; Ferdinand to Ferdinand State Forest and Huntingburg to the Dubois County Park.

In all, the firms identified 275 miles of trails that could be created through the three methods. These trails and designated routes would connect to the county’s extensive network of parks and recreation areas as well as go through residential areas. They estimated a price tag of $65 million for the overall cost of the project but felt it was premature to plant a flag on that cost especially since the implementation of the project would likely occur through phases.

“That’s not a number to take home with you tonight to think about a lot,” Taylor told attendees. “But if you just use some basic rules of thumb, and you think about how much it was cost in some of the other communities to build trails, that’s kind of the amount of investment that we think it would take in order to implement this system as it’s being laid out in the master plan.”

While the planning grant through the state health department was made to increase safety and accessibility to trails to impact the overall health of communities, officials also see initiatives like this as significant ways to attract and retain residents.

VS Engineering and Taylor Siefker Williams are still seeking input on the draft. You can add your input through this site outlining the project. The plan will be up for final approval in July.

The draft plans should be uploaded to the site over the next few days.