Bicycling in Arvada
Continuing To Build A Better Community
Arvada’s bicycle network consists of multi-use paths, bike lanes, and shared lane facilities. Cyclists have an array of tools to improve their recreational and commuter rides: continuous trails, on-street bike routes, online maps, intersection signal detection, and educational programs. In 2008, the City earned the Bronze level Bike Friendly City award from the League of American Bicyclists. To carry on as a Bike Friendly City that values the health and quality of life of the public, the City is engaged in implementing street and trail solutions that benefit the cycling community.Planning
For over a decade, Arvada has applied multimodal transportation principles for planning projects. These principles support bicycle and pedestrian connectivity to transit hubs, parks, schools, and other destinations at the city level. Meanwhile, spot improvements at intersections, trail heads, and through cul-de-sacs are studied at the neighborhood level. As a result, engineering standards for designing new streets include bicycle lanes and roadway retrofit solutions as well as spot improvements have been developed for established streets that lead to planned transit stations or tie together existing bike routes.Trails paralleling streets, traveling along creeks, and passing through parks vastly exist and continue to be improved as part of the City’s bicycle system.
Because both trail and on-street bike lane facilities are costly to construct, City Staff developed a city-wide Bicycle Master Plan to help coordinate the type of bike facility needed to produce direct, continuous, and easily identifiable bikeways that result in local and regional connectivity. Implementation of the plan is achieved through grant applications, street reconstruction projects, and land development projects.
Engineering & Operations
The transportation system in the City of Arvada is a network of highways, arterials, collector, and local streets designed to serve varying traffic levels. Guidelines consider right-of-way, safety, accessibility, multimodal traffic operations, utilities, drainage, vegetation, lighting, streetscape, and environmental necessities during the design process. Likewise, engineering standards govern the alignment, width, slope, surface material, signing, striping and other aspects of bikeways.Projects funded by State and Federal grants are subjected to additional guidelines and the City complies with private sector railroads and ditch company requirements when developing infrastructure. Engineers also work to combine or phase projects (known as Value Engineering) to ensure responsible use of public funds.
The majority of trails in the City are concrete surfaces vary between 6 and 12 feet in width and on-street asphalt bike lanes are often 4 to 5 feet wide. Bridge structures and other pinch points may result in narrower bikeways. The narrower width is tolerated for short distances while shared lane treatments such as sharrow pavement markings are placed for motorists and cyclists to share pavement space in roadway corridors.
As the preferred treatment, bike lanes in the City of Arvada extend to the intersection space at signalized intersections to queue cyclists alongside motorists and pick up on the far-side of the intersection for connectivity. Signalized intersections that cannot accommodate a cyclist in a dedicated bike lane have been retrofitted with “bicycle detection” that is marked and signed with a specialized symbol. In contrast, trails are often carries through intersections using pedestrian crossings.
