Departmentt of Transportation (DelDOT) Bicycle/Pedestrian Coordinator Anthony Aglio and Ocean View Police Chief Ken McLaughlin presented local Chamber of Commerce members with plans for stepped-up bike safety, last week. There had already been some movement in this direction, following a vehicle-bicycle collision near Millville last summer.
That incident involved a foreign student, biking home after finishing his work shift at the Ocean View Family Restaurant — he was seriously injured by a hit-and-run drunk driver.
There were other traffic accidents involving pedestrians and bicyclists last year, around the region, and some of them involved foreign students, as well. But the accident near Millville particularly raised local awareness of the number of foreign students sharing the roads.
The community almost immediately increased efforts to encourage the use of safety equipment (lights, helmet, reflective clothing), and to generally educate visiting students about bike safety and American rules of the road, while also working not to shift attention away from inattentive drivers.
Those efforts will continue this summer, Aglio pointed out. He told Bethany-Fenwick Area Chamber of Commerce members gathered at the Cripple Creek Golf and Country Club on April 6 about plans to partner with McLaughlin this year.
Aglio said the bike safety effort would particularly target international students, but he pointed to the number of American summer visitors who bring their bikes to the beach as well. “We don’t want to exclude anyone,” he said.
But the problem is more likely to be how to reach the international students, not excluding American kids, he added.
“We’ve tried to reach out for the past couple of years, but it’s not as easy as it might seem,” Aglio said. He said the department typically tries to pass educational materials on bike safety through the recruitment agencies that assist the students and employers, but they reach relatively few of the students themselves once they enter the country.
DelDOT gave away 1,000 helmets last year, held a bike safety “rodeo” for kids and gave several presentations on how to ride in the resort area — particularly, on Route 1 — Aglio said. “We had about 300 people attend those, but only about 35 of them were international students,” he said. “This year, we’re taking a different approach. We’re still going to have the bike safety rodeo, but now we’re also going to set up bike safety checkpoints, on Route 1, and now on the Route 26 corridor as well.”
The checkpoints will be 10-by-10-foot tents, set up at the roadside. Aglio expected help from Sussex Cyclists (www.sussexcyclists.org), who he said had been of tremendous assistance in the past. Organization members will staff the checkpoints, hand out helmets, lights and educational materials, and perform some basic, on-the-spot bike maintenance.
Aglio said they were planning to hand out 400 or 500 sets of bike lights, and 3,000 helmets, over the course of the summer. The whole program is slated to cost about $20,000, he said, funded primarily by Rehoboth-based developers Ocean Atlantic Associates (DelDOT contributed $3,500).
“If you employ these students, it’s your responsibility to make sure they’re safe,” Aglio reminded the Chamber members. Giving away safety equipment won’t do much good if employers don’t encourage their workers to use it, he said.
McLaughlin recognized DelDOT and the Chesapeake Region Safety Council as partners on the Route 26 project element, and seconded Aglio’s closing remarks.
“It is incumbent upon us to do something,” he said. “We’re recruiting [the international students] over here, and I think the business community has an obligation to ensure their safety, as much as possible.”
He said the Ocean View Police Department plans to set up checkpoints on June 30 and July 8, followed by a couple of weeks of extra attention.
Officers will keep a special eye out for bicycle-related traffic violations during that period, he said, and issue warnings. According to McLaughlin, they will start issuing real tickets after the first couple of weeks.
He said he suspects the associated fines might have a considerable impact on young workers’ paychecks, and asked the businesspeople to help their employees avoid that situation by insisting that they use their safety equipment.
Indian River Inlet Bridge
Chamber members also received an update on progress at the Indian River Inlet Bridge. DelDOT originally planned for a rather unique “tied-arch” design at the Indian River Inlet but found very few contractors willing to tackle it.
With an incredibly over-budget project all but guaranteed by that design, they halted the first round of contractor bidding and returned to the design table. (The winning team would, however, be able to re-use much of the geotechnical information from the tied-arch designs, Robb noted.)
The bridge will still stand clear of the channel, with no piers in the water, but the department now anticipates a “cable-stayed” design, similar to the Route 1 bridge over the C&D Canal.
DelDOT has also switched to a design-build (D-B) bidding process. Robb said he expected the department would have a short list of qualified engineer-contractor teams compiled by year’s end.
“The goal is to have final proposals, score the proposals and award the contract by early next year,” he pointed out. He said there was typically a considerable time advantage with D-B. Teams typically start into preliminary engineering work before they are actually selected, Robb said.
He said DelDOT was planning to send out the “Request for Proposal” documents (several thousand pages of information) for an industry review, toward the end of June, and start looking for submittals from the D-B teams about that same time.
Despite delays associated with the ultimately impractical consideration of the tied-arch design, Robb said the department still expected to complete the new bridge by 2010.
“There are a lot of opportunities for construction time savings, with D-B,” he said. “If we are able to award the contract early next year, we should be into construction within six to nine months (mid- to late-2007).”
In the meantime, DelDOT’s David Duke said work on the mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) walls — the foundation for the bridge approaches — was progressing on schedule. With those foundations taking shape, the footprint of what will eventually become the new Indian River Inlet Bridge is starting to come into view.
Crews have been working to shift Route 1 slightly to the east, to keep traffic away from the work zone, and Duke said that realignment was nearing completion ahead of schedule.
“Northbound Route 1 will be open, dual, within the next couple weeks,” he predicted. (Crews have already reopened a second southbound lane.) “We’re in good shape — just waiting to find a bridge contractor.”