Major updates for BikeWalkOKC plan ready for Council’s vote

OKLAHOMA CITY — Planners and organizers behind the citywide BikeWalkOKC project – bringing more focus on pedestrian access and cycling to city infrastructure – are seeking city council approval for a massive update and expansion to the plan following a successful first five years.

Originally submitted, approved, and initiated in 2018, BikeWalkOKC was designed as a sprawling, multi-year set of city works projects aimed at improving safety for cyclists and pedestrians while also expanding the availability and accessibility of bike trails, bridges, and inner-city sidewalks.

In its first five years, BikeWalkOKC has resulted in 176 miles of new sidewalks across the city and 10 miles of new, dedicated bike lanes, primarily focused within the city core and major daily transit areas like Downtown and NW Classen Boulevard.

In anticipation of the program’s next five years, city planners have compiled a new 135-page update proposal identifying the most beneficial and pressing areas for new pedestrian and biking infrastructure and laying out development plans.

Originally scheduled for an approval vote on April 23rd, the City Council voted unanimously to defer the approval until May 7th to give themselves more time to review the lengthy proposal.

“It’s funny. It’s only 135 pages because they wouldn’t let us go any longer,” City of OKC’s Justin Henry told Free Press in a phone interview. “We really updated the whole plan, because so much has happened and changed in the city since 2018. There’ve been a lot of lessons learned.”

Henry is a transportation program planner with the City of Oklahoma City Planning Department.

BikeWalkOKC proposed updates

The proposed new update to the BikeWalkOKC plans would:

• Add 10 new “pedestrian priority areas” to the existing 10 from the original plan, in addition to the Downtown area, which was determined as the highest priority. Pedestrian priority areas have been identified as city areas most in need of pedestrian-focused development.
• Create 150 miles of new sidewalks, focused primarily on connecting neighborhoods to major streets and previous BikeWalkOKC developments.
• Increase and ensure walkable access to schools, identifying the top 20 city schools in need of better walking/biking access (primarily elementary schools) and developing clear, safe pedestrian-focused paths from surrounding neighborhoods to their locations.
• Create walkable paths and access to public transit stops, in particular to current and future stations for the new Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, with the eventual goal of creating sidewalk access to every transit stop in the city.
• Create better walkable access to public parks, identifying and ranking the top 20 parks most in need of better access, much like the school access ranking.
• Identify long-term plans for more than 40 walking/biking trail routes throughout the city, comprising over 160 miles of new trails over what city planners say would be “many decades.”
• Identify 13 areas across the city where new pedestrian bridges are needed or where existing bridges need updates or renovations.

Major sidewalk expansion

The largest updates in the newly revised plan are focused on new sidewalk projects, joining the numerous ongoing sidewalk and street resurfacing projects currently across the city.

Henry said that those projects have mainly been aimed at increasing accessibility and access along major roads like Penn and Portland, with many of the newly proposed projects in the BikeWalkOKC update focused on connecting neighborhoods to those major streets with much smaller, localized sidewalk projects.

“For a long time – from about the 60s to the 90s – the city just didn’t build sidewalks and didn’t require developers to include sidewalks,” Henry said. “So we’ve done a lot of analysis to determine what areas aren’t served well by sidewalks right now and to focus on those areas in this update.”

The proposed BikeWalkOKC update lays out plans for 150 miles of new sidewalks, much of which would focus on connecting communities to main streets and hubs and on ensuring access to the city’s recently expanded public transit.

“We want to have a sidewalk to every single transit stop, essentially,” Henry said. “The city is putting a lot of emphasis on improving public transit right now, and we want to be supportive of that, but once you get a bit further out away from the city core, a lot of people are just living too far away to be able to walk those transit stops.”

Further funding

City council approval of the newly updated plan would allow BikeWalkOKC planners to access some city funds for these projects, in particular utilizing MAPS funding and money from the city’s next General Obligation Bond.

But city funds alone won’t cover the costs of this massive, updated plan.

In addition to seeking city council approval for city funding, elements of these plans can potentially be financed through state-level and even federal grants and allocations.

“We’re actually writing a grant application right now for a Safe Routes to School grant from ODOT to try to get some of those school access projects funded,” said Henry. “Kind of the day job of me and my team is just trying to get these plans implemented, and we’re always out hunting for funding and finding great opportunities or pitching stuff.”

May 7th City Council vote

City Council members received the newly updated BikeWalkOKC plans and heard a presentation from OKC Planning Director Geoffrey Butler summarizing the updates on April 23rd.

To give themselves time to fully review the new 135-page plan, the council voted unanimously to defer their approval vote for two weeks until the May 7th meeting.

Free Press will bring you updates on the plan’s pending approval following that vote.

For more information about BikeWalkOKC, including the full originally approved 2018 plan and the full-length 2024 update document, visit okc.gov/departments/planning/bikewalkokc.

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