Gresham Smith Selected to Deliver Bicycle System Plan Update for City of Dallas
Gresham Smith is excited to announce that the firm’s active transportation team has been selected to develop a bicycle system plan update for the City of Dallas. The new plan will be an update to the city’s previous bike plan that was completed in 2011.
The overarching goal is to build upon the previous plan and provide clear, implementable and prioritized projects to expand and enhance the existing bicycle network.
For the bike plan update, the Gresham Smith team will perform the following services:
- Build a robust public involvement plan (including a series of meetings with two advisory committees) to reach every potential user group, virtually and in-person
- Update the bike network to reflect existing conditions, priority destinations or connections, and desired facility types comfortable for all ages and abilities
- Reconcile past plans into one single, unified vision for the future
- Identify a core bike network that will form the spine of the future network
- Create a prioritized and phased implementation plan that identifies “quick win” priority bicycle facilities and priorities for future capital improvement programs, with a focus on the next five years
Outreach to key stakeholder groups and the general public will begin in the coming months and carry on throughout the planning process. A draft framework is expected to be created by the end of the year with additional time set aside for review and approval.
“What we’ve heard from city leaders and the community at-large is that we need to create an actionable bike plan built upon public support and readily available funding strategies,” said Bert Moore, P.E., P.L.S., PTOE, who serves as the Project Manager at Gresham Smith. “Using best practices from our team’s design and construction expertise from past multimodal master planning efforts, we’ll develop a plan that delivers feasible, implementable recommendations and sets a new bar for future updates and implementation.”
Moore is joined by Tim O’Brien, who will serve as Deputy Project Manager and has a long history of working with clients in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as well as the firm’s core active transportation team which consists of Active Transportation Practice Leader Greg Kern and Community Transportation Planners Amanda Sapala and Katie Rowe.
In addition to using traditional methods such as historical data collection, Senior Strategist Mike Sewell will be leading a team of engineers that will collect empirical heart-rate data to pinpoint user stress from bicyclists and pedestrians along key corridors using the firm’s patent-pending empathic analytics platform. The technology collects user stresses recorded from wearables with location data to explain how users perceive safety, and allows our planning teams to better match facility types to expectations.
“The data we collect in the field will allow our team to put together a plan with priority bike routes that are designed with the user in mind,” Sewell said. “Simply put, our new empathic analytics technology allows us as engineers to design comfortable, safer spaces that people want to use.”
In recent years, Gresham Smith has expanded its presence in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and contributed to a number of key projects, including a series of wastewater and stormwater projects for the City of Dallas Department of Water Utilities, the City of Ennis’ Downtown Master Plan, alley reconstructions for the City of Carrollton and intersection improvements for the City of Fort Worth.