Rehoboth bicycle plan: Keep it simple

Rehoboth Beach is working on a plan to improve safety for everyone who wants to bike or walk in Rehoboth Beach.

It’s a critical goal going forward; traffic in Rehoboth on holidays and summer weekends already approaches gridlock, so encouraging people to park cars outside of town and walk or bike into the city is important. It’s also a concept that has strong popular support.

Consultants have so far proposed several sensible, low-cost improvements that should help cyclists and pedestrians navigate the city, among them encouraging cyclists to avoid Rehoboth Avenue by designating certain roads as bicycle boulevards – low-speed, low-traffic streets that bicycles and cars will share.

As presented so far, the plan also calls for designating a bike lane on the Lewes-Rehoboth Canal bridge at the entrance to the city, a sensible plan that should improve safety for cyclists, especially if the lane extends far enough to provide cyclists with safe access to the Junction and Breakwater Trail – probably the most popular way to get into Rehoboth by bicycle.

Painting lines on a few roads should help cyclists out for exercise avoid Rehoboth Avenue, but it will do little for the many people who ride bikes with the intention of going to one of the many stores on Rehoboth Avenue for a coffee, a quick breakfast, a newspaper or a slice of pizza.

For those people, the plan also calls for significantly more places to park and lock bikes than now exist, so once in town, cyclists can easily become pedestrians.

The plan also calls for a new Bayard Avenue bridge across Silver Lake and an additional footbridge near Silver Lake Park. These goals deserve long-term consideration, but they should not draw attention away from inexpensive and easy-to-implement strategies aimed at improving safety for everyone.

Perhaps the most important safety consideration of all is simply enforcing speed limits throughout the city.