Community News

With Sleepy Hollow’s Endorsement, Route 9 Bike Path Plan Moves Forward

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Bike lane rendering in Sleepy Hollow — This is what Broadway might look like with a designated bike lane

December 1, 2020

By Barrett Seaman—

With a 7-0 vote at its November 24^th board meeting, the trustees of Sleepy Hollow joined four other rivertown villages in endorsing a plan to create a separate lane for bicycles and pedestrians from Hastings to Sleepy Hollow. By doing so, they allowed the Route 9 Active Transportation project’s steering committee to go to the New York State Department of Transportation (NYDOT) with the weight of unanimous backing by the affected communities.

From a practical standpoint, says Dan Convissor, who heads up BikeTarrytown, a group spearheading the bike path campaign, the newly united front allows the steering committee to make a case for more grant money. “The next step,” he says,
“is finding grants to pay engineers to produce detailed plans.”

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Adds David Kim, the newly appointed Tarrytown trustee and that village’s liaison to the project’s steering committee, “It was important to show that the ‘consortium of five villages’ are still committed to moving forward in making Route 9 safer for all modes (walking, bicycling and driving).”
The Route 9 bike path project has been in the works for more than four years and already has support from a $150,000 feasibility study, paid for by a grant from the New New York Bridge fund because of its tie-in to potential bicycle traffic coming off of the Mario M.Cuomo Bridge’s shared use path.

While all five villages have now endorsed moving forward, there is not unanimity as to the final details of the route—particularly for Tarrytown. “The key concern from the Village of Tarrytown continues to be that we do not support the abolishment of downtown parking along Broadway,” says Village Administrator Rich Slingerland, “as we feel it would have a detrimental effect on the downtown businesses.”

In particular, the stretch of Broadway between Main Street and Wildey Street is not only lined with small walk-in businesses but also on-street parking. The concern of business owners in the village is that valuable customer parking would have to be sacrificed to make room for the bike lane. As Dan Convissor points out, however, “The initial plans put forth by the Steering Committee don’t touch
parking on Broadway from Main St to Wildey St. ,” he says. “The version signed off by Rich [Slingerland] and [former Tarrytown Mayor] Drew {Fixell] “doesn’t touch any parking at all.”

That and possibly other potential choke points elsewhere along the route will have to be addressed in the more granular engineering work to be down in the next phase.