The town of Williamsburg plans to replace the sidewalk along South Main Street in Haydenville with a substandard 8-foot wide path for use by bicycles and e-bikes along with pedestrians. Between Fort Hill Road and Bridge Street, the proposed path crosses 11 driveways, many of which have obstructed sight lines up and down the path – leading to predictable collisions between bikes and cars pulling out of driveways. The existing sidewalk is well used by pedestrians young and old and by people walking dogs. Expecting people on foot to stay alert for bicycles coming up behind them will seriously degrade the experience of using the sidewalk and put pedestrians at risk of injury.

South Main is a neighborhood street with low traffic volume and a low speed limit. It has long been a popular bicycle route, and cyclists have safely ridden in the street for decades. The town’s proposed design, which violates MassDOT regulations and guidelines regarding path width, side clearance, placement and facility type, is opposed by nearly all of the residents on the street, who want a sidewalk for pedestrians and improved safety for cyclists in the road. The residents of South Main Street have always welcomed bicycle traffic through their neighborhood; they do not want the town of Williamsburg to turn bike traffic into a nuisance and a hazard for them.

Some people believe the South Main Street neighborhood is objecting to “the Greenway bike path,” that we’re fighting or endangering construction of the bike path between Williamsburg and Haydenville. That’s not true. Click the map below to learn about the short segment we’re actually objecting to.



May 2025 Update

The Williamsburg Select Board and its Mill River Greenway committee, dismissing abutter concerns and rejecting alternative proposals, continues to move forward with plans to replace the sidewalk on South Main Street in Haydenville with a bike path. Nearly all the residents along the 700-foot long affected stretch believe the proposed design is unsafe for both pedestrians and cyclists and remain strongly opposed to this ill-conceived plan. We are appalled at the Greenway committee’s hell-bent determination to impose their design on a neighborhood they have no experience living in.

The Greenway committee is supposed to be working respectfully with abutters, but when we reviewed emails received as part of a Public Records Request, we were stunned by the contemptuous disrespect committee members showed toward the neighborhood and members of the Select Board. Examples here.

With a name like “Greenway,” you’d think the committee would respect environmental laws, but we discovered that they preemptively cut down trees on lower South Main Street in order to evade a required environmental review. Narrative here.

Last year the Select Board chair asked us to prepare a writeup they could give to the town’s legal counsel, making the case for a bike boulevard on South Main Street. We did so, but when the town reached out to counsel six months later, the lawyers spoke only with a Greenway supporter on the Select Board and the engineering company. We doubt the lawyers ever saw the document we prepared, but you can read it here.

The Greenway committee, the town and their engineering company all insist that a MassDOT Engineering Directive prohibits bike boulevards on roads classified as arterial. The directive in question says no such thing and does not apply to South Main Street. Read more here.

The committee regularly claims that only a small percentage of cyclists would feel comfortable riding on South Main Street. However, they ignore some of the words in the info-graphic their claim comes from, as well as the study the graphic is based on, which found that even the least skilled cyclists are comfortable riding on traffic-calmed residential roads. Read more here.

The committee is fond of saying that they’ve been working on the shared-use path for 12 years. Not true for South Main Street. The committee changed their plans for South Main five years ago — and waited three years before notifying abutters of that change. Read more here.

The Greenway committee’s design forces pedestrians on South Main Street, including residents walking dogs, senior citizens and young children at play, to share space with bicycles and heavier, faster e-bikes in a substandard 8-foot wide shared-use path. The Greenway committee touts its design as a “common path for all.” We regard the design as lacking common sense: pedestrians in a residential neighborhood should not lose their long-standing, well-used sidewalk and instead be forced to dodge bikes and e-bikes on a designated bike path.

Moreover, we believe the design is unsafe for cyclists and creates a never-ending liability hazard for homeowners on the street. Houses on our cozy village-style street are built up close to the sidewalk. (See the picture at the top of the page and more pictures here.) The proposed bike path runs in front of fences and crosses 11 driveways between Fort Hill Road and Bridge Street, many of which have sight lines up and down the path obstructed by fences, foliage and adjacent cars in the driveways. These visibility restrictions are not a problem for pedestrians, who automatically stop when they see and hear a car pulling out of a driveway. It is a very different matter for cyclists, who move much faster and may require 50, 100 feet or more to come to a halt (see here). In any collision between a resident pulling out of their driveway and a cyclist on a designated bike path, the resident is going to be liable for damages and traffic safety violations.

At some point, a bicyclist happily cruising down the long, straight, empty bike path on South Main is going to be surprised to see a car pulling out in front of him. And if the cyclist is unable to stop in time and collides with the car, the motorist will automatically be judged at fault because bicycles have the right of way on a bike path. The town of Williamsburg is creating a facility that practically guarantees residents will eventually be sued for a collision caused by the unsafe design Williamsburg has forced on the neighborhood. Consider the effect on property values: Would you want to buy a house with a liability time bomb in front of it?

There are time-tested reasons why sidewalks and streets are laid out as they customarily are: Sidewalks run close to fences and driveways because, in practice, collisions do not happen between slow-moving pedestrians and vehicles pulling out of driveways. Streets are located further away from property lines, typically with a grass buffer between the sidewalk and road, giving motorists wide, clear sightlines to see oncoming fast-moving traffic before pulling out into the road. And street traffic adjacent to a driveway arrives from a single direction, not from either direction as bikes on the path will be arriving. By constructing a bike path that defies these practices, the town of Williamsburg is setting up a situation in which accidents will make the reasons for the standards apparent — at the expense of neighborhood residents and bicyclists using the ill-conceived design. If the Route 9 bike path opens and the South Main Street sidewalk becomes a popular, busy bicycle avenue, the likelihood of accidents will only increase.

Compromise Efforts

In the summer and fall of 2024, the neighborhood worked with the town in an effort to come to agreement on a design for the street. In addition to the neighborhood’s preferred design (see below), we put forth two additional proposals. Both were rejected by the town. (Read more here.) The town has not budged from its plan to replace our sidewalk with a bike path which the neighborhood has been objecting to ever since we first learned about it — ever since we learned that the Greenway committee had changed its previous plans to keep bicycles on the street (which the neighborhood enthusiastically supported) and instead decided, without informing abutters, to put bicycles on the neighborhood’s sidewalk.

No Oversight

The South Main St. neighborhood finds itself pitted against not just the Greenway committee but also the Williamsburg town government. The Greenway committee is a town-appointed body, charged with creating a bikeable connection between Haydenville and Williamsburg, and the governing members of the town want to see their Greenway committee succeed. Two of the three Select Board members have consistently sided with the Greenway committee in decisions against the neighborhood. The problem here is that the deciding body in this conflict is allied with one of the parties in the conflict. There is no impartial oversight in the planning of the South Main Street bike path.

The Select Board would have the town believe that VHB, the engineering company it hired for the Greenway project, is an impartial source of accurate professional judgment. The neighborhood’s experience, though, has been that VHB knows what their paying client wants and has collaborated with the Greenway committee to give professional credence to arguments in favor of their design.

For example, in October of 2023, VHB asserted that if the Greenway’s shared-use path wasn’t built, the $2.4 million T-bond allocation for the project would be forfeited. We wrote to MassDOT to ask if this was true and eventually heard back that the money could be used for either the Greenway design or the alternative design the neighborhood favored. (See here.)

Other issues with VHB’s support of the Greenway path include:
  • They incorrectly claim that MassDOT Engineering Directive E-20-001 prohibits construction of a bicycle boulevard on South Main because the street is classified as as an arterial road. We refute this claim here. This refutation has been ignored by the town Select Board, Greenway committee and VHB, which all cite the Engineering Directive every time they make a case for the Greenway committee’s design.
  • They reject the neighborhood’s preferred design by pointing to DOT regulations for arterial roads while ignoring the fact that those regulations specifically state that exceptions can be made when justified — as they are in the case of South Main Street due to its traffic volume and vehicle speed being uncharactistically low for a road classified as arterial. See discussion here.
  • While using DOT regulations against neighborhood proposals, they ignore DOT regulations that apply to the Greenway design:
    • Until recently, DOT required a three-foot spacing between bike paths and adjacent fences (see here), during which time the Greenway shared-use path was routed just one foot away from three of the four fences along the street.
    • Current DOT regulations (here) require that shared-use paths be at least 10 feet wide, with exceptions being made only “where there are severe environmental, historical, and/or structural constraints” — and even then only for short distances. Narrower paths require that a Design Exception be granted. The Greenway committee’s design constructs an 8-foot path along the entire length of South Main Street, with no acceptable justification for doing so.
    • Speed humps are not allowed on arterial roads: see here. While we don’t object to speed humps being installed on South Main, we do object to DOT regulations being selectively applied to neighborhood proposals and ignored for the Greenway design.
  • MassDOT recommends that fences separating paths from roadways be at least 3.5 feet high in order to prevent cyclists from toppling over them. The guardrail proposed below Fort Hill Road is only 2.5 feet high, and its posts are less than the required 2 foot distance from the edge of the bike path. If a cyclist’s pedals get snagged on a post, the cyclist may be thrown over the guardrail into the path of oncoming traffic.
  • The Greenway design ignores DOT guidelines that caution against using sidewalks as bike paths and routing bikes across driveways: see here.
Two of the three members of Williamsburg’s Select Board defer to VHB’s professional judgment and reject neighborhood objections and proposals. Without any truly impartial oversight in this project, the neighborhood has little recourse but legal action against the town. We hope that in a court of law we will finally find someone who will take the neighborhood’s safety concerns seriously, rather than waving them away because VHB says something different.
 

Records Request

Towards that end, the neighborhood filed a public records request with the town for communications and minutes of the Greenway committee. What we found surprised and appalled us:
  • Disrespect bordering on contempt for the residents of the street and Select Board members. See here.
  • Preemptive tree cutting to avoid a required environmental review in violation of anti-segmentation regulations. See here.
  • Despite a mission statement of working with abutters, consistent efforts to work against the neighborhood’s proposals.
  • Strategizing with VHB for how to prevail against the neighborhood.
  • Evidence of Greenway postponing efforts to inform the neighborhood of their change in design until the design had been completed, submitted to DOT for funding, and approved by DOT. See here.
The complete collection of records we received can be downloaded for your own examination. Visit here: Records Release

Is This How You Want Your Town Government to Work?

Up through 2019, the Greenway committee planned to route bicycles along South Main Street itself, the path that bikes have safely traveled for decades without incident, and the neighborhood enthusiastically supported their plans. In October of 2019, though, committee member Nick Dines drew up a radically different design, replacing the neighborhood’s sidewalk with a shared-use path for bicycles to use, and the Greenway committee stopped reaching out to the neighborhood. In meeting after meeting, the topic of contacting abutters came up, and each time the committee found a reason to postpone doing so. (See timeline here.) By the time the neighborhood was finally alerted to the change of plans, in April 2023, the new design had been fully engineered, funding obtained, the design submitted to MassDOT, and approval for use of the funds obtained. Since then, the town has effectively regarded the South Main Street neighborhood as trouble, opposition to be overcome.

The neighborhood has always welcomed bicycle traffic on our road, and we welcome changes to the street that truly improve safety for cyclists, rather than create a false sense of safety by routing bicycles off the roadway and across numerous driveways. We want to improve safety for cyclists without endangering pedestrians. And we would like to see the Greenway committee actually live up to its mission statement of respectfully working with local property owners, and focusing and encouraging local enthusiasm, input, and participation in the project.

Contact us at:  southmain01039@gmail.com

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July 2024 Update

On June 13, two of the three members of the Williamsburg select board defied the wishes of residents along South Main Street in Haydenville and voted to proceed with Mill River Greenway plans to replace the sidewalk on South Main with a bike path, which will be a new segment of the Mass Central Rail Trail. Residents have been objecting to these plans ever since they first learned of them, have pointed out how the design violates state and federal bike facility guidelines, and have proposed an alternative design — all of which has been dismissed by the select board.

The portion of South Main St. in contention lies between Fort Hill Road and Bridge Street. This section is 700 feet long (1/8th of a mile) with 15 homes along it, 8 of which are on the eastern/sidewalk side of the street. It is a distinctly neighborhood road: straight and level with no intersections, currently a 25 mph speed limit, and low traffic levels (less than one vehicle per minute in each direction at peak times). The street is traveled by numerous bicyclists daily and has been for decades without any record of accidents between bicycles and motor vehicles.

Driveway Danger

Replacing our sidewalk with a bike path is a bad match for this location. Homes on the eastern side of South Main sit between the street and the Mill River, and are built up close to the street. There are no spacious lawns in front of people’s homes; front-yard fences and garden plantings extend right to the edge of the sidewalk.


Vinyl scale mockup of proposed bike path, grass buffer, and curb

As a result of this close construction, driveways on the east side of the street have very limited visibility up and down the sidewalk. This is not a problem for pedestrian traffic, because people walking can stop in mere inches when they see a car pulling out. It’s a different matter for bicycles, which may travel 25-50 feet or more in the time it takes to react and come to a stop. And for many of the driveways along the street, cyclists will not even be able to see that there’s a car backing up until it’s on the bike path dead ahead of them. Collisions between bikes and cars pulling out of driveways are entirely predictable. Having a bike path cross 11 driveways, many of them blind, in a short 700-foot stretch is an irresponsibly bad design specifically warned about in bicycle facility manuals from MassDOT and other transportation agencies.


Pedestrian Danger

Although bicyclists in Massachusetts are allowed to ride on sidewalks when necessary in the interest of safety, cyclists do not at present ride on our sidewalk because South Main St., with its low traffic volume, is a comfortable and obviously safe street to ride on. The street is used daily by numerous bicyclists and has been for many decades with no record of accidents between bicycles and motor vehicles. Our sidewalk has always been a relaxed, hospitable path for pedestrian use. The proposed bike path will change that: with an existing rail trail to the south and a planned bike path along Route 9 to the north, practically every cyclist traveling along South Main Street will wind up riding on what was formerly our sidewalk. Our sidewalk becoming a section of the Mass Central Rail Trail will take away something that our neighborhood, like many others, has long enjoyed: a calm, safe place for people to walk, to walk dogs, and to socialize with neighbors.

Everyone walking on the new bike path will have to stay alert for bicycles coming up behind them and be sure to quickly do what it takes to avoid a collision. Anyone listening to headphones, and older citizens with hearing difficulties will be at risk of not even knowing that a collision danger is imminent. Young children playing on the sidewalk, darting out to grab a ball, or senior citizens who cannot move fast enough are at risk of being struck by a bicyclist. With a width of only 8 feet, narrower than the 10-foot width of other bike paths, the new path leaves a bare minimum of space for pedestrians to dodge bicycles. And with the rapidly growing popularity of e-bikes, which are heavier and faster, the risks to pedestrians will only increase over time.

Walking on a designated bike path is different than walking on a sidewalk. There are rules to follow, things you must understand and be prepared and able to do. It is less relaxed, more stressful, and there are risks involved. People choose whether they want to walk on bike paths; if they are not comfortable doing so, they stick to sidewalks. The residents of South Main St. will have no such choice, it’ll be the bike path or nothing in front of their homes.


Less Safe

In carefully examining the proposed bike path, it is clear that it was designed by people lacking experience and expertise in bicycle transportation engineering: It looks good on paper from a landscape design perspective but is seriously deficient from a bicycling safety and usage standpoint. Everywhere we look, the designs in bicycle facility manuals provide separate accommodations for pedestrians and bicyclists in built-up areas like neighborhoods. Bike transportation engineers understand the importance of keeping bicycles and pedestrians separate, for reasons of safety and to provide comfortable levels of service to both groups.

The South Main St. Greenway designers evidently thought that getting bicycles off the road would eliminate safety problems. They clearly had not read MassDOT bike facility guidelines which warn against using sidewalks as bike paths and identify the exact problems with bike paths crossing driveways that the residents have been pointing out. Nowhere else on the Mass Central Rail Trail can we find any section where the rail trail has replaced a pedestrian sidewalk. By adding a curb to the eastern side of the street, the Greenway design narrows the usable width of the road: bicyclists will have to stay a distance away from the curb to avoid crashing (and lose the ability to use the shoulder for emergency maneuvers), and cars and delivery vehicles will have to park fully on the pavement, decreasing the space available for cyclists and increasing the likelihood of collisions with doors being opened.

The Mill River Greenway committee has latched on to the idea that it’s important to have “continuity” between the rail trail to the south and the proposed bike path along Route 9 to Williamsburg. They say that cyclists might be confused if there was no dedicated bike path between these two sections. This is one reason why the neighborhood wants the street clearly labeled with bike route signs and sharrow markings on the roadway. If the Greenway committee had studied bicycle transportation engineering manuals, they would have learned that it is not uncommon for a bicycle facility to change from one type to another depending on the context of the area it’s passing through.

Corridors that effectively accommodate bicyclists often combine multiple facility types, each type being used where appropriate. For example, a shared use path can connect to a bicycle boulevard to create a continuous corridor. A corridor may start with bike lanes, travel along a bicycle boulevard, and then transition back to bike lanes.
            — AASHTO Guide for Development of Bicycle Facilities

The whole plan for South Main Street needs to be reviewed by actual bicyclists and experienced bicycle transportation engineers, not landscape designers and people fixated on a single solution — before spending more than $3 million of taxpayer money on a facility with obvious deficiencies.

Process Failure

The Williamsburg Mill River Greenway committee has been working on this project for the past 12 years, but for 10 of those years the plan was to have bicycles share the road with cars on South Main Street — a design the neighborhood enthusiastically supported. Something different emerged in 2022, though, and the new bikes-on-the-sidewalk plan was designed, engineered and submitted to MassDOT for funding approval before anyone on the street, except one resident from whom easements were needed, was notified that a huge change had been made. This from a committee whose mission statement says they will achieve their goals by “Focusing and encouraging local enthusiasm, input and participation in the project” and “Respectfully working with local property owners.”

We only learned about the new plan in April 2023 when notices were posted on telephone poles in the neighborhood, and we have been studying bicycle facility manuals, learning about regulations and guidelines, and objecting to the Greenway’s new plans ever since. Our objections have been met with a stone wall of refusal to change the basic design, justified with misinformation, deceptions and outright lies. The neighborhood’s alternative proposal — to improve roadway safety and formalize bikes sharing the road with cars — is what is recommended for streets like ours by bicycle facility design manuals from MassDOT, the Federal Highway Administration, the National Association of City Transportation Officials and other agencies.

Unlike the members of the select board and the Mill River Greenway committee, we residents of South Main St. live here, and we are not going away! We are the ones who will have to deal directly with the unsafe consequences of the bike path design, day after day. The select board may have passed its vote, but we are not going to lie down and quietly take having a bike path shoved up our sidewalk against our will — particularly when an alternative is available, and that alternative is what’s recommended for our street by bicycle facility manuals from multiple transportation agencies.


Lawn sign campaign — click image above.

Additional Reading

Forum Presentation — our talk at the April 2024 Greenway forum, a good general introduction to the neighborhood’s concerns and proposal

Bike Boulevard for South Main St. — Greenway advocates claim that South Main St. isn’t allowed to be a bike boulevard. This essay explains why a bicycle boulevard is an appropriate and important facility for our street.

South Main St. Photos — take a look at our neighborhood

In the News — newspaper articles and social media postings about the neighborhood and our efforts to get the town to build a bicycle facility which is safe for cyclists and pedestrians alike

Responses to Arguments — our responses to arguments in favor of the sidewalk bike path

Further Reading — still more pages on various topics

Contact us at:  southmain01039@gmail.com

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December 2023

The material below is the original main page of the web site, from a time when MassDOT planned to extend the sidewalk bike path all the way up South Main to the library end of the street. Unlike the Greenway committee, MassDOT listened to the neighborhood’s objections and changed their plans.

 

Plans to replace a neighborhood sidewalk in Haydenville with an 8' wide bicycle+pedestrian path are opposed by nearly all residents of the street, who wish instead to convert the street to a bicycle boulevard, with bicycles traveling in the street. They point out that this is what is recommended by bikeway planning manuals from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration and other agencies.

The Williamsburg Mill River Greenway Committee is charged with creating a walkable, bikeable connection between Williamsburg, MA and the village of Haydenville, two miles away. Route 9 connects the towns, but that road is so narrow in places that you are taking your life in your hands if you ride a bike along it. The Greenway committee plans to build a shared-use bike path along Rt. 9, between the highway and the Mill River.

(click images to enlarge)
To the south of Haydenville, the Mass. Central Rail Trail ends about 1/2 mile from the center of town. The Greenway committee wants to put a bike path along South Main St. between the rail trail and the start of the Rt. 9 bike path. One-quarter mile of this connection (in red below) runs through a quiet, thickly-settled, long-established neighborhood.
The Greenway committee’s plan is to replace the neighborhood’s sidewalk with an 8-foot wide “shared-use path” — meaning a bike path shared with pedestrians. (See pages 15-25 of the Greenway 2023 Forum presentation.) The South Main St. neighborhood is built up close to the sidewalk, and the proposed bike path runs mere feet in front of some people’s front doors. Nearly all of the residents along this section of South Main are adamantly opposed to this plan (see map), for three main reasons:
  1. It would take away our sidewalk, a place where pedestrians can safely, casually walk without concern about bicycles — in particular, without having to stay alert for bicycles coming up behind them. A sidewalk is a place where children can play, ride tricycles and scooters, and where parents say, “Stay on the sidewalk!” A roadway is a place where you have to keep to the right, and look both ways before stepping onto it, to avoid possibly being hit — and a bike path, shared-use path, whatever you call it, is a roadway. More on why we want to Save Our Sidewalk. Our concerns will be compounded when the future Rt. 9 bike path leads to increased levels of bicycle and pedestrian traffic; see Future-Proofing.

  2. There are fences, bushes and various plantings immediately adjacent to where the proposed bike path would go, and there are 19 driveways and handicap ramps along the 1/4 mile stretch. Most residents backing out of their driveways would not be able to see bicycles approaching (now from either direction) along the path, and bicyclists would have trouble seeing cars entering the path in time to stop. The combination of these sight-line issues creates a serious safety problem for bicyclists and a liability issue for residents — issues that do not exist at present with bicycles riding on the road. If houses on South Main St. were set back from the sidewalk with open lawns in front, sight lines would not be an issue, but that’s not how our neighborhood is laid out. Read more about our Safety Concerns, and take a look at driveway sight lines in Photos Along South Main Street.

  3. The bike path plan eliminates parking on the river side of South Main St. Above Bridge St., residents regularly park on this side of the street in front of their homes, and parking in this section FILLS UP at times, on both sides of the street, during events at local businesses. Eliminating half the parking would leave the neighborhood with insufficient parking and create problems for three businesses — the Hampshire Masonic Lodge, the Williamsburg Funeral Home, and Chuck’s Radio appliance repair — which rely on river-side parking for handicap access and loading purposes. At the lower end of the street, at 29 South Main, the bike path would take away driveway parking for which the homeowners have no substitute, and leave them unable to park on the street in front of their home.
South Main St. has relatively little traffic on it; the speed limit is currently 25 MPH, and the street is wide enough that it is regularly used by bicycles without problems — and has been for decades. None of us residents have any hesitancy about bicycling down South Main to the rail trail. (And we are not expert bicyclists: none of us will ride on Route 9 to Williamsburg.)

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration and many other transportation agencies have guidelines for building various types of bicycle accommodations, and a shared-use path is NOT what is recommended for a street having South Main St.’s traffic level — shared-use paths are prescribed for streets having seven times as much traffic as South Main.

Orange star indicates South Main Street’s traffic volume and (proposed) speed limit. From the Federal Highway Administration’s Bikeway Selection Guide (2019), p. 23.


The Greenway plan for South Main St. removes stress-free passage for pedestrians, creates safety issues around driveways, takes away well-used parking spaces, and transforms a quiet village neighborhood into one with bicycles zipping by directly in front of people’s homes. It is an inappropriate and problematic solution for a “problem” that does not exist — and is a project that comes with a price tag of more than $2 million, money the state will borrow to pay for it.

 
The Neighborhood’s Proposal: A Bicycle Boulevard

Though we have no hesitancy about bicycling on South Main St., we recognize that bike safety along the street could be enhanced. Both the Greenway committee and the neighborhood propose reducing the speed limit to 20 mph and installing multiple speed humps to keep cars from speeding. In addition, we propose widening the roadway between Fort Hill Rd. and Bridge St. to the same 14-foot lane widths found in the upper part of the street. The details of our proposal can be found here: Neighborhood Proposal.

These changes, together with sharrow bicycle markings on the street and appropriate signage, are elements of what is referred to as a “bicycle boulevard” or “neighborhood greenway”: changes that shift the priority on a street from car-centric to bicycle-primary. With these changes, the 1/4-mile section of South Main St. between Fort Hill Rd. and the future Rt. 9 bike path will in effect become a bikeway where cars are allowed to carefully navigate.

Unfamiliar with bicycle boulevards? We were too. Read what we’ve learned about them here: Bicycle Boulevards. In reference materials from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration and other agencies, a bicycle boulevard is the recommended means of accommodating bicycle traffic on a street with South Main’s speed limit and traffic volume. Bicycle boulevards are commonly used to connect disjoint segments of dedicated bike paths — exactly the purpose a South Main boulevard would serve. And bike boulevards are regarded as “All Ages & Abilities Bicycle Facilities.” (See the Bicycle Boulevards page for more information about these statements.)

We believe the neighborhood’s plan:
  • Follows current best-practice recommendations from MassDOT, the Federal Highway Administration and other agencies.
  • Achieves the Mill River Greenway Initiative’s stated goal of broadly accessible, safe connectivity — including safety for pedestrians.
  • Creates an entire bike-friendly street vs. a segregated bike path, benefitting even cyclists who would eschew a relatively narrow bike path and ride in the street.
  • Is able to smoothly handle substantial increases in bicycle traffic, levels that would cause safety problems for pedestrians and cyclists alike on a relatively narrow 8 foot wide shared-use path.
  • Preserves frequently-used and important on-street parking.
  • Keeps bicycles at safe distances from driveways, and keeps them arriving in the same direction as cars.
  • Lowers the cost, saving taxpayer dollars or allowing funds to be diverted to other transportation projects.
  • Preserves the historic rural village character of the community — a fundamental goal of neighbors and abutters and a stated goal of the Town Of Williamsburg:

    • “We want to improve Williamsburg, but we don’t want to lose what we value.” Williamsburg wants to maintain the character and the culture that make it so desirable to both long-term residents and newcomers. Williamsburg is proud of who and what it is. In a world of placelessness, Williamsburg is a beloved place whose identity is rooted in a slow changing landscape and culture.
    — Williamsburg Healthy Aging & Community Design, pg. 37-38


The South Main St. neighborhood looks forward to being able to bicycle between Haydenville and Williamsburg, and we welcome bicycles traveling between the rail trail and future Route 9 bike path. We simply want our quiet street, rather than our sidewalk, to support that traffic — we want to see the street made safer for bicycles, rather than our sidewalk made less safe for pedestrians, and bicycles encouraged to ride directly in front of our driveways.

 
An Opportunity for Western Mass.

One compelling motivation for building bicycle accommodations is environmental: getting people, whenever possible, to ride bikes to a destination instead of driving there in a car. This is the norm in many cities in Europe, and it’s a worthy goal to strive for in this country as well. Dedicated bike paths are one component of making this happen, but they are primarily for long-distance and recreational travel. Of equal or greater importance is accommodation for shorter distances, on vastly more roadways. If bicycles are to significantly displace automobiles in an area, a network of bike-friendly travel-ways is needed. This is unlikely to happen by replacing existing sidewalks with shared-use paths, to the ire and resistance of abutters; it will come about by adjusting selected roadways to be friendly to bicycles. In every neighborhood, a fraction of the streets should be clearly marked and speed-calmed to become bicycle boulevards. Riders should be able to get from any point A to point B in town with most of the riding being along bike-friendly streets, as is the case in Portland, Oregon:

Parallel green lines are bike boulevards; solid green lines are shared roadways; blue lines are streets with bike lanes; purple lines are multi-use paths. See full map and web page.


South Main Street in Haydenville is an excellent candidate for a model bicycle boulevard, setting an example for the rest of the Western Mass. to take notice of and consider following in other neighborhoods. Absence of a shared-use path along South Main St. should not be seen as a failure, a failure to construct an uninterrupted bike path from Williamsburg to points east, but as an opportunity: a chance to demonstrate something eminently practical that could lead to vastly more environmental benefits than replacing one neighborhood sidewalk with a shared-use path would provide.

 
Further Reading

Bicycle Boulevards
How the neighborhood wants to accommodate bicycles on our street.

Responses to Arguments
Our responses to arguments in favor of the shared-use path.

Traffic Volume on South Main St.
Low traffic volume is what makes South Main suitable for use as a bike boulevard. How much traffic is there, and how much of it is trucks?

Bicyclist Preferences
Even the least-capable cyclists are happy to ride on bicycle boulevards, particularly if they’ve ridden on them themselves.

Future-Proofing
Numerous agencies warn about mixing pedestrians and bicyclists, particularly on paths as narrow as the proposed 8-foot shared-use path.

Safety Concerns
Running a bike path directly in front of homes and blind driveways leads to accidents waiting to happen.

Roadside Shared-Use Paths
Examples of what strike us as appropriate shared-use paths along roadways: streets with a lot more traffic than South Main Street.

Timeline
Ten years of work on the Williamsburg-Haydenville bike path, but plans to replace the sidewalk on South Main with a shared-use path first appeared in 2022.

The neighborhood’s petition from September 2023
(Some of the issues, such as moving power lines across the street, have been removed from the Greenway committee’s proposal and are no longer concerns.)

A map showing where the petition signers live/work/own property
Nearly every house along the street.

Fuss & O’Neill Report from 2015
This study by a transportation civil engineering company proposed solutions that seem eminently sensible to us in the neighborhood. They wrote:

Accordingly, the most feasible alternative appears to be to separate the bikers from the pedestrians along this section. For pedestrians this can be accomplished by utilizing the existing sidewalk, where available, and extending it by means of a new sidewalk to the Mill River. Bikers can use South Main Street as a bike route, and share it with existing traffic.

Fuss & O’Neill’s proposals are vastly less expensive than the Greenway’s plan — roughly one-sixth as much. And if their recommendations had been followed, bicycle and pedestrian accommodations might be in place today, having met with neighborhood support rather than resistance.

What about the section of South Main below the red line on the map?
There is currently no sidewalk on South Main St. between Fort Hill Rd. and the rail trail, so new accommodation for pedestrians is definitely needed. If the owner of the property below Fort Hill refuses to grant an easement to the town, we suggest following the original 2015 recommendations of Fuss & O’Neill, namely constructing a pedestrian sidewalk on the western side of the street and having the bicycle boulevard start at the concrete bridge near the rail trail dismount. This would save a great deal of money, a bike path on the eastern side having to be built out over a slope to the river. It would also prevent the removal of more than a dozen trees, preserve parking used by the owner of 29 S. Main, and provide a consistent travel path for bicyclists along the full length of South Main Street.


South Main St. looking north above Bridge St., showing typical daytime roadside parking.



Contact us at  southmain01039@gmail.com