The Farmington Bicycle and Trails Advisory Committee has spent three months turning a good idea into a sign you can actually follow, and on June 9 it got down to the last hard question: which street.
The idea is wayfinding signage guiding cyclists from the Highlands neighborhood to the trail access points near Farmington High School and the Monteith municipal campus. The committee approved the concept in March and spent April sorting out who would design and pay for the signs. On Monday night it finally looked at routes.
Mason, the committee member who built the map, laid out four options and color-coded them. Two were long loops winding through the neighborhood's "-wood" streets, Knollwood to Birchwood to Springwood, and the committee set them aside quickly. The two finalists are short: a red route off Crestwood and a blue route off Briarwood, each running just under four-tenths of a mile to the high school campus. "Basically the same distance for red or blue," Mason said.
What separates two nearly identical routes turns out to be a list of small, real things. Crestwood gets a cyclist off Knollwood, which carries the most traffic of the bunch. Only one route has a sidewalk for any meaningful stretch, and several members argued that was a reason to avoid it, not pick it.
"I'm a big fan of staying off the sidewalks," said Matt, who runs the bike-shop end of the committee's work. "Every driveway is an intersection. You're asking for trouble if you're telling people to ride on sidewalks." His real objection was visibility: "If you're riding on a sidewalk, you're invisible to traffic." Bruce Donald, the Southern New England manager for the East Coast Greenway Alliance and a longtime presence at these meetings, agreed the signs are really for cyclists, not pedestrians, which made the sidewalk question mostly moot.
The committee talked through sight lines on the Crescent curve, whether the high school would rather a route empty into its parking lot or its back lawn, and which path the plow reaches first in a storm. "If there's inclement weather, that's the one that's going to be plowed," Matt said of Crestwood. It was the kind of detail that decides things.
By the end the room was leaning red. But leaning is all it did. The committee took no vote, and chair Bruce Sear was explicit about why: the route empties near the high school, so the school board gets the first word. "Let's just check in with the school board first," Sear said, "so we don't say, yeah, Crestwood's away, and then everyone likes that, and then we have to pull it back." Andres, the committee's resident Highlands expert, was not on the call and was named more than once as someone who needs to sign off before anything is final.
So the plan is to show the school board the red and blue options, take the longer routes off the table, and let the people who weren't in the room weigh in. New signs would all go on standalone posts, because the existing poles already carry stop signs, which makes them a little more expensive. The committee will price them once it knows the route.
It is, in other words, exactly the pace The Farmington Mercury was built to cover. Nobody is rushing a sign into the ground. The committee would rather get the third of a mile right.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A wayfinding sign and a storage unit make the same quiet promise: that you will be able to find the thing again when you need it. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered the Farmington Bicycle and Trails Advisory Committee long enough to know which "-wood" street is which, and is now on his second coffee trying to remember whether Birchwood connects to Springwood or Rosewood. (It's Rosewood.)
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