Update May 5, 2023: In August 2022, Walk Bike Nashville delivered our Keep Infrastructure Public Petition to the mayor's office, with over 800 signatures from Nashvillians. Legislation resulting from our Keep Public Infrastructure Public Petition passed Metro Council and was signed by Mayor Cooper on January 3, 2023. BL2022-1530 requires special exception to close any public right-of-way (sidewalks, bike lanes, travel lanes, etc.) for more than seven continuous days. 

NDOT has established the Multimodal Access Closure Advisory Committee (MAC) to review exception applications. The committee meets on the third Thursday of the month to review exception applications. Wesley, our Policy and Government Relations Manager, represents Walk Bike on the committee and advocates to maintain pedestrian and bicyclist paths on all projects. Thank you to all who signed our petition and catalyzed this policy change. 

 

Keep our public walk & bike infrastructure public. 

We have few safe places to walk and bike in Nashville. Through various mayors and transportation plans, Metro Nashville has expressed a focus on expanding walking and bicycling -- we can not achieve our transportation goals as a city if our limited safe bicycle and pedestrian routes are regularly closed for special events. 

When the city allows bike lanes, sidewalks, greenways, or transit routes to be closed, people who use this public infrastructure are left with few to no safe options for getting around the city. A road closed to cars may cause a few minutes of detour, when you close the Pedestrian bridge there simply is no other safe route across the river. When you close a sidewalk, people are forced to walk in the street.

We are asking Mayor Cooper, Metro Council and the Nashville Department of Transportation to pass a policy to limit the use of bikeways, sidewalks, greenways and the Pedestrian Bridge for private events or construction, and require all special events or construction sites using our public infrastructure to ensure safe pedestrian and bicycle access through the event or provide an equally safe, efficient, and ADA-compliant detour. 

Please join us in this request by signing our petition to keep public infrastructure publicly accessible.

(PS this petition was developed in response to the many closures caused by the Music City Grand Prix. You can see our letter to the community about that event here)

Will you sign?