Above is a presentation of the Reedley Parkway including it's history, community leaders, volunteers, and donations.
The Reedley Parkway corridor/bike and pedestrian trail
project is a continuous 2.6 mile,
multi-use, non-motorized, tree-lined transportation corridor constructed on railbanked railroad right-of-way.
The corridor ranges in widths from seventy-five feet
(20') to one hundred feet (100') and follows a
clearly defined route which extends in a northwest to
southeast direction through the center of the City.
The Parkway connects some of the community’s
busiest east/west arterial streets and north/south arterial
streets, terminating at the southeast boundary of the
City’s sphere of influence. Along its route, the
Parkway connects most of the City’s
industrial sector, City Hall, the County Courthouse,
downtown Reedley, Reedley College, Reedley
High School, several elementary schools, and an approved Park
and Ride facility. The section under construction will extend the Parkway to the Kings River.
The Reedley Parkway is widely used by people of all ages. Bicycling, walking, jogging, and rollerblading, are frequent uses of the trail corridor.
The City of Reedley has been developing ways to reduce
air pollution. The Reedley Bikeways Plan is a subsection
of the Reedley General Plan Circulation Element and
serves as one of the several transportation modes which
comprises the Circulation Element. When the latest Circulation
Element was prepared in August, 1993, it was not known
that the TVRR was contemplating abandonment of the portion
of their railroad that runs through Reedley. Consequently,
the adopted Circulation Element does not show the TVRR
right of way converted to a bicycle/pedestrian trail.
With an outpouring of strong community support in 1996,
the City of Reedley set the preparations for the bikeway
project according to the objectives of the General Plan,
namely that a continuous and easily accessible bikeways
system which facilitates the use of the bicycle as a
viable alternative transportation mode would be developed
with priority given to bikeways that would serve the
most cyclists and destinations of greatest demand, such
as employment centers, school, college, the downtown,
and other commercial centers. The Parkway project includes
amendments to the General Plan Land Use and Circulation
Elements, and the Zoning Ordinance. Owners and operators
of connected sites will be encouraged to provide secure
bicycle parking and participate in the promotion of
bicycle transportation. The Reedley Parkway is catagorized
as a Class I Bicycle Path.
The benefits from this project have been that
it provides a convenient access for people to walk and/or ride
their bicycles instead of driving their vehicles to
commute to work, school, and commercial centers in the community. Estimate are that this project will eliminate 218,000
vehicle trips over the first 20 years of the life of
the project.
Reedley’s growth rate is approximately 2.5 %
per year. As the Reedley Industrial Park is developing, as is the City's new sports park, we expect the
number of jobs along the project route to increase substantially
over the next 20 years. Combined
with the fact that the Parkway is within the Redevelopment Project
Area which encourages infill housing, it is quite
possible that the number of bicycle commuters will far
exceed our initial estimate.
