City of Madison officials decided on Friday not to appeal a “disappointing” decision by the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Railroads that prohibited an off-road connection between the Cannonball Path and Wingra Creek bike paths.
The Cannonball Path, which connects the city of Fitchburg with Madison, currently ends at Fish Hatchery Road. To connect with the Wingra Creek path, cyclists must bike alongside cars on Fish Hatchery Road for 0.3 miles. The city’s proposed extension would have crossed Fish Hatchery Road and continued alongside the Wisconsin and Southern railroad tracks, before turning behind the Capital Newspapers printing facility and joining the Wingra Creek path past Wright Middle School.
The extension would have crossed railroad tracks near Ridgewood Way twice.
Don Vruwink, Wisconsin’s commissioner of railroads, rejected the proposed crossings on July 22. Vruwink said the crossings would “not promote public safety” and that there were viable alternatives. Vruwink said bikes could become stuck in train tracks and that installing a railway crossing would increase the risk of train car derailment, among other safety risks.
Tom Lynch, Madison’s transporation director, tells Isthmus he feels the railroad commission’s decision did not fully “consider the broad safety of cyclists, children and pedestrians.” Fish Hatchery Road, he notes, has a high volume of vehicle traffic and high speeds, making biking alongside cars on the road dangerous. Lynch argues, too, that the tracks’ usage was minimal: the southern spur track is only used eight times a week, while the Capital Newspaper spur track is used twice annually.
Though the city debated appealing Vruwink’s decision, Lynch says in an email Friday to Isthmus that the city decided not to appeal.
In an Aug. 15 interview, Lynch said the railroad commission’s decision to prohibit the railroad crossings is one in a “series of disappointing orders.” He says that the commission recently struck down crossings for decades-long sought extensions to the Capital City Trail and Glacial Drumlin trail, too. The extensions were fully funded and otherwise approved.
“It took eight years for us to line up the permits and the funding to get that,” Lynch says. “Then within four weeks, the OCR rescinds the order that allows us to do the project.”
Harald Kliems, a board member of Madison Bikes who testified before the railroad commission in support of the Cannonball extension, tells Isthmus he was disappointed to see the commission strike down a fully funded project with public excitement behind it. The extension would have provided a safe path for children at the nearby Wright Middle School and help connect Madison with a neighborhood largely composed of people of color that was once part of the town of Madison.
Kliems says the denial ignores safety risks other than a train-car collision or a bike getting stuck in tracks.
“People do crash on railroad tracks, and there’s design guidance to avoid that,” Kliems says. “But this is one of those safety trade-off matters, where you avoid one safety risk, but the tradeoff is that you put people alongside or onto Fish Hatchery Road, where there’s probably more risk for people.”
In his decision, Vruwink admitted that “to say that Fish Hatchery Road is not adequate for bicyclists is an understatement; the Fish Hatchery Road on-road bike paths are outright dangerous.” To address the safety concerns, Vruwink proposed that Dane County expand the current sidewalk alongside the road into a shared sidewalk path with both pedestrians and cyclists. Madison officials proposed doing so in 2019, but in public feedback, residents preferred the extension entirely separate from Fish Hatchery Road.
Lynch says that the city will need to work with Dane County to “see if [the sidewalk expansion] could move forward.”
