The Tampa City Council signed on this morning to work with Hillsborough County on a countywide bike safety program that hopefully will be sweeping game plan to address bicycle education, awareness, road engineering and enforecment.
With Councilwoman Mary Mulhern leading the charge, the council voted to be part of the countywide bike safety plan.
I was there to give a bike infrastructure presentation to city council (set weeks ago before the recent string of bicyclist deaths. But I re-shaped my presentation to tell the city council that the county just approved a bike safety program yesterday and I asked the city sign on. Mulhern made the motion and off we go.
The city of Tampa already has a bike-ped study going on, being done by Seminole Heights resident Demian Miller of Tindale Oliver consulting company. I've asked the city to funnel his ideas also to this new bike safety program.
In addition, Karen Kress of the Tampa Downtown Partnership said her TampaBayCycle program is also working on an action plan and that perhaps it can also be dovetailed into the countywide action plan so that we move forward in a coordinated fashion.
It was also a sad day knowing that as I addressed the Tampa City Council family members of Diane Vega were putting her to rest. Diane was killed at Himes and Spruce while biking to work last Friday morning.
Her family members -- and the also the loved ones of other local Tampa Bay area bicyclists killed recently -- should know that out of such sadnesss is growing a movement to try and avoid these tragedies.
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