Kelly Kenoyer: Mike Naklicki is the division project manager with the City of Wilmington's Engineering Department. Thank you so much for joining me.
Mike Naklicki Thank you, Kelly. I appreciate it.
KK: We're seeing some progress in the city and the county on bike and pedestrian infrastructure. So I just wanted to get a quick update from you. Where are we at on the Greenville Loop Trail, and where is it going to connect into the existing infrastructure we have in this community.
MN: Yeah, we've made a lot of progress on the Greenville Loop Trail. Over the last few years. We've completed our feasibility study, completed our design, the majority of the right-of-way acquisition, and just now finishing up with some utility relocations. We broke it into actually four different sections to make sure, once different sections are complete, we can get to them quicker. So the first section runs from Holly Tree and College [Road] intersection, and that has been completed, it runs up Holly Tree and connects up to Pine Grove Drive and the holly tree intersection. Section two goes from Pine Grove Drive up to Bradley Creek Elementary School, and that is currently wrapping up design, and hope to get that under construction early next year. And then the third section is from Bradley Creek Elementary School up to Oleander and crosses over and connects to the river to see bikeway that's on Park Avenue, and we're about the same progress on that as well. So once that's complete, we'll have about a four-mile network that connects to the Cross City Trail, Central College trail down there, along College Avenue, all the way up to the river to see bikeway.
KK: What's the long term vision that we have for bike and pedestrian infrastructure in the Cape Fear region? Should I be able to bike from anywhere to anywhere? Or what's the goal?
MN: Yeah, the best way to look at that is, I know our transportation planning in Wilmington [Urban Area] Metropolitan Planning Organization [WMPO], they work closely with the county and developed a Walk Wilmington plan that was recently updated in 2023 a lot of these path projects, though, are part of the comprehensive Greenway plan that both the county and the city developed back in 2013 but what's important to consider is it's a network we're not trying to necessarily serve one specific area. The long-term plan is to connect all these new trails to the current Cross City Trail and the other networks of bike lanes and sidewalks across the city. It takes a long time to build this network. We try to, you know, catch the low-hanging fruit first, and then through, you know, these opportunities, like the transportation bond and the various federal funding that we're able to acquire through the WMPO, we're able to fill in these gaps and do some of these larger projects for those, those cyclists?
KK: So in a recent city council meeting, there was discussion about the Greenville Loop Road. There was also discussion about the Hooker-Hinton multi-use path, anything else that we haven't discussed that you think cyclists and pedestrians in the area would be excited about
MN: For our current transportation bond, we are building sidewalks mostly gap-fill projects. And along Dawson and Wooster Street, we did a fair amount of smaller gap-fill projects along Oleander Drive. And also we will have one coming up next year with the Wrightsville Ave sidewalk project.
Some of those are really high-traffic areas, and I know we have a lot of pedestrian-involved accidents in those places, is the aim to kind of reduce those crashes. That is, it's to give them a location where it's very obvious where they'll be walking, that cars will be able to see it. They have a designated location, instead of trying to walk along the edge of the travelway that's unprotected and has small, what they call goat paths, where they tend to just walk, where it is convenient, but not always safe.
KK: Mike Naklicki, project manager with the city of Wilmington. Thank you so much for joining me.
MN: Yeah, no problem.
