Tonawanda, NY (WBEN) After Thursday's deadly crash involving an e-bike in the Town of Tonawanda, how much talk is there of reconfiguring Sheridan Drive back to the way it was?
Town of Tonawanda Supervisor John Flynn says the addition of bike lanes along Sheridan has received high marks. "Biking has become a big thing from a recreational standpoint to just a leisure activity. We have a number of bike trails and bike paths all over Tonawanda and Erie County," says Flynn. "We haven't really had any problems or complaints regarding that.
Flynn refuses to blame the bike lanes for Thursday's deadly crash involving an e-bike rider at Sheridan and Delaware. "It was just a situation where apparently the driver went through a red light, and so the the traffic lanes and the bike lanes really, and quite frankly, being on an e-bike per se really didn't have anything to do with the with the accident here. It was just a matter of going against the traffic signal, which unfortunately caused this this accident," notes Flynn.
Flynn says that intersection is probably one of the busiest intersections in all of Western New York, but it is safe. "There's plenty of room there. There's still three lanes of travel going down Sheridan, and you got two lanes going down Delaware there. So there's plenty of room there, and I know that the layout of the traffic intersection or the fact that there was a bike lane added in a few years ago really had nothing to do with this accident," adds Flynn. He says don't anticipate a change back to the way things were.
But Flynn admits some e-bike riders are reckless along trails. "We have had complaints this summer of people on e-bikes, basically going too fast and and traveling unsafely on the bike path," says Flynn. "When you have a narrow bike path, on a weekend especially, you have a lot of foot traffic, you got jogging, you got walking, you got strollers, you got regular bikes. You gotta be careful on there. So what we've done is we have a pretty active police presence on our rails of trails. We have police officers on bikes, we have police officers on ATVs, we have police officers on UTVs, and so we have a fairly robust presence on the rails of trails, especially on weekends, where we can kind of monitor the situation and put a stop to any unreasonable behavior," explains Flynn.
He says any next step would be creating an ordinance to develop speed limits on trails. "That's something that I'm going to take a long hard look at because it's kind of tough to enforce that to tell you the truth. You'd have to have speed detectors out there, and so we're going to see how we got to increase police presence right now," says Flynn.
