Bicycle Friendly Community

Missoula, MT | Silver Level

Community Highlights: Having a bike/pedestrian office within city government for more than 25 years, Missoula has long been a regional hotbed for cycling activity. The results can bee seen with the 5.64 percent bicycle mode share, a dedicated snow plow for bike-lane and path clearing in the winter, state of the art bicycle detection at intersections and innovative accomodations such as sharrows. Bicycle Ambassadors offer safe cycling instruction at busy intersections. To educate Missoula’s youth, the school district has two trailers equipped for approximately thirty students with bikes and helmets and bicycling teaching aids travel between all nine schools. The bike program teaches K-5 bike safety and skills during the spring and fall in each school as part of the physical education curriculum. For residents who don’t have their own bike, bicycles are made available through 3 bike –loan programs:  one at the University run by the student government trasportaion office, one at Free Cycles Missoula, and a third – the Dasani Blue Bikes Program – managed by the City Parks and Rec Department. Missoula has had an active program encouraging children to walk to school since 1998, now involving 7 of the 9 public elementary schools.  They had an aggressive 4-year pedestrian safety campaign aimed primarily at motorists’ stopping for pedestrians at crosswalks and are currently in the 3rd year of a major bicycle safety campaign which encourages both motorists and bicyclists to responsibly share the road.  The City also adopted a Complete Streets resolution, guiding both new street construction and existing street reconstruction.

Most Significant Recent Accomplishment: The city opened a new bicycle & pedestrian bridge that is suspended below a major highway and street that links the city center, University and two major bike paths. Missoula also opened a new street with sidewalks and wide bike lanes through empty fields that links a major commercial area, a school and new housing developments. Missoula has just completed design and received funding to construct (in summer 2010) its first 4-block stretch of cycle tracks on a major downtown arterial.