OMAHA, Neb. (KMTV) — It's a change Mark Vondrasek wants to see. As somebody who rides his bike often, he gets annoyed when his designated lanes are blocked.
"It's usually just delivery people dropping somebody off at a location temporarily sometimes it is like a whole car, parked out in the bike lane,” says Vondrasek.
Vondrasek says it's worse along Leavenworth street, sometimes he has to veer into car traffic just to avoid getting into a crash.
"You just got to swerve around, slow down a bit, make sure there's not a car, you know if you have to go out into the car lane with your bike, make sure you don't get hit on a bike by a car,” says Vondrasek.
Council-member Pete Festersen is working to make Omaha a more bike friendly city and was the one that proposed the ordinance change.
"Having this simple clarification which seems kind of self evident, but was just nowhere in city code we thought it was important to do,” says Festersen.
Right now, no parking signs are posted next to some, but not all bike lanes.
This change would make those signs unnecessary and all the bike lanes uniform throughout town.
"You wouldn't want to put a sign up everywhere, so it just makes it clear, makes it apply everywhere to where those things have been designated already,” says Festersen.
Festersen says he next is looking to connect the Keystone Trail to Lake Cunningham and would also like to see more lanes downtown, something Vondrasek welcomes.
"There's a lot more the city could do. Hopefully this means they're getting ready to add more bike lanes down and they're trying to get the code in line so that that this,” says Vondrasek.
