A couple dozen people took a quick stroll around downtown Kalispell on Wednesday, looking for ways to make it a friendlier place for bicyclists and pedestrians. 

Ideas didn’t take long to surface during the “walking audit.”

Several people rode their bikes to Depot Park where the walk started. Randy Kenyon, a member of the Kalispell City Council and someone who regularly pedals around downtown, was one of them. They all had to find a spare bench or tree to chain their bikes to before setting off on the eight-block walk.

Jennifer Young, recreation superintendent for Kalispell Parks and Recreation, apologized for the park’s lack of a bike rack. It went missing some time ago and has never been replaced. 

“The rack got stolen,” she said.

An almost complete lack of bike racks downtown was just one observation that participants raised as a possible improvement as they walked along Center Street, First Avenue West and Main Street.

Drinking fountains were nonexistent as the sun beat down. Trash cans were scarce in places. Sketchy bike lanes on Main Street and First Avenue East start and stop in strange places and are not clearly marked as bike lanes. 

Drivers use the bike lanes on Main Street as right turn lanes, so it might be best that they aren’t used much by bicyclists. “They’re only for the hard-core bikers. And they’re all dead,” one participant said about the bike lanes over the roar of passing traffic.

Downtown’s bike routes might need to be reinvented, especially with city officials trying to pull out the railroad tracks and build a new linear park through the railroad corridor just north of downtown. 

Like Kalispell’s often spotty network of sidewalks, the existing bike routes don’t run all the way through downtown, let alone connect to other trails in and around the city or to neighborhoods, schools, parks, shopping areas and other places someone might want to go without hopping in a vehicle.

Maybe it would be best to run bike routes along First Avenues East and West and other periphery roads. 

Whatever the route, Kalispell needs functioning and clearly marked bike lanes so bicyclists don’t ride through town switching between bike lanes, sidewalks and busy streets and putting themselves and other people at risk, another participant said.

Sidewalks peter out around Kalispell Center Mall, a major downtown anchor. And crosswalks leading to the mall need some fresh white paint before they fade out of sight into the gray asphalt of Center Street.

Walkers encountered mysterious, shin-threatening fire hydrants sprouting from the middle of sidewalks on First Avenue West. 

They briefly marveled at the decayed appearance of city-owned parking lots with their crumbling asphalt and dead landscaping and walked through a gauntlet of parking signs that pop out of the sidewalks along Main Street.

The goal of the walking audit is to start creating a conceptual plan to improve the usefulness and safety of pedestrian routes downtown. Such an event raises awareness and gets people thinking about problems and solutions. 

“It’s all about accessibility, safety and connectivity,” Parks and Recreation Director Mike Baker said about sidewalks and bike paths in Kalispell and the work that lies ahead.

Some of the desired improvements that get identified in the conceptual plan might take years or even decades to plan and implement. Pam Carbonari, coordinator of the Kalispell Business Improvement District and Kalispell Downtown Association, is hoping some inexpensive improvements can be fit into budgets and help make things better in the meanwhile.

“The crosswalks are in dire need of being painted,” Carbonari said. “We’re missing bike racks and a water fountain downtown. The whole way we walked on First Avenue West there was no trash can. Maybe there’s a way of striping the lanes differently on First Avenue East or West to actually create a bike lane. I think a lot of things we could see in this downtown core would make it a little more pedestrian friendly and take care of some of the issues.”  

Reporter Tom Lotshaw may be reached at 758-4483 or by email at tlotshaw@dailyinterlake.com.