Lakeshore Path improvements underway
A three-month project announced in March to improve the Howard Temin Lakeshore Path, a favorite spot on the UW–Madison campus, is well underway and should be completed by the beginning of August.
The project, which began May 3, will improve safety, maintain accessibility, and prevent flooding and erosion.
Located on the south shore of Lake Mendota, the three-mile path runs between the Memorial Union and Oxford Road in the village of Shorewood Hills.
The project, expected to take about three months, will focus on the western half of the path between Oxford Road and the Willow Creek bridge, behind the UW–Madison Natatorium. That portion of the path, including the boat launch area, will remain closed during the project. Picnic Point is open, but vistors will need to park across the street from the entrance.
“This section of the path crosses some of our most scenic and sensitive natural areas as well as the rapidly expanding western edge of campus,” Gary Brown, assistant director for planning and landscape architecture with UW–Madison Facilities Planning and Management, says. “The project will improve the path surface and provide long-term protection for campus buildings and sensitive natural areas.”
Right now, much of the western half of the Lakeshore Path consists of separate 10-foot-wide bicycle and pedestrian paths with deteriorating surfaces and excessive contact with street traffic, problems that create safety and accessibility problems. Also, the adjacent shoreline is showing signs of erosion and provides little protection against flooding.
To improve safety and accessibility, the project will:
- Resurface both the bicycle and pedestrian paths
- Narrow the unnecessarily wide pedestrian path from 10 feet to eight feet to create green space, reduce runoff and save maintenance costs.
- Redesign street intersections so that path users cross at a single point, reducing the risk of collisions.
- Redesign the boat landing across from parking lot 60 so vehicles and boat trailers no longer share the road with cyclists and pedestrians. Instead, vehicles will cross the path at a single driveway between lot 60 and the boat launch.
- Replace some deteriorating willow trees that have been identified as “hazard trees” and could pose a threat to path users during windy days.
The design for the new path was developed with input and support from UW–Madison’s Transportation Demand Management program, which promotes biking, walking and other alternatives to driving to, from and around campus.
“Our top priority is providing safe, convenient alternatives to driving, and this project helps do that,” Renee Callaway, UW–Madison TDM coordinator, says. “If we are going to ask commuters to consider leaving their cars at home, we have to make sure the infrastructure exists to support that decision.”
To address flooding and erosion concerns, additional work will be done on the path between Picnic Point and the boat landing, raising the path 18 inches and grading it away from Nielsen Tennis Stadium, Rennebohm Hall, a sanitary lift station that serves UW Hospital and the 1918 Marsh.
The grading will require the university to replace additional willow trees that border the path with a mix of golden willow, swamp white oak and river birch trees, which will form a heartier mix of trees better suited to survive in the area.
The project will not affect the older willow trees along the shoreline, some of which are believed to be the original trees after which Willow Drive and Willow Creek were named. Fifty-one trees will be replaced.
Brown says the difficult decision to replace trees — for both safety and path re-grading purposes — was made to ensure long-term protection of path users, and the environmentally and technologically sensitive areas nearby. Most of the trees that will be replaced were planted by the university in the 1980s and are already showing signs of decline.
“Without the reconstruction, we run the risk of continued shoreline erosion, or flooding of the 1918 Marsh and university facilities, which would be disastrous,” Brown says. “If flood waters shut down the power supply for the sanitary lift, hospital services would be seriously impacted. That’s a risk we cannot take.”
Brown says he explored the possibility of re-grading around the existing trees, but says it would have required crews to cut through or to suffocate some of the trees’ roots under layers of soil. He says both scenarios could have eventually killed some of the trees and caused additional hazards.
The only other option, Brown says, would be to build a dike around nearby buildings. “But that would be very costly to develop and maintain, and it would have disrupted other desirable drainage patterns,” he says.
The project will temporarily disrupt bicycle and pedestrian traffic on the path. Path traffic will be diverted to Observatory Drive, Walnut Street and a series of existing trails on the west side of the 1918 Marsh.
The project, which will cost $411,000, is partially supported by grants from the federal government and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. The university is providing additional funding through program revenue in its Transportation Services fund. The Campus Planning, Campus Transportation, Campus Natural Areas and Temin Lakeshore Path Advisory committees reviewed and approved the project.
The reconstruction project is unrelated to a project already underway on the eastern portion of the path. A water supply line is being installed along the path between Charter Street and Willow Creek to provide cooling water from Lake Mendota to the new West Campus Cogeneration Facility, which is under construction.
The water supply line project will close portions of the path from the Limnology Lab to Willow Creek until June. Sections of the supply line near the lakeshore residence halls and points east will be completed first to allow those sections of the path to open earlier in the spring.
For additional information, contact Gary Brown at (608) 263-3023 or Renee Callaway, UW–Madison’s transportation demand management coordinator, at (608) 263-1034.