lose some weight, fatty

Hey Fifth Avenue! Why don't you go on a diet? You're WAY too big. Do you really need those extra lanes? You look like a road that goes somewhere, but really you just link some neighborhoods together. Not that I can fault you for that, Fifth Avenue. I use you everyday to circumnavigate downtown. But why do you have to be so fat? You could easily be a svelt two driving lanes with a turning lane and bicycle lanes! If only you'd lose some weight...


Fifth Avenue is an essential part of the Knoxville bicyclist's strategy to get around the inner neighborhoods around downtown. For our purposes here, I'll call it the Great Northern Transverse Bicycle Route. No other cross street works quite so well and crosses all the major routes into downtown- Broadway (Homeless Dodge 'em Course), Central (clever name TBD), and Hall of Fame (The Senor Taco Expressway). The Great Northern Transverse Bicycle Route provides a good way for the not-so-inner neighborhoods of Mechanicsville (where I live) and Parkridge to connect into downtown via the Grand Hipster Bicycle Meridian (aka Gay Street). If you want to get to a friend's house in another neighborhood and don't want to have to handle downtown traffic, it acts as a good inner bypass for bicyclists.

The Great Northern Transverse Bicycle Route

So why is it a four lane?! No traffic I've ever scene on the Great Northern Transverse Bicycle Route would warrant this Middlebrook Pike-esque streetscape. As the Regional Bicycle Program looks for roads to put on a "road diet" let me respectfully submit this huge fatty. It's just screaming for bicycle lanes. Let's get the paint truck out there and make this happen.