Getting Involved with Warner Robins City Government

It’s been a busy couple of weeks in bicycle and pedestrian advocacy land! On March 7th, I attended the Warner Robins Area Transportation Study Citizens Advisory Committee. This particular committee is basically the interface between the citizens of Warner Robins and the transportation department of the city and its surrounding metropolitan area. I’m hoping to be nominated to join this committee to represent the city in a future Warner Robins city council meeting.

At any rate, these meetings are open to the public so I’ve been attending them to start acclimating myself to how our city government functions. One of the topics for the March 7th meeting was about a bridge replacement in Perry. Both Tim and I have voiced that we’d like to see this bridge have a raised multi-use path instead of a smaller sidewalk and a painted, on-road bicycle lane.

I believe that the gist is that GDOT doesn’t intend to add a multi-use path to the bridge unless the City of Perry improves the road adjacent to the bridge such that the bridge construction matches the roadway. Still— it’s better that the suggestion was brought up than left unvoiced!

Speaking of city council, I took the podium for a few minutes on March 18th to voice my support for the rezoning of three parcels of C-2 (general commercial) land to R-4 (multi-family residential). This sort of rezoning is called “infill development” in urban development parlance, and is a way of making unused urban land productive, in both the “makes more housing available” sense and “improves the taxable value of the land” sense, which is good for both the government and its citizens. Sort of the opposite of urban sprawl.

The parcels in question are on both sides of Peacock Drive, between the At Home shopping center on Watson and Corder Road. While these parcels total a little over 6 acres, the odd lot shapes will probably preclude anything very large from being built there.

Still, should residents move into future housing there, they happen to be in an incredibly walkable place. In the video below, I share that these residents will be in walking distance to two parks, Wellston Park and Wellston Trail. In addition, it’s a short walk to the Watson Center, which features a Food Depot, Big Lots, Harbor Freight, and a number of smaller shops and restaurants. I ask council to consider adding sidewalks to Peacock Drive and the south side of Watson Boulevard to improve accessibility to future residents of the newly-zoned R-4 land.

This sort of pedestrian and micromobility advocacy is exactly the sort of thing we plan to continue doing here at Ride Robins. We hope you’ll join us as we press forward to make Warner Robins a better, safer, more accessible place for all road users.