Transportation may become easier and safer in the next year for students and staff who bike on campus and throughout Iowa City.

Currently, Iowa City is at the silver level in biker friendliness, as designated by the League of American Bicyclists. In the next year, city officials said they would like to reach the gold standard.

In order to reach that standard and improve the safety and efficiency of biking in Iowa City, officials hope to implement road diets on well-traveled streets in the center of town.

A road diet is a transportation planning technique in which travel lanes are reconfigured or reduced in order to make sharing the road between bikers and cars more efficient.

Darian Nagle-Gamm, senior transportation engineering planner for the city of Iowa City, said there are plans to implement road diets on Clinton and Madison Streets.

This will consist of reducing the current four lane streets into three lanes, with two lanes going opposite directions and one center left-turn lane. Nagle-Gamm said this method has proven to be efficient and reduces collisions.

“If you reduce the lanes in this manner, roads can still handle the same amount of traffic,” Nagle-Gamm said. “It’s primarily a safety enhancement that also enhances traffic flow.”

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