GREENFIELD — The Franklin Regional Council of Governments (FRCOG) fueled cyclists and pedestrians Tuesday morning, continuing its Bay State Bike Month tradition of the Bike Breakfast for the 12th year.

Starting at 8 a.m., visitors came with their bikes or ventured over on foot to get a free breakfast. The event is part of the wider Bay State Bike Month initiative that celebrates the benefits, recreational value and safety of bicyclists. Events are planned across the state throughout the month, and FRCOG’s breakfast fell during Bike to Work Week.

While outside the Franklin Regional Transit Authority building and the FRCOG offices at 12 Olive St., bikers had the chance to mingle with other cyclists and FRCOG staff, while also getting the chance to give feedback on the Franklin County Bikeway maps that will be updated over the next year.

“We were thinking we wanted to get input from the public and find out, could we add things to the map? Should we take some things off and how can we make the maps better?” FRCOG Transportation Program Manager Beth Giannini said about the bike map updates. “The idea was to use this event as a way to get input on reprinting our regional bikeway map.”

To accomplish this, Giannini said FRCOG staff set up poster boards with maps and legends of the bike routes covering western, central and eastern Franklin County with sticky notes and pens for guests to give feedback on. The plan is to start looking at these suggested map improvements at the start of the next fiscal year, and further public outreach will be done starting in the spring and summer of 2026.

The FRCOG website on bicycling planning explains that the Franklin County Bikeway is a regional, 240-mile network of off-road, multi-use trails and shared roadway routes across the county.

These routes connect to each other, and provide different levels of difficulty for cyclists, as noted on the maps provided, as well as elevation profiles for the bikeways across the county. With the designs last updated in 2017, Giannini said the feedback that FRCOG hopes to receive is about designs for existing bikeway structural improvements or expansions, along with design ideas for the maps themselves.

“We welcome people giving us their thoughts, both about making improvements on the road, but we also welcome thoughts about the bike maps and information that we can provide,” she said.

Senior Transportation Planning Engineer Laurie Scarbrough, who collects data on transportation in Franklin County that includes cyclist data, said that once the bikers provide their feedback and ideas, FRCOG can begin looking at what improvements are feasible.

“We work closely with towns’ highway departments and also with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, so whenever we become aware of an issue that locals are concerned about, users are concerned about, we can quickly share that and come up with solutions,” she said.

One attendee, Bill Collins of South Deerfield, attended the breakfast as he was intrigued by the opportunity to provide feedback on the bikeways.

Collins is a former regional planner in Cincinnati, Ohio, before moving to Franklin County four years ago. He suggested creating a 12-foot-wide paved mixed-use trail that extends from Sunderland into Shelburne Falls, following the Deerfield and Connecticut rivers starting at the Sunderland Bridge going north and connecting some of the existing routes in Greenfield along the Deerfield River into Shelburne Falls.

This width allows for a buffer between cyclists and pedestrians, and provides a connection between historic Deerfield and Shelburne Falls that doesn’t exist. The proposal could connect the two communities for community building and economic development.

“If you can really prove the economic development drivers, it begins to take on a life of its own,” Collins explained. “In this case, you’re hooking together the tourism at Historic Deerfield with Shelburne [Falls]. … To me, there’s an economic development logic to it.”

Erin-Leigh Hoffman can be reached at ehoffman@recorder.com or 413-930-4231.