PORTAGE | With the region's network of recreational trails expanding, bike racks will soon dot the area and hopefully encourage people to pedal to nearby destinations.

Mitch Barloga, nonmotorized transportation planner for the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission, said a grant program will make 500 bicycle racks available to local communities.

"Several communities have already applied for the racks," Barloga told members of the Ped and Pedal Committee on Thursday.

The round tube racks will mount to sidewalks or pavement and cost about $90 each. The racks will securely hold two bicycles. Under the Rack-em Up program, municipalities would pay the full amount for the racks and get 80 percent back.

If there are any racks remaining after the applications are approved, Barloga told members of NIRPC's Ped and Pedal Committee that schools, libraries and selected businesses would be contacted to see if there's any interest in having the racks mounted on their property.

The committee also reviewed project scores for bicycle and pedestrian trail projects under consideration as part of its future Surface Transportation Program.

A phase of the Pennsy Greenway Northwest Trail project running from Calumet Avenue to Main Street in Munster scored the highest. That trail would connect a portion of the trail in Lansing to another portion in Schererville. If approved as is, that project would be completed in 2009.

The second highest ranking project would pave an existing limestone rock trail in Hammond being built by the Army Corps of Engineers. A third project would connect Broadway to Taft Street in Merrillville and run over the former Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.

Scoring fourth was another phase of the Iron Horse Trail in Portage, extending the recently completed portion at Hamstrom Road to Woodland Park. That project would require boring underneath Crisman Road, an elevated roadway. Tentatively last is a project in the Robertsdale section of Hammond that would run around the eastern bank of Wolf Lake to the Illinois state line near a Cook County Forest Preserve.

All projects will go through a series of committees before final approval.