Ask a Suamico driver what changed on Lineville Road in the last year and you'll hear about the roundabouts, or how the Velp Avenue backup that used to stack up past Culver's during rush hour finally eased. Ask someone who bikes the corridor and you'll get a different answer. For the first time since the road existed, you don't have to ride the gravel shoulder to get from Vickery Village to the west side of the village on two wheels.
That second answer is the more interesting one, and it's the part most recaps of the Lineville Road project skip past on their way to the ribbon-cutting photo.
What Actually Changed Between Velp and West Deerfield
The numbers are real and worth stating plainly. Brown County spent $20 million and two years, starting in the fall of 2023, rebuilding Lineville Road (County Highway M) between Velp Avenue and West Deerfield Avenue. Crews expanded the stretch to four lanes, rebuilt the roundabouts to handle today's traffic instead of the traffic the road was designed for decades ago, and added a 12-foot paved multi-use trail along the north side for pedestrians and cyclists. The project reached a ribbon-cutting on November 10, 2025, with the reopened road carrying traffic again that same week.
Village of Howard Administrator Paul Evert put it simply at the time:
"The value of this project almost instantly, the first time you drive."
Here's the shorthand version of what the corridor looked like before and after:
| Lineville Road, Velp to Deerfield | Before (pre-2023) | After (November 2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic lanes | Two | Four |
| Roundabouts | Original, undersized for current volume | Rebuilt to current standards |
| Pedestrian or bike infrastructure | None | 12-foot paved multi-use trail, north side |
That table alone explains why drivers noticed the lane count first. It's the part you feel the moment you turn onto the road. The trail is the part you have to go looking for, and so far, the businesses along the corridor are looking harder than most residents realize.
The Corridor Was Built To Be Driven, Not Walked
Lineville Road has spent the last several years attracting retail specifically because of its car traffic. Developer marketing for the Edge of Howard retail center and the neighboring Urban Edge Towne Centre both cite roughly 11,800 vehicles passing through the corridor on an average day, the kind of number that gets a Noodles & Company or a second Modern Eyes location built. That drive-to logic is why the stretch near Velp Avenue now includes Firehouse Subs, Jersey Mike's, and a Cost Cutters, all clustered around parking lots designed for a quick in-and-out, plus Urban Storedge, a climate-controlled storage facility that leans entirely on drive-in access.
None of that is new information if you've driven the corridor in the last two years. What's newer, and less obvious, is that a different kind of business has started betting on the opposite premise.
Why A Bike Shop Passed On The Busiest Stretch
In 2024, Broken Spoke Bike Studio owner Kapitz announced plans to open a fourth location, adding to his shops in Green Bay, Ledgeview, and Manitowoc. He looked first at the busiest part of Lineville Road, the stretch closer to Highway 41 where the car counts are highest. He passed on it. A bike shop needs room for customers to take a bike on a test ride and space for group rides to gather, not a parking lot built for a five-minute sandwich run. He chose a spot near Ahnapee Brewery and 888 Cheese & Company instead, closer to the interstate but away from the densest retail traffic, specifically because it left room to breathe.
That decision only makes sense once you know what's driving his business. At his Ledgeview shop, e-bikes account for roughly 60% of sales, a shift he's watched pull in customers who wouldn't have called themselves cyclists five years ago, including a wave of Baby Boomers getting back on two wheels. A shop built around e-bikes needs test-ride space and a place for a Saturday group ride to stage. It needs a trail, not a turn lane.
He wasn't the first to make that bet on this corridor. Suamico Bike Company opened in Vickery Village in the fall of 2023, the same season Brown County broke ground on the road project that would eventually deliver the trail, which means the corridor's first dedicated bike retailer opened on faith that the infrastructure would catch up to the demand, not the other way around.
What's Already Walkable And Bikeable Right Now
If you're weighing whether the trail is worth using for anything other than a morning walk, here's what's currently sitting along or near it:
- Ahnapee Brewery's Suamico Taproom, the second location of the Algoma-based brewery, built in Suamico in 2020 with 16 beers on tap and a patio with garage doors that open to the outdoors in summer.
- 888 Cheese & Co., a grilled-cheese concept opened in late 2023 by Suamico natives Juan and Brandy Hernandez in the former Taco John's space next door to Ahnapee. The two businesses share a wall and a QR code system that lets Ahnapee customers order food from 888 without leaving their table.
- Vickery Village, the specialty shopping cluster that's home to Suamico Bike Company and a handful of smaller retailers along Riverside Drive.
- Urban Edge Towne Centre, the newer mixed-use development anchored by a fitness center and connected apartments, built to be walkable within its own footprint even if most visitors still arrive by car.
- Festival Foods, the grocery anchor most residents already treat as a landmark for giving directions.
None of these opened because of the trail. All of them are now positioned to benefit from it in a way they weren't nine months ago.
The Part Every Recap Skips
Most coverage of the Lineville Road project measured it the way the county measured it: travel time, lane capacity, roundabout throughput. Those are the right numbers if you're a traffic engineer. They're the wrong numbers if you're trying to understand what the corridor is actually becoming.
The more telling number is the one nobody put in a press release. Two dedicated bike shops have now bet real square footage on a road that didn't have a place to safely ride a bike until last November. One of them opened before the trail existed. The other one specifically avoided the stretch with the highest car counts to get closer to a brewery and a sandwich shop instead. That's not the behavior of businesses chasing drive-by traffic. That's the behavior of businesses who think the value of this corridor is about to shift from what passes through it in a car to what stops and stays on foot or on two wheels.
Whether that bet pays off is still an open question nine months into the trail's life. But if you live along Lineville Road and you've only measured the project by how much faster your commute got, you're missing the half of the story that Suamico's own business owners are already planning around.
If you're curious how changes like this one show up in what a Suamico home is actually worth, or if you're weighing a move within the neighborhood and want someone who tracks this corridor block by block, the team at Dave Forehand would be glad to talk it through. Reach out anytime for a free consultation or an instant home valuation.
