So the city of Austin would like to build a $4 million bicycle bridge on a southern section of MoPac to encourage southwest Austinites to use Loop 1 to commute to work. But the Austin American-Statesman‘s transportation columnist Ben Wear took a bold stand against it this morning. Pure boondoggle, he insists. Why? Well, the first reason he lists is, “I commute down North MoPac every day, have for years, and in all that time I don’t remember ever seeing someone riding a bike down the shoulder. On Loop 360, yes, all the time, mostly for exercise and recreation. But MoPac? No. South side commuters can tell me whether they’ve ever seen anyone down that way on MoPac.”
Now, to be fair to Wear, the city’s bicycle manager Annick Baudet didn’t help him out much – she told him that (his paraphrase) “People don’t commute on MoPac, at least down south, because there’s no separate (and safer) bridge over Barton Creek’s deep gorge.”
We here at Chronic have another theory: Perhaps bicyclists don’t use MoPac to commute because of the signs at every entrance that specifically ban bicycles on that highway. Just a thought.
MINOR EDIT: Okay, we should have said almost every entrance. We checked out the south end of MoPac, and there is actually no sign right before the Barton Creek bridge. But the signs begin at the very next entrance, and anyway, the bridge’s shoulder is so narrow that attempting to cross it on bike would be suicide, so the notion that bikes could commute there is theoretical at best. In any case, we’re amazed that the person working the transportation beat at our daily paper thought that cyclists were avoiding MoPac purely by choice.
This article appears in August 17 • 2007.