Just as the Live Music Capital of the World is often an enemy of live music, and the leaders of the Silicon Hills have been typically clueless about using technology, Austin’s reputation as an EnviroMecca is routinely undercut by its lax attention to alternative transportation.
And, as Austin usually does, it has responded with a big plan — the multi-million-dollar two-part Austin Bicycle Plan — for constructing a new infrastructure for non-motorized travel. However, there are some simpler things the city can do, say alternative-transportation advocates, to make bicycling easier:
* Get the cars out of the bike lanes. This is probably the biggest sore point among the politically active cycling community; in most of Austin, it’s perfectly legal to park your car in the middle of a bicyclist’s road. (There are exceptions, mostly around the UT campus, and mostly limited to rush hours.) The City of Austin’s Bicycle Program is preparing an ordinance to change this.
According to incoming Bicycle Program director Keith Snodgrass, “The intent is to make it possible for a review of where parking currently occurs in bike lanes, and either eliminate one or the other; they don’t exist together very well, though some streets are wide enough to have both.” It is still unclear whether such a review will come before or after bike lane parking is criminalized city-wide.
* Make new development bike-friendly. Whenever a new project comes before the Planning Commission and city council, its neighbors routinely demand that roadways within the development not be connected to existing streets. “We often say `no access,’ when we mean no vehicular access. So I’ll ask for a pedestrian right-of-way, that bicyclists could use as well, to connect the dead ends,” says Planning Commissioner Dave Sullivan. “If I wasn’t there, that wouldn’t happen. We should be requiring pedestrian access, but when I’ve tried to get that I’ve only had mixed success.”
Sullivan — who’s also embarked on a quasi-crusade to crack down on parking on Austin’s sidewalks — is looking into ways such pedestrian connectors can be made part of the Land Development Code, which is also a point in Phase I of the Bicycle Plan. “But no effort at implementation has been made,” says Snodgrass. “For years, it was standard practice for developers to ask for variances and get them, so sidewalks weren’t built where they should have been, and streets that are named in the Bicycle Plan were built without bike lanes. Dave has been good about keeping those variances from going through Planning Commission, but we need code changes and much better enforcement.”
* Squeeze bike lanes into existing roads. Every major street in Austin is, by default, included in Phase II of the Bicycle Plan, yet many improvement projects on these streets — being paid for by Capital Improvement Program (CIP) bonds authorized back in the Eighties — were planned without facilities for bikes and pedestrians. Given the rate of inflation since their approval, these projects have already had to be scaled back from their original dimensions; adding sidewalks and bike lanes, and thus additional acquisition of rights-of-way, has for years been held to be too costly to contemplate.
A solution was reached last year with the Stassney Lane East extension in South Austin, where the travel lanes for cars were narrowed from their original, trade-standard 13′ width, and a 3′ wide curb lane (as opposed to a standard 5′ bike lane) added, without expanding the total width of the street. “It was a compromise, but it was a personal success,” says Sullivan, who along with his council appointer Daryl Slusher led the workaround effort.
Snodgrass and his office are “working on narrower travel lanes and either wide-curb or bike lanes on a lot of the streets in the Plan,” he says. “There’s also some talk about eliminating some of the travel entirely to make room for bike facilities, but that has to be carefully studied; it’s not a very popular idea.”
* The symbolism thing. There’s a lot of talk about “institutionalizing” bicycle transportation in Austin, and proponents point to such measures as clear signage and the Yellow Bike Program as examples. Beyond that, though, there’s sentiment that the city, or at least selected officials and staff members, need to practice what they preach.
Bike lanes alone won’t solve problems; there’s no silver bullet, says Sullivan, who routinely commutes to and from Planning Commission meetings via Yellow Bike. “We need an integrated strategy that includes leadership. There should be people who are leaders in the community who use alternative transportation, because only by doing so can they understand what other people face. Max Nofziger rode a bike. Brigid Shea’s husband rode a bike. They had insight. As far as I know, no one on the current council knows first-hand what it means to try to use a bicycle for transportation.” — Mike Clark-Madison
This article appears in October 17 • 1997 and October 17 • 1997 (Cover).