In case you missed some of the 42 Austin cycling and bike culture events that happened this weekend, he’s a quick highlight of some of the cool things that happened. Don’t want to miss out on this weekend? Visit us on Thursdays for our highlight of the week’s coming events or visit our comprehensive calendar of Austin cycling events anytime for last minute editions or to plan your weekend.
Friday, January 30
Riding with Independent Fabrication- Gary Smith and Joe Ingram hosted a Tour of Austin ride on Friday as part of their roll out with Bicycle Sport Shop as a new IF dealer. We wrote about the ride and IF on Friday and Road Rash attended a Thursday night launch party and took some good pics.
January Critical Mass- This month’s theme was Viking Ride, and Jason at ATXBS wrote an article about it with pictures. The Austin Critical Mass Flickr pool has also been updated with pictures of Friday’s ride.
Saturday, January 31
Frankenbike #42, FrankenBABE- I’ve not been to Frankenbike in about a year and I’m happy to report Austin’s bike swap is alive and very well. When I stopped by at 1 PM on Satuday, there were well over 100 people there as well as about 10 booths with everything from apparel to mountain bike parts to fixed gear to vintage Campy. You can take a look at some of the pictures I took below or see more at the Road Rash article on Frankenbike. No word on the location and time of Frankenbike #43, but stay tuned and we’ll let you know.
LOBV Project Catapult Meeting- After stopping by Frankenbike, I headed down the street to the Project Catapult Meeting of the League of Bicycle Voters. About 30 people showed up for an impressive turnout for a beautiful Saturday afternoon.
Project Catapult is a LOBV campaign with the goal of seeing five significant bicycle projects/programs put in the works in five months. The main focus of the meeting was discussing how to effectively make Nueces Street a quality bike boulevard from 3rd street to West Campus and how to create a north-south bikeway south of the River. The discussion of Nueces centered around removing stop signs for bikes while creating physical barriers for cars to use the street as a fast cut through. There was also some discussion of separating the bike lanes with a curb to remove cars from the bike lane completely as well as the possibility of closing the street completely to cars to make a bicycle/pedestrian street.
The South Austin discussion centered around which street to focus on to establish a bikeway. While the city seems focused on moving bike traffic to South 5th/Banister, many thought it was an out of the way route for most. An LOBV survey and most of the people in the room thought South Congress was the best major road (as opposed to South 1st or Lamar) to create a bikeway. More research is being done to determine how to proceed on South Congress to discuss at the next meeting.
UPDATE
Sunday, February 1
Tour of New Braunfels- Mike’s Bike Blog has a nice race report from Sunday’s Road Race of the Tour of New Braunfels which was his first road race.
on Feb 2nd, 2009 at 12:17 pm
I completely agree on the bikeway being South Congress – it’s better for commuters and it’s better for the businesses up and down the street too. One thing that will have to be dealt with a LOT better is the handling of the merging of cycle and auto traffic at the Oltorf intersection along with Ben White going all directions.
Using Dawson/Bouldin and South 5th is a much hillier route, and there are basically no destinations that cyclists want to get to – and if you take this route and then want to get to Congress, there are even more big hills.
Did I mention I’m not a good hill climber? Let’s face it, most of the people that we *want* to get cycling (not the one that already are) are going to be unwilling or unable to face those hills either.
on Feb 2nd, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I’m glad you agree because I volunteered you to work with me on it.:)