It’s not official or a done deal by any means, but let’s just say the odds of getting bike lanes on Red River are looking good right now. City staff has been working behind the scenes with the Downtown Austin Plan staff to see what they can do to provide for all kinds of cyclists using Red River.
Before this, cyclists other than really experienced ones were going to be pushed off onto Trinity instead – so this is a great development. According to the Downtown Austin Plan, Red River is a “car priority” street, and Trinity is “bike priority” but your advocates at the Bicycle Advisory Council have pushed for more accommodation for bikes on Red River for a while and it seems to be paying off.
Even if everyone agrees, we won’t have bike lanes up and down RR overnight. It could be a while, because they wouldn’t be installed until normal maintenance was done or the street was reconfigured according to the downtown plan.
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on Mar 17th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
dude! This is the street that caused my transformation from normal human being to anti-terror (anti-car) zealot! The terror I experienced while riding on this ‘bike route’ street was what pushed me over the edge!
I say don’t stop at bike lanes. Remove a lane of traffic from either direction, and drop in full, physically-protected cycletracks. They’re needed.
The only other reasonable option is to slow down the speed limit to 20 MPH — so, make the speed limit 10 MPH so cars only go 20 MPH.
on Mar 17th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
I agree. Actually I was going to write something later in the week about how silly this “priority” system is for dowtown at all. It should be simple. There don’t need to be ANY “car priority” streets in an urban downtown.
on Mar 17th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
I prefer Trinity/San Jacinto to Red River anyways. But if the addition of lanes to Red River doesn’t take away lanes on Trinity/San Jacinto then I am all for it!
on Mar 18th, 2009 at 8:02 am
The councils here rarely give cyclists priority, its silly – especially with global warming.
on Mar 18th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
I always liked Red River – traffic, south of 12th, was always slow enough to just take the lane, and north of there there’s enough lanes where cars just went into the other lane. What’s the big problem with it these days?
on Mar 18th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
mailman tried to run me off the road on RR and ~9th once. i was as far right as possible, following all traffic laws. he yelled at me as he did it. it was awesome….still, for the most part, i don’t think a bike lane’s that vital (relative to some other streets); but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
on Mar 18th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Well if possible I think bike lanes would be very helpful on Red River, because it would be welcoming and provide access for all levels of cyclists, and encourage more people to bike, not drive, to music events & bars etc.
on Mar 19th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
You can already see a ton of people biking to shows in that area — I don’t know that bike lanes in areas with heavy loading traffic are better than what we have now; lights timed to encourage slow driving and taking the lane.
More bike parking on Red River and better security there would probably have a greater impact.