This a happens almost every day in our city. You’re cruising along one of Austin’s bike lanes, and Bam! you’ve go to stop or quickly (and dangerously) merge into traffic because your bike lane has been taken over by construction work. Whether its road work, which seems reasonable and is often well marked with warning signs, or private construction, which often blocks bike lanes without warning, it seems those on two wheels become the first to be sacrificed in our push for urban in-fill. I’m often reminded at these times that the Empire State Building was constructed without shutting down a single street.

Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. Bike Portland recently reported on a construction firm, Hoffman Construction, that created its own bicycle only lane around construction when they recently had to do sidewalk work on a project. 

From the article:

According to project engineer Jason Haslam, who smiled and waved on bike riders this morning, they did the bike detour because they’ve been working on the project for eight months and “we’d seen all the bike traffic going by.” “We’ve been planning this,” he added, “so we didn’t just throw all the bikers into the roadway.”

Wow. A construction crew and developer proactively looking at how their project might temporarily effect a community negatively and creating a solution without anyone asking. Pinch me, am I dreaming?

Perhaps we could make a friendly amendment to the Master Bike Plan that requires some sort of action on developers to accommodate ALL forms of traffic in necessary lane closures.