Image Courtesy of Bike Portland.
In response, Nadia Barrera with the City of Austin Bicycle/Pedestrian program in the Department of Public Works responded with this statement:
Don’t get me wrong, I like bike lanes as much as the next girl. But, painting illegal bikes lanes will just cause more work for the City, will cost the City money in painting over them (we’d rather use the $ to paint legitimate bike lanes) and will be an overall additional strain on
everyone.Please be patient, we are working as fast as we can given all of our constraints. I know it is tempting. I thought it was a great story as well. Too bad the people in LA don’t have such forward thinking folks
working for them. ; )ALSO, segments of Parmer Lane and all of IH-35 belong to either Travis
County or TXDOT. Please be sure to let your Travis County representative and TXDOT district office know how important bicycle facilities are to you. Especially if someday you’d like to see them on those roadways.
I have to agree with Nadia here. The problem in LA is a non-responsive local government to cyclists’ needs. On the contrary in Austin we have a staff that is very in-tune to requests from our community and a City Council that unanimously passed the new Master Bicycle Plan (though budget votes implementing the plan have yet to come up.) Spitting in the eyes of our potential allies seem ill advised, and we should save our civil disobedience for more resistant individuals like our Governor.
on Jul 8th, 2009 at 1:31 am
Elliot — I agree totally. If you have a response city, that’s a relationship that you don’t want to screw up. Now, if they were stonewalling… well, that’s another story. And sorry about your lunkhead governor. That’s gotta sting for the bike community!
on Jul 8th, 2009 at 8:03 am
[...] Bike Lanes: Some Cities Need 'em, Others Don't (A2W via [...]
on Jul 9th, 2009 at 12:57 am
[...] Texas, cyclists have been cautioned about taking the creation of bike lanes into their own hands, in emulation of L.A.’s own Department of DIY. As the writer put it: The [...]
on Jul 9th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Have y’all seen KVUE’s smear piece based on this discussion?
http://www.kvue.com/news/top/stories/070809kvuebike-bkm.2070f93e.html
It’s pretty excellent, they even mistake some old route markers for a marathon/running event (I think it was the turkey trot) that happened up in my neighborhood for “rogue bike lanes”. Heh.
on Jul 9th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Yeah, this is pretty much a non-issue right now other than some forum discussions. Still, maybe picking on the cyclists is good for ratings?
on Jul 9th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
To quote a paragraph from above –
a poster recently suggested some guerrilla street painting to
carve out space for cyclists on Austin streets specifically on
parts of Parmer Lane and along the IH-35 access road
But the thing is … no poster suggested this. Instead, what was actually said –
The July issue of Bicycling magazine has a fascinating article on
DIY bike lanes. Seems a guerilla group of Los Angeles cyclists
painted their own lane… in a city which basically has none. It
lasted for about 100 hours before the city painted it over.
Should we do something like that in Austin? There’s drainage
grates that, at the very least, could be marked. And roads like
Parmer Lane east of I35 could be hit with an impromptu lane.
… he was asking if it should be done, not suggesting that it be done. It’s a minor nit, I know, but seemed to be enough to get KVUE to make a story on it. After all, their story says `One local cyclist, in fact, suggested that cyclists start doing the same thing here.’
I think KVUE reads your blog to look for dirt. Not that you should stop giving it to them, but be precise about what you say, because they seem pretty willing to take things out of context and run with it without actually confirming anything.
It happened back with the `Careful when you glide through that stop sign, it may cost you over $150′ story too. You said –
The Bicycle Austin forum was active over the weekend with multiple
reports of cyclists getting ticketed for failing to stop at stop
signs.
… but really, there was only *one* report of a cyclist ticketed there. (ATXBS had one more. Two total.) In any event, KVUE parlayed this into –
Austin’s cycling blogs lit up the Internet this weekend with
complaints about cyclists being targeted by Austin police and
receiving tickets for running through stop signs.
but that didn’t really happen. There were a few comments, but nothing was `lit up’.
on Jul 9th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Doug,
My experience with local TV reporters, which is pretty extensive in the political world, is that they glob onto one, maybe two story lines if you are lucky, and run with it. We saw this with the stop sign story, to the point that they did a followup in response to criticism (including from this site.) They also do sensational lead in’s to make the story more interesting and keep viewers. The painted lane story actually ends up reporting that this is a problem in L.A. not here, but that wasn’t the sense you got at the beginning. It’s the nature of the beast when your success is determined pretty much on ratings alone.
I do think you are nit picking on the first point. Yes, the writer was asking should we do it, but then suggesting where it should be done. On the second, there were multiple people that chimed in on Bicycle Austin about getting ticketed (it may have been by e-mail rather than the forum. This two tiered system means not all of the thread is seen online.) I am not responsible for the adjectives KVUE chooses to use in its search for higher ratings.