Will good public policy prevail or will a handful of property owners derail the first major project of the Master Bike Plan?
Traffic diverter prevents car traffic off a busy street onto a bike boulevard. Image courtesy of Payton Chung via Flickr
Tonight is the second in a three part series of open houses on a proposed bicycle boulevard for Nueces Street from 3rd Street to MLK downtown. All are welcome at this public forum which starts at 6 PM at Pease Elementary, 1106 Rio Grande Street, accross from the ACC Rio Grande campus downtown.
Bike boulevards will provide a return to making room for all road users while increasing property values and helping local businesses. Despite what some say, Texans really can get out of cars and live life on two wheels everyday.
In response to the planning for Austin’s first bike boulevard, the League of Bicycling Voters put out a bike boulevard plan for Nueces Street. As part of rolling out this plan, the LOBV put out this release:
Bicyclists craft plan for city’s Nueces Bike Boulevard project
League develops details for attracting riders, making boulevard safe and convenient
The League of Bicycling Voters (LOBV) has crafted a detailed plan for the Nueces Bike Boulevard project, and bicyclists will ask the City of Austin to implement the recommendations when the city holds its second public workshop on the project on Wednesday, Jan. 13, 6 p.m. at Pease Elementary School.
Bike boulevards are streets designed to give preference to bicycle travel by using signage, traffic calming and other techniques that make key bike corridors more attractive to all bicyclists, but in particular, new riders not comfortable riding in high traffic areas.
“Our plan focuses on techniques to maintain automobile access to the street while also minimizing the amount of through auto traffic so that bicyclists are ensured a quick and safe route from the UT campus area to downtown and back,” said Tom Wald, LOBV executive director.
Wald said that the traffic calming and diversions in the LOBV plan are key to a successful project, since the current city plan calls for removing most north/south stop signs on Nueces to make it a more feasible route for bicyclists who are now forced to stop at most intersections. “If you’re removing stop signs for bicyclists, which is a good idea, you have to make sure that you’re not also attracting new motorists and increasing cut-through traffic on a street not designed for high automobile traffic,” he said.
The City of Austin’s current proposal—which includes a Nueces Street bike boulevard from Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard to 3rd Street—is a component of several city planning initiatives, including the Bicycle Master Plan, the Downtown Plan and the Street Smarts Task Force. The City of Austin launched a public input process for the bike boulevard with an initial workshop in December, and while it presented a “tool box” of possible traffic calming techniques, it did not detail specific improvements.
The LOBV plan uses a variety of traffic calming devices—such as traffic circles, pinch points and semi-diverters—to reduce auto traffic that should be using nearby arterials, such as Guadalupe or Lamar. It also addresses ideas to give the boulevard identity, such as stenciled streets, signage, gateways and public art.
“About a dozen bicyclists with a tremendous amount of experience with bicycle facilities and traffic calming helped design the LOBV plan,” said Rob D’Amico, LOBV president. “We felt the city was moving in the right direction with its planning effort, but that it needed specific input on how the final result should look.”
D’Amico said that a completed Nueces Bike Boulevard will be a boon to those living or doing business on the street, since boulevards in other cities have made the areas more bicycle/pedestrian friendly, have increased property values and have been welcomed by businesses and residents on the boulevards.
LOBV first began planning work on the boule vard in early 2009 with a working group outlining recommendations for the top-five bicycle facility investments in Austin. Later, members working with a subcommittee of the Bicycle Advisory Council and city planners throughout 2009 also began develop ing a framework for what the boulevard would look like. LOBV also researched known constraints for any changes to Nueces, along with detailed notes from City of Austin meetings with public safety stakehold ers.
LOBV planners also soundly rejected a possible use of Rio Grande for the bike boulevard route, since the hilly street deters new riders and doesn’t offer the same connectivity to key facilities—such as the Lance Armstrong Bikeway—that Nueces does.
The LOBV plan, including a map with proposed facilities, can be found at: http://www.lobv.org/nueces.
Related posts:
- Tonight the last in a series of open houses on the Nueces St Bicycle Boulevard ...
- LOBV releases proposal for Nueces Bike Boulevard ...
- LOBV launches petition in support of Nueces St Bike Boulevard proposal ...
- Massive turnout by cycling community at Third Nueces Street Bike Boulevard Open House ...
- Your voice needed at upcoming Nueces Bike Boulevard open houses ...
on Jan 13th, 2010 at 11:35 am
What about the rumor that the city staff have declared the project DOA?
on Jan 13th, 2010 at 11:52 am
This rumor has not been confirmed but relayed by a reliable source. I’d suggest everyone attend tonight to see if this is true and express your displeasure if so.
on Jan 13th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
A “reliable source”? I called the city staff and they completely denied it. Please tell me this rumor is something y’all cooked up to get more people fired up and out to the meeting, because if so it totally sounds like something I’d pull and I applaud you for the decision to do so without regard to truth or fact. If not, I’d check your sources.
on Jan 13th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
I’m pleased to hear the Bike/Ped staff publicly reaffirm that Nueces Street is still very much on the table. It would give me more confidence if I heard that from the Assistant City Manager level.
on Jan 13th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
It’ll be some years before I dare attempt to take time away from my family for the meetingocracy, but this is my advice to y’all this evening, in relation to the contention made by many that ‘traffic calming increases property value’ and similar ones.
San Francisco and New York might as well be in another solar system for all the relevance they have to Austin. And don’t get me started on Europe (another galaxy).
As much as we might wish otherwise, the fact is that in Austin, people who patronize businesses by transit instead of by driving are almost entirely lower-income folks, unlike the vast swaths of middle and upper income people who do so in SF and especially NY. It is not difficult to understand why these businesses are afraid that their patrons who are turned off by difficulty driving there might not be easily replaced by transit users or cyclists.
It’s important to understand this argument rather than dismissing it with studies that simply aren’t applicable to our environment. Otherwise, you’re talking past each other, and the city will just go with the people making the most sense to them (meaning a 6-1 vote against the bike blvd).
Instead, I’d respond with “your customers will still have access by car; they just won’t have through access for long distances either way; this is no different than (insert large numbers of other sections of downtown where the street grid is discontinuous, for instance; or even go to suburban areas where strip malls don’t connect with each other). This shows that you understand the concern, and then effectively minimize it, rather than relying on the questionable contention that our transportation modeshares among the people with money to spend are anything like SF or NY or will be any time in the near future.
From a tactical/historical perspective, this is similar to how the SCB argument was needlessly complicated by some full-time cyclists’ lack of understanding of why people might want to park in front of their houses (leading to some of those people saying that the residents should just ride their bikes too, rather than the far more effective ‘understand and minimize’ rebuttal of “you can still park right across the street, a restriction just like that on “).
on Jan 13th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
whoops, I was trying to be clever and ended up making it think I was doing HTML. Right before the last close paren was “insert long list of streets in Austin that only allow parking on one side”.
on Jan 14th, 2010 at 9:52 am
@M1EK – I disagree to an extent with your statement above. While we may be in the minority, my wife and definitely in the middle class and we plan where we go shopping & eating out based on the ease of riding. Based on the success of what we’re doing, other middle class couples in our circle of friends have plans to buy bikes and do the same. So the tide is turning. Slowly
The majority of current riders may be lower income. But I believe the purpose of the bike blvd, and other infrastructure improvements, is to get more people from all income levels out there bicycling. If we’re just trying to improve things for the people that are already riding, I think we’re missing the point.
on Jan 14th, 2010 at 10:39 am
Ben, two things:
1. Obviously there are some non-lower-income people who would be riding the corridor – I would have been one of them had arthritis not intervened – but the aggregate income of “bicycle riders” in this town is not going to excite a business owner on this corridor, especially when you consider how many of those non-lower-income cyclists are just out riding for fun in their racing plumage and wouldn’t be inclined to stop. In other words, I was a transportation cyclist with a job that’d look legit to those businesses, but I was heavily outnumbered by the juvenile anarchists, students, and poor folks; even if I wish that weren’t the case.
2. Even if #1 weren’t true, it’s the perception among the public, and so, the effective fact on the ground for those business owners. (You’re not going to convince them, in the middle of a discussion like this, that the widely-held public image of bike riders or transit users is incorrect).
on Jan 14th, 2010 at 11:04 am
MiEK,
I agree with what you are saying about perception from the businesses, though based on my own experience riding nearly everyday in this town that last 5 years, I’d say they are not accurate. Even though there is data out there to support traffic calming as positive for business, the data is limited, and this will be a first for Austin. This requires businesses in some sense to take a leap of faith. That’s just part of owning your own business in my experience, but I can see how those with lower risk thresholds or who are less visionary would be nervous (that is not meant as a insult to those owners.)
Bike boulevards are supposed to make public space so that everyday citizens, not the fringe or early adopters, will see the bike as a valid transportation choice. So we’ll not change the demographics of those biking, whether it is actual or perceived, unless we create such facilities.