OTHER PARTS OF THIS REPORT:

Part I can be found here.

Over the next couple of weeks, I am going to be writing a section-by-section summary and info on the City of Austin Street Smarts Task Force 2008 final report, which is Austin’s updated bicycle plan. I will add comments and links to other related news articles where needed.

The Street Smarts Task Force Final Report can be downloaded here:
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/bicycle/downloads/sstf_final_report.pdf

The City of Austin’s main page on bicycle resources is here:
http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/bicycle/

Streets Smarts Task Force Participants

As can be seen on page 3 of the Street Smart Task Force, the community participants were a well-rounded group, and contained everything from bicycle commuters to representatives of TxDOT to urban planners. I have to commend the city for making this group remarkably diverse.

Vision, mission, and background data

It is estimated that about 27% of Austin’s 550,000 driving age citizens engage in recreational bicycling, and 7,900 people bicycle commute in Austin each day, depending on the time of year and weather conditions.

Page 5 outlines the background information, mainly in the sentence above. Unfortunately, I could not figure out how they got their number on daily cycling commuters. I was surprised, as I would have guessed the number was actually a little bit higher. Perhaps this number does not include UT students?

According to the plan, formal planning for bicycle infrastructure in Austin began in 1972, but it took until 1980 for the plan to officially become the city’s bicycle plan. Updated bicycle plans were adopted in 1996 and 1998.

The existing Austin Bicycle Plan facility portion is approximately one-third complete, with approximately half of the policy recommendations implemented.

This statement in the task force report seems to indicate that only 1/3 of the recommendations in the bicycle plan from TEN years ago have actually been implemented. If true, this means we are definitely taking the “slow train” to decent bicycle infrastructure. It’s a worrying statement, because some of the later sections of the report only suggest “studying” some very important infrastructure ideas that are already working well in other cities.

As a side note, this page of the task force report has the League of American Bicyclists “silver” badge on it, so I should mention that yes, Austin was awarded silver level as a bicycling friendly community in May, 2007. More information on that can be found here.

Reasons to bicycle

The task force report uses four pages to describe all the usual reasons to promote urban cycling. I’ll save space by summarizing them in one statement per section here:

• Promoting cycling is really cheap in comparison to building roads
• Austin’s air is fairly polluted and we need to reduce traffic congestion
• People in the US are fat, although Austin is better than most, and we want to keep it that way
• Bicycling for transportation is easy on the pocketbook
• Cycling is an economic industry and creates jobs (I was very, very glad to see this section here)
• Cycling can increase your quality of life (little bit redundant in this section, but ok, whatever)
• Having bicycle infrastructure can help us build a sustainable city

In Part III, I will cover the global recommendations of the report, and start to go over the specific infrastructure recommendations.

Related posts:

1. Austin City Council Passes Master Bike Plan on 6-0 vote ...
2. League of Bicycling Voters releases its Austin City Council Endorsements ...
3. City Council Action on the Master Bike Plan, Part Deux ...
4. Massive turnout by cycling community at Third Nueces Street Bike Boulevard Open House ...
5. Update on action on the Austin 2020 Master Bike Plan ...