Suburban bike plans offer ways to create a safer ride for cyclists
Like streetsmart guerrillas resisting conventional armies, bicyclists who share the roads with cars must develop certain strategies to survive against more powerful adversaries.
Cyclists learn tricks from their fellow riders: Make eye contact with the driver waiting to turn into your path. Point at yourself, even if you think it makes you look foolish. Hop up on the sidewalk for a block or two when conditions make the street too perilous. Avoid certain streets at all costs.
Clark Martinson uses these techniques when he rides his bike to his job as executive director of the Energy Corridor District on Houston’s far west side. If he encounters a red light on a certain stretch of his commute, says Martinson, “I will wait on the corner away from the right-turning cars.”
The challenge of riding safely can be particularly acute in suburban neighborhoods like Martinson’s, where the automobile culture is even more dominant than in the central city and where street design may provide fewer safe options. Even so, leaders of area suburbs are taking steps to encourage and support walking and biking, often through the development of master plans.
The Energy Corridor District adopted a bike-pedestrian master plan in 2010. Several area communities have followed suit, including The Woodlands, whose plan I wrote about last October. The latest plan was developed for the Westchase District, a 4.2-square-mile area whose center lies roughly at Richmond and the Sam Houston Tollway.
Westchase embodies many of the issues that make it difficult to get more suburban residents out of their cars and trucks. I saw no cyclists, and just two or three pedestrians, during the two hours I spent driving around the district on Saturday.
The community is planning or building a number of trails, including an off-street path that will connect to the Brays Bayou trail. But most streets that reach major destinations are thoroughfares with thick, fast-moving traffic that would be daunting even to the most experienced cyclist.
Much of the development is commercial or multifamily residential, so there are relatively few side streets where the pace is more sedate. You don’t see a lot of tree-lined lanes with speed bumps and “Drive like your kids lived here” signs. That may explain why cyclist Blair Johnson, a Westchase health consultant, confines her rides to off-road trails.
“I am a nervous Nellie,” Johnson told Houston Public Media reporter Gail Delaughter. “I get out there and I get very nervous, because the cars are too close and the condition of the road.”
Her attitude, while understandable, illustrates the challenge of increasing the number of people who use bikes or their feet for transportation. Building enough off-road trails to reach the places people regularly need to go would be an overwhelming task.
Advocates of the new Houston Bike Plan want to increase the share of people who ride bikes to work to 5 percent, from less than 1 percent now. “The only way you can do that is by getting the average person to look out at the streets and say, ‘I could ride there,’” says Mary Blitzer, the advocacy director for Bike Houston.
Leaders of the Energy Corridor District hope to achieve the benefits of off-road bike paths by building barrier-protected lanes in the right-of-way of existing streets, says Martinson.
“We are evolving to recognizing the need for protected infrastructure for the cyclists because we just cannot slow these cars down,” he says.
Another ambitious element of the Energy Corridor District’s plan involves building new streets to create a tighter grid, a pattern common in urban centers but rare in the suburbs. Long stretches of uninterrupted road invite higher vehicle speeds; frequent intersections have the opposite effect.
Steve Schoger, 65, has seen most of the problems that street design can create, including the curbs that jut into the shoulders favored by cyclists in The Woodlands. Schoger has lived in the masterplanned community north of Houston for 24 years and has biked most of its roads.
“I have managed to survive all of these hazards,” Schoger wrote in an email to me, “as well as the motorists who despise us by throwing stuff and even stopping and getting out of the vehicles and swinging baseball bats at us!”
As a cyclist myself, I’d like to think we’ve progressed beyond the baseball-bat level of tension with motorists (and yes, I know cyclists contribute to the problem when they ignore traffic laws.) Over time, perhaps, cyclists and pedestrians will no longer be seen as interlopers in the kingdom of cars. And innovative thinking on the part of suburban leaders like Martinson can make the whole system work better for those in vehicles, on bikes and on foot.