Texas - Friendly reminder to watch for road grooves on Waugh bridge

All of you Houston folks who have ridden on the Waugh bridge over Memorial and Allen Parkway know what I'm talking about:

On the southbound side of the road there are sections of the road with large grooves parallel to the direction of travel. Think railroad track sized grooves; the kind that you always try to ride over perpendicular to the direction of the groove (lest you lose total control of your bike :eek:). Usually I am pretty alert and am able to successfully navigate over these sections of the road.

However - a few nights ago I was returning from a training ride around 11 pm and there was a car on my immediate right merging onto the Waugh bridge. I signaled that I was going to change over to the right-most lane and kept my eye on him as I changed lanes. In the instant I looked over at the driver my tires caught the groove and my bike went into an uncontrolled skid (I was traveling about 25 mph). My feet lost total contract with the pedals (platform) and I lost pretty much all steering control of the bike. This lasted for a few secs. until I somehow managed to regain control of the bike.

Everything happened so fast - if it had happened during rush hour I probably would have been dead; there was little or no time for the cars to react. Needless to say - I learned my lesson from now on and will be extremely careful when traveling southbound. Come to think of it - I think there are grooves on the northbound side as well, but I've never had to worry about traffic merging from my right at that juncture.

Anyways - just a reminder to everyone out there to be ultra careful and to always be mindful of the road surface*(even if you're looking at other cars).

Surely the quarter-million bats (http://www.houstontx.gov/parks/batpage.html) under that bridge must somehow be responsible. You can't trust bats. :twitchy:

Cool - that is really interesting. I knew that Austin had a large bat population but I never imagined that there were so many in Houston as well.

Cool - that is really interesting. I knew that Austin had a large bat population but I never imagined that there were so many in Houston as well.
Its a lot of fun to watch them take off at dusk. A big angry hawk shows up just before dusk circling overhead ready to pick off any stray bats. The bats are on to him and create a giant circling storm with thousands of bats underneath the bridge with no bats leaving. Then they somehow signal to each other that its go-time and they all take off at once. Its strength in numbers, because the hawk can't catch all of them. The bats head straight for downtown along the bayou and eat up all the bugs in downtown all night long.

Sadly, some of the baby bats who have not learned to fly well yet fall to the bayou water during the takeoff maneuver and are snatched up by an evil heron who shows up every night at dusk for dinner.

Anyway, didn't mean to distract from your topic, and yeah, those grooves really suck.

Its a lot of fun to watch them take off at dusk. A big angry hawk shows up just before dusk circling overhead ready to pick off any stray bats. The bats are on to him and create a giant circling storm with thousands of bats underneath the bridge with no bats leaving. Then they somehow signal to each other that its go-time and they all take off at once. Its strength in numbers, because the hawk can't catch all of them. The bats head straight for downtown along the bayou and eat up all the bugs in downtown all night long.

Do they fly out this time of year or is it a summer thing like in Austin?

Do they fly out this time of year or is it a summer thing like in Austin?
Fewer in numbers in the winter, but still many thousands. There's a Parks woman who comes out once a month at dusk on a Friday (First Friday? Third Friday? I forget...) and explains some things about them. She has a dead one in a glass case so you can get a closer look.

Edit: Confirmed that Texas Parks and Wildlife volunteer is on-hand shortly before sunset on the third Friday of each month.

Its a fun experience to go watch the bats, especially when you see joggers stop dead in their tracks and see this thing they had never knew about, thousands of bats taking off from under the bridge. A word of advice, don't stand under the bridge near sunset, because the bats dump massive loads of guano just before takeoff time.

Glad to hear you didn't have a wreck! I know those grooves well, they scare the crap out of me.

And the bats are very cool. When they spiral out from under the bridge at sunset and head for downtown - it's definitely a sight worth seeing. I've seen that evil night heron at work, too!

I know exactly which grooves you speak of because I slipped into it once and managed to recovery also.

My sister is the TPWD biologist who runs the volunteer program. As Kyle said, there is usually somebody there on the 3rd friday, and during the summer we usually try to have somebody there as many friday and saturday nights as we can. They are working on some permanent signage to put up so that people can read about the bats when nobody is there giving them a presentation.

The spring time between about late March and early June is the best time to go see them, as they come out earlier in the evening and usually in one big mass, while later in the summer they typically come out later, when it is already fairly dark and they kind of stream out over a longer period of time. The best nights are when it is warm, but when a front has gone through and we have clear skies and a north or northeast wind. On nights like that, they seem to come out somewhat earlier and they will often go nearly straight up into the sky and head NE instead of hugging the bayou going into downtown. On nights when it they are flying east along the bayou or southeast, a great place to go watch them other than looking down from the bridge sidewalk is the grassy area between the fountain and the bayou just east of the bridge. They hug the treeline and then drop down and fly across the grassy area at top speed. If you turn and face west and stand still, you will see them all flashing past right by you and it looks almost like hitting warp speed on star trek.