Advocacy & Safety - Austin Texas - Shoal Creek Blvd. Project

Construction on the Shoal Creek Boulevard Improvement Project has finally begun. After five years of struggle between neighbors, city planners, and cyclists, the bastardized street restriping initiative, originally intended to add bike lanes to the residential stretch, will soon come to fruition. When the dust settles, Shoal Creek Boulevard will have a 10-foot wide multipurpose lane on each side of the street and 37 sporadically placed 6-foot curb extensions, adorned with crape myrtles. Crews will start work at the northern end of the project near the intersection of Shoal Creek Boulevard and Foster Lane, moving down the southbound side to 38th Street, then back up the northbound side of the road. City Project Manager Kerri Juarez says two-way traffic will be maintained throughout the duration of the work. A handful of dissident cycling advocates worry that the project sets a bad precedent in its failure to provide car-free bike lanes, something that many people agree Austin sorely needs. – Daniel Mottola
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2005-02-18/pols_naked.html

Some additional background on the project:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2002-10-11/pols_feature6.html

I tink the only safe way to have parking adjacent to a bike lane is to have diagonal parking for the cars, where the car has to reverse into the parking space. Then opening doors wouldnt extend into the cycle path, and drivers would have good visibility of approaching cyclists before they drove across the bike path onto the road.

Looks like they're ending up with pretty narrow (10') shared lanes. Maybe they'll use shared lane markings, but I wouldn't count on it.

That flower pot idea that they are now executing sounds terrible.

Let's make a wide road into a more narrow road for crape myrtles!

Thanks City of Austin.