FW: BIKE: Envision Central Texas, CTRMA & TxDOT

[Loren Schooley]

FTW has plenty of space to work with, the layout practically begs to be
utilized for such. After all, its basic functional layout was for horse and
cattle travel (The right of ways and stretches from one area of town to
another are wholesale), with tons of flood plain and rivers.

Austin on the other hand is tiny (area wise), was engineered and designed
from the beginning for the short term, colleges, hotels, legislature - in a
compact area, making development area over the last century competitive and
politically patchy -the reason we can't get things done.

Austin's idea of pleasing bikers was to spend 10 million on a half a bridge
for bikes-pure politics- --FtW prolly spent 10 million and got about 150
miles of nice path.

Oh, and check this out:
http://saunabiber.antville.org/getfile?name=tysonskating

> From: David Dobbs <ddobbs>
> Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 18:54:41 -0500
> To: forum
> Subject: BIKE: Envision Central Texas, CTRMA  & TxDOT
> 
> At 08:25 -0500 4/16/04, Mike Dahmus wrote:
>> In order to make this an honest figure, I'd be curious to know how
>> much of this MPO-directed sidewalk spending is on state highways
>> which didn't previously have sidewalks. It's very misleading to
>> consider this a big improvement (when you guys fail to build
>> sidewalks on urban and suburban frontage roads, and then hit up the
>> local and federal governments for funding to do it later at a much
>> higher cost).
>> 
>> That's the way it works here, and I'm sure there's a guy at the
>> Austin TXDOT office who's very proud of it.
> 
> Amen to that!  March 27th I was in Ft. Worth attending a National
> Association of Railroad Passengers meeting and since I have not yet
> purchased my Brompton folding bike, I took a two and half mile walk
> around the periphery of downtown.
> 
> For those of you haven't been to downtown Fort Worth, know that it is
> a vibrant bustling place of people, shops, hotels and nice
> restaurants, despite its almost total orientation to arrival by
> automobile.  While the CBD center emphasizes pedestrians and has a
> fairly balanced car-control environment, the southern edge of
> downtown where it meets IH 30 is a mess because it totally ignores
> pedestrians, cyclists, and urban rail.  (The terminus of the Trinity
> Railway Express commuter train between Dallas and Fort Worth is at
> the historic Texas & Pacific Railway Terminal  on Lancaster.)
> 
> At Lancaster and Henderson there are no sidewalks adjacent to
> Lancaster and pedestrian movement along Henderson under IH 30 is
> hostile at best.  The south side of Lancaster at the intersection of
> Henderson is a steep concrete embankment which will require
> mega-bucks to retrofit to a sidewalk, which bears out exactly what
> you said.  This one of many many examples that can be found right
> here in Austin and all over Texas of how roadways, especially ones
> designed by TxDOT are monolithic, utterly precluding anything but
> movement in a ton-or-more motorized steel box.
> 
> TxDOT's mission is foremost about distributing public tax dollars to
> its clients--roadway consultants and contractors who lobby the ledge
> for funding; any benefit that accrues to the traveling public is
> purely secondary.
> 
> Dave Dobbs
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Texas Association for Public Transportation
> 9702 Swansons Ranch Road
> Austin, Texas 78748
> Ph 512.282.1149
> 
> Visit our website at  http://www.lightrailnow.org
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 
> 
> 
> At 08:25 -0500 4/16/04, Mike Dahmus wrote:
>> Andrew Wimsatt wrote:
>> 
>>> In TxDOT's Fort Worth District, 8.5% of this fiscal year's letting
>>> amount (or approximately $17 million) is being used for bikeway
>>> construction, sidewalks, park and ride facility construction, and
>>> pedestrian access improvements.  Of the $17 million. $9.5 million
>>> is being funded under Category 9 (Transportation Enhancements).
> 
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