BIKE: Percentage of Austin Bike Commuters

[Mike Dahmus]

David Foster wrote:

> My guess is that there are great disparities depending on where you 
> live. Inside the central city, bounded roughly by Ben White on the 
> south, MOPAC on the west, and 183 on the north and east, my guess is 
> the % of bike commuters is significantly higher than 1%, but I have no 
> way at present to measure or prove this (I do not have the time to dig 
> into census tract data that might allow me to answer this question). 
> But we know that most of the growth Austin experienced since 1994 has 
> been in the form of auto-oriented sprawl subdivisions outside the 
> central city, which has off-set any gains made inside the central 
> city, where (at least my intuition tells me) the numbers have been 
> climbing. And once we finally get around to completing the Pfluger 
> Bridge and the Lance Armstrong Bikeway, to name just two obvious 
> improvements, the numbers should climb more.

As Lane mentioned, biking in the center-city is already very good. 
Extending the Pfluger Bridge is not going to add a lot of 
transportational cyclists to the mix (it will incent those that exist to 
move away from the Lamar Bridge, which is a worthy goal in and of 
itself). Likewise, I doubt whether the poorly routed bogus bikeway that 
the LAB is becoming is going to attract many new transportational cyclists.

There's a lot we can do to make biking better in the suburbs, if we have 
enough money and focus. Unfortunately, the Pfluger Bridge and Lance 
Armstrong Bikeway have taken 99% of the focus and 80% of the money over 
the last 5-10 years. Simply building a few more bike lanes in the 'burbs 
will provide the most bang for the buck for the foreseeable future. 
Spending more bucks in the center-city not only won't produce much bang, 
it's actually the least efficient thing that can be done now if you want 
to further increase center-city biking.

The top things that can increase biking in the center-city, in my opinion:

1. Stop government agencies from providing free automobile parking 
downtown, at the Capitol, and especially at/around UT. UT shouldn't be 
building any more parking garages at this point; they should allow the 
market to do it. (see #4). All existing free state/UT/city garages 
should be moved towards market rates as soon as possible. Ideally, some 
of these would be sold off to the private sector.
2. Remove all parking requirements for urban buildings (see #4).
3. Incent buildings that do build car parking to build more bike parking 
_and_ charge for their car parking (see #4). In other words, if they 
provide a bunch of bike parking and actually charge users for their car 
spaces, they get some tax relief. (relief from parking requirements, 
which is what we do today, wouldn't work if we already did #2).
4. MOST IMPORTANT: Figure out what stops the market from building good 
parking garages (not buildings with garages, but garages open to the 
public that charge money) and fix it. For one thing, it's nearly 
impossible to build parking garages outside downtown right now due to 
the ridiculously onerous zoning code. Were it not for the evils of our 
zoning code and the neighborhood veto over urban development, somebody 
could make a mint building a small garage near 6th/Lamar so that you 
could legally park your car ONCE and shop all afternoon instead of 
having to move it every time you switch stores.

Everything else is secondary to the lure of free or cheap parking. 
Biking to work is ALWAYS more of a hassle than driving, if you can park 
for free very close to your office. There's nearly nothing you can do to 
change this equation without addressing the parking side. And you can do 
it today without being onerous by the four steps above, none of which 
prohibit Joe Developer from building as many parking spaces for cars as 
they want. The key here is that Joe Developer probably won't WANT to 
include his own parking if the law doesn't make him, and if the market 
is allowed to build more efficient parking garages for the entire 
population of workers in the area. (This is the way REAL cities work).

- MD