BTW. I feel and hope that bike lanes will work since I prefer them. When I stated “flawed from a road sharing advocacy perspective”, I was merely presenting the point-of-view that some may have from a “road-sharing” perspective. Being a motorist as well, I can understand the mixed signals they may be getting from designated bike lanes. Communication becomes key.

I ride both bike lane and road and feel that with the right amount of awareness, we can all be safe.

Side note: In a way, I’m glad there was/is a suburban sprawl in North Texas – it’s kept property prices down.

If you look at Uptown from 1990 to 2009, you’ll see this very same thing occurring. Density and development has skyrocketed there, where it was once the bad side of town that few people lived in. Seeing the numbers now, you’d be hard pressed to ever believe it lacked the streetlife it currently has. From 2000 to 2009, downtown’s population swelled from 500 to 8,000, and is projected to be at 10,000 by next year. Add the development of a series of urban parks, greater Transit Oriented Development projects, and these numbers only appear to continue to climb. I can say that annecdotally, in my neighborhood in North Oak Cliff, we see a new young family every month moving in. My wife and I left Plano for our home (which very few did at the time), and this transfer is now becoming a very common migration.

When you begin adding up all of the trending occurring, and also take into account that this younger generation is visiting cities like Austin, Boulder, Portland, NYC, and returning home…they’re inevitably going to bring back concepts and ideas from these places. Or worse, they’ll leave us for them. That’s the alarming trend I see. We’ve already had one neighbor who’s a graphic designer at a local museum by day, and runs a t-shirt business at night while putting on amazing art shows in town…after visiting Seattle one time, she came back home and said, “I just can’t do Dallas anymore”. We can’t stand to lose people that are adding such vital creative character to our city…if we do, we’ll look like Detroit in only a few years.

Lastly, I think we can never really state that: “bike lanes won’t work in Dallas because X”, because we don’t have any test case evidence to prove the theory. What we’re going to see in the very near future is a couple of prototype “test lanes”, that ridership levels will be measured on. Only after this, can we fairly state if something works or not…otherwise it’s all speculation. We do note that ridership surrounding trails (White Rock, Katy), is greater, though this is largely a recreational only crowd, but it does go to show that if you create the infrastructure, people will come out. The PSU study in Portland noted that residents will go out of their way to cycle on streets with bike infrastructure: http://www.portlandtribune.com/sustainable/story.php?story_id=122402296838932000

I LOVE the idea of shortcuts between subdivisions. We could sure use them.

When it comes to facilities, I think the California experience with “diamond” (carpool) lanes should be carefully considered when it comes to bikes. When diamond lanes were created by taking away existing lanes, motorists got VERY nasty about it. When the diamond lanes were created by ADDING to existing lanes, the motorists reacted MUCH more favorably.

One thing that would help a LOT would be shortcuts between subdivisions that allowed pedestrian and bikes to filter through the neighborhoods without having to go along the big arterials. John Allen talks about that on his site. It’s cheap and encourages walking and biking. That becomes a place people want to live – it isn’t so sterile as a “car only” area.