Bike Denton

In the above photo taken on my work commute this morning, you can see a group of about ten seniors taking a stroll along Hinkle.  Notice there’s no sidewalk on either side of the road.  I’ve also encountered folks in wheelchairs who roll in the road here.

Since Hinkle is about to be restriped and was just re-signed, allow me to think out loud: “Pedestrians use the road.  Nobody parks here.  Can we make this a pedestrian lane and not a parking zone, as it’s now signed?”

In playing Devil’s advocate, I must wonder if AASHTO will even allow pedestrians to share a roadway?  If not, then I suspect a parking lane is the nearest compromise, since a no-parking zone would just make it easier for cars to drive in the lane.

If this is the nearest compromise, then an obvious conclusion is that Hinkle deserves a sidewalk.  With a proper sidewalk on both sides, the Hinkle lanes could be reconfigured or even dieted, and that unfolds a number of possibilities for buffered or physically separated facilities.

Last week, we spoke briefly with city engineer Frank Payne to check the status of bike planning in Denton.  As you can read, Denton has hired consultant(s) to work on safe routes for children and an update to the city’s bicycle plan.

We have the consultant working on the Safe Routes to School project and have been gathering information through DISD.  We have a contract negotiated for the bicycle plan update and have been discussing possible roles with the UNT professor, wrapping that up as recently as a week ago last Thursday.  So, we should be underway on the bike route update shortly, pending contract execution.

We’re very happy to hear reports of progress, and we hope to see a realistic, benchmarked bicycle plan that doesn’t collect dust, as many master plans do.  We’d like to find out contract details including cost for the SRTS and plan update projects, and we’ll report back when we know the numbers.

Jon Triantafyllou

Phil Bayiss

Yesterday morning, Denton’s own Jon Triantafyllou and teammate Phil Bayiss started a 4500 mile, 66 day ride from San Diego to New Jersey to raise money for cancer research.   They are riding road bikes and pulling bob trailers, and they’ve mapped out their estimated checkpoint arrival times for a huge list of cities.  Many of us in Denton know Jon and met him through Querencia, and we’ve become good friends on bikes and off.  I had a blast riding the Hotter Than Hell 100 with him last year, and I know he’ll have a great, life-changing adventure.   are cheering him on from back home.  They accept contributions via Paypal, if you’d like to help.

My whole life I have seen cancer all around me.  In elementary school one of my best friends lost his father to brain cancer.  My grandfather has fought and survived colon cancer not once, but twice.  My grandmother lost a fight to cancer two years ago.  My aunt fought off breast cancer and is now in remission.  And most recently I have been diagnosed and undergone treatment for thyroid cancer.  While I am lucky that my type of cancer is easily cured, there are millions out there that are not so lucky.

Our mission is to do anything we can to help find the cure for cancer.  The easiest way for us to accomplish this is to raise money that can be used for cancer research.  We will be riding our bikes from San Diego, CA to Avalon, NJ, a journey of about 4,500 miles.  This is an extreme trip for us, since we are not avid cyclists.  However, we feel that a trip this extreme is warranted to raise as much awareness and funds as possible.

Please feel free to contact us for any reason.  Our email address is biketowardsthecure@gmail.com.  We would love to hear from supporters so that we know we are making a difference.  We are doing all of this for those millions that have been affected by this horrible disease, so let your voices be heard!

You can follow their journey via twitter or the blog.

From Colin McDonald’s recent piece in MySanAntonio, we see a scenario both similar to Denton yet further advanced:

For years, San Antonio has built streets and approved developments with little to no accommodation for anything but motor vehicles. Now with obesity rates off the charts, the region on the verge of violating federal air standards and a new mayor who sees bicycles as part of being a competitive and attractive city, bike lanes are gaining ground.

It’s a move Portland, Ore.; Seattle; Minneapolis; and New York made decades ago.

According to a study for the Metropolitan Planning Organization, San Antonio and Bexar County could add 350 miles of bike lanes just by restriping pavement, without impeding traffic or widening roads. The “road diet” plan would more than triple the miles of bike lanes and go a long way toward forming a grid.

The timeline on the left side of the article lays out the sad life of a master plan: negligence, edits, negligence, edits etc.  Negligence aside, the city still managed to increase bike lanes and routes from 34 to 136 miles over the last decade.  But for a metro area facing violation of air-quality standards, rising obesity epidemic, and traffic congestion, they need a full scale transit mode shift away from cars.  To help get there, the region’s health czar wants San Antonio to adopt a Complete Streets policy:

Metro Health Director Fernando Guerra likes bike lanes because they encourage people to be active. This spring, his department received a $15 million federal grant to fight obesity.

Along with measures to improve eating habits, funds are dedicated to create a ride-to-own-bike program, establish a “complete-streets” policy so the city considers all modes of transportation, and start ciclovías, where miles of streets would be periodically closed to make room for bikes, classes and recreation in a citywide celebration of being active outdoors.

To assure actual change and not just a grandiose master plan, the city’s director of public works and a city engineer created a requirement, stating “Bike facilities must be considered as part of all roadway-related projects that are not further along than 40 percent design approval stage.”

For Denton, I see some valuable lessons:

1. Denton’s planning paradigm must shift away from moving cars and towards moving people
2. We need to work more closely with our MPO, which is NCTCOG.  Dallas is receiving NCTCOG funding for their new bicycle plan, so why aren’t we asking for help too?  NCTCOG has some great advice, and the bicycle coordinator, Deborah Humphreys, would be pleasantly surprised if Denton started asking her for help.
3. Clarify and expand our existing development code requirement which already requires “bicycle lanes” on all arterial roads
4. Adopt a Complete Streets policy for the entire city

Thanks to all the cyclists who came by The Hydrant for our first BikeDenton commuter station for Bike-To-Work Day!  We met riders from all walks of life: a pathologist, a professor, a police lieutenant (Tom Woods), a city councilman (Dalton Gregory), UNT staff, an elementary school teacher, UNT students, parents with children in tow, a random guy just riding by, a massage therapist, and many more.  We saw road bikes, mountain bikes, cruisers, cargo bikes, and bike trailers.

All in all, we gave away 40 breakfast tacos from The Hydrant (via Mi Casita), at least 2-3 carafes of Bookish Coffee, and we sold about 20 BikeDenton t-shirts.

Today (and really all days), we salute you riders for doing your part.  We are already excited about doing this again in 365 days!  Do we really have to wait that long?

First two photos courtesy of Trent Geerdes: