Austin fosters growing cycling community with infrastructure, events

If you've pedaled a bicycle around Austin lately, you might have noticed something: You're not alone.

More folks, it seems, are turning to two wheels when it comes to getting to work, running errands or just having fun.

And it's no wonder. Austin has nearly year-round cycling weather, terrain that ranges from pancake flat to steep enough to make a mountain goat smile, weekly social rides and bike races, and a growing array of infrastructure designed to make it easier to travel by bicycle.

We have 166 miles of bike lanes and more than 4,500 city-installed bike racks. Austin Yellow Bike Project operates a community bike shop. In February, Austin hosted the North American Handmade Bicycle Show. Lance Armstrong, arguably the world's greatest cyclist, lives in our midst. And now the city is eyeballing a bike share system like one recently installed in San Antonio, in which people can check out bikes from public stations downtown.

But exactly how many people are cycling? We can guess by looking around that it's more than 10 or 20 years ago, but we've never really know by how much.

Until now.

Last fall, as part of a $100,000 study funded by the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization and the city of Austin, the Texas Transportation Institute purchased and installed two permanent bicycle and pedestrian counters - one on the Lance Armstrong Bikeway bridge over Shoal Creek and another at the Lance Armstrong Bikeway bridge over Waller Creek.

Those counters, which count passersby automatically with infrared sensors, show that on average, a total of more than 1,100 bicyclists cross those two bridges daily, with peak traffic on Saturdays - numbers so high that they surprised even Greg Griffin, a senior planner at CAMPO. Numbers spiked to about 5,000 bicyclists per day during the music festival portion of South by Southwest. Toss in pedestrians and the daily average doubles.

"There are city streets that don't have that many cars in a day," Griffin said.

The Texas Transportation Institute study also included baseline, manual counts of cyclists and pedestrians at 15 locations around the five-county region.

Among the busiest locations for cyclists included in that study? The Lance Armstrong Bikeway at Third Street, where 108 cyclists per hour passed during peak hours; Speedway at 38th Street, where 102 cyclists per hour passed; and Shoal Creek Boulevard at Stoneway Drive, with 98 cyclists per hour.

The City of Austin has done a single long-term, site-specific cyclist count - on the Pfluger Bridge. That study showed that 362 cyclists crossed the bridge on Aug. 22, 2001, compared with 528 cyclists on Feb. 17, 2010, an increase of 46 percent over nine years, or about 5 percent per year. (Conservative estimates because the first was taken in the summer and the second in the winter.)

All the new statistics will help CAMPO and the city plan for bike and pedestrian improvements the same way they plan for other modes of transportation.

"We want to know what volumes are so we can see what improvements are having effects and which are not working so well," Griffin said. "This time next year we'll have a year's worth of data to compare."

That data also will help CAMPO officials measure how Austin is doing in its effort to boost the percentage of peak period trips taken by bicycle or walking from about 7 percent in 2009 to 12 percent by 2035.

One thing that's helping is infrastructure designed to make cycling easier. Among the most recent improvements?

• The extension of Pfluger Bicycle and Pedestrian Bridge over Cesar Chavez Street.

• Installation of painted bicycle boxes, which allow cyclists to move to the front of the line at an intersection; sharrows, or shared lane markings that alert motorists that bikes may share the lane; bike lanes that are painted green where they cross vehicle lanes; and "bicycles may use full lane" signs.

• A new 12-foot pathway that crosses Capital of Texas Highway (Loop 360) at U.S. 183, connecting to Jollyville Road.

• Bike lanes on Exposition Boulevard, along Barton Springs Road, at East 51st Street at the Interstate-35 overpass and along Lake Austin Boulevard.

Two other big bicycle projects are still in the works.