HOUSTON – Chad Freeman loves to bike around the Heights area but says that sense of peace is quickly disturbed when you have dedicated bike lanes that abruptly end or aren’t complete, forcing cyclists into traffic.
“I have an injury from where I fell a couple weeks ago, so I mean sometimes at a stop sign, you jump off your bike and fall because someone’s not paying attention,” according to Freeman.
Connecting bike lanes and routes is imperative to keep cyclists safe and to this point, advocates have been working with the city to temporarily paint bike lanes where there are gaps making it unsafe for bikers to continue on their route.
“Our bike network has a lot of gaps in it, and you can tell when you’re out on your bike, especially on the weekends, people are riding wherever they can, wherever they think is safe enough,” said Joe Cutrufo with Bike Houston.
So far, there have been two events-- one at the intersection of Heights Boulevard and 8th, and the second happened a few weeks ago on the Harrisburg Trail, where cyclists literally grabbed paintbrushes and hand-painted bike lanes to fill in the gaps and show what it could look like if bike routes were fully connected. The third event is expected to happen sometime this fall.
“The idea is it doesn’t have to take a lot of years, it doesn’t have to take a lot of money. You know this was something staff did on a Saturday morning. You know with a lot of help from the community,” David Fields with Houston Planning Department.
There are 340 miles of high comfort bike lanes, but you’re going to see a lot more coming. Houston has committed to creating almost 1,800 miles of dedicated bike lanes.