This doesn’t really add much to what we had before, but I figured a little low-stakes story about something good was a thing we could use.
11th Street in the Houston Heights area became safer for everyone, including drivers, after traffic-calming measures and protected bike lanes were installed, according to a Houston Public Works (HPW) study published by Axios.
“I’d say it’s not surprising,” said Nicholas Ferenchak, an assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at the University of New Mexico. “We did a study of bus rapid transit system in Albuquerque … and we’re actually seeing the same thing. So, it’s not just protected bike lanes, but protected bus lanes as well — just kind of making these corridors more multimodal.”
Despite the apparent improvement and an award from the American Public Works Association, the $2.4 million 11th Street redesign could be reversed. Mayor John Whitmire announced a re-evaluation of multiple street projects in March, along with a deemphasizing of the “Vision Zero” traffic safety initiative. Ferenchak published research in 2019 finding that cities with higher rates of biking are safer for all road users, including drivers. His coauthor was Wesley Marshall, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Denver.
“I think one of the big findings was that it was the bicycling infrastructure that was sort of the biggest differentiator between the safer cities and the less safe cities,” Marshall said. “More specifically, it was the separated and protected bike infrastructure … it wasn’t just painted bike lanes, it was the better infrastructure that seemed to be one of the biggest differentiators.”
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The HPW study published by Axios found that overall travel times “do not appear to have increased significantly” because of the changes, with drivers experiencing less than 10 seconds of additional waiting time during the morning and evening rush hours at the Yale Street Intersection.
“I think there’s a lot of biases that come from behind the windshield, especially when you look at bike lanes or bus lanes,” Marshall said. “The way those operate, they’re gonna seem empty to someone who’s sitting in traffic congestion … you’re going to look over at a bike lane or a bus lane and think, ‘Oh, no one’s using that. I should be over there.’ The math doesn’t support that if you’re actually counting people instead of cars.”
See here for the background. The one thing I’ll add, as someone who has lived in the Heights for over 25 years and who drives down West 11th all the damn time, is that when it was four lanes in total, those lanes were empty most of the time. You’d get a rush of traffic when the lights changed at Studewood and Heights/Yale, but usually just in one of the lanes each way. A similar two-way, four-lane-total thoroughfare like Shepherd between US59 and Allen Parkway was way, way busier, any time of the day. It’s really not a surprise that vehicular traffic on 11th is mostly unaffected.
What those extra lanes meant on 11th was that it was easy to speed like you were accelerating to enter a freeway. That’s what made crossing 11th, especially at the bike trail between Yale and Shepherd, so dangerous. That behavior is now mostly extinct, which is why it’s so much safer. This is not hard to figure out.
Anyway. Even if the bike lanes on 11th didn’t get used all that much, the Heights trail that crosses 11th does, and one no longer takes one’s life in one’s hands when one makes that crossing. And we can put a dollar value on that, as a bonus. We’re not out from under the Mayor’s thumb on this yet – who knows how long he’ll do whatever it is he’s doing about it – but we have that on our side.