Gathered around a table at the Dakota East Side Ice House Thursday night, a group of roughly 20 bike enthusiasts got the first look at the City of San Antonio’s overhauled bike website, complete with comprehensive maps of the city’s existing bike routes.
“We just today launched a monster update to our website,” said David Bemporad, a transportation planning consultant working on the city’s bike network reboot.
“We realized there’s no real place anywhere at that you can find a complete and consolidated inventory of what exists on San Antonio streets right now that can be used by bikes. It didn’t exist.”
The brightly colored website with route mapping features and a shared community events calendar are intended to encourage an organized biking community and attract more engagement with the public input process.
Bemporad and Harley Hubbard, assistant to the Transportation Department director, have been tasked with spearheading a long-overdue update of the city’s bike plan — a now 12-year-old strategy that’s been widely criticized for both its planning and execution.
Biking advocates say the 2011 plan did little to facilitate biking as a means of transportation or commuting, instead favoring recreational routes and paths aimed more toward tourists.
Of the 1,288 miles of bike lanes it recommended constructing, about 523 are complete, according to a September presentation to the City Council’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.
“I’m very disappointed with the plan that came out in 2011, and its execution, and what we’ve gotten out of it over the last now 11 or 12 years,” Councilman John Courage (D9), who chairs the committee, said at the time.
To avoid past mistakes, the city is now trying to engage bikers with a variety of needs and backgrounds about how it can improve the biking experience in San Antonio.
Tuesday’s event was a soft launch of the in-person listening tour the Transportation Department plans to begin in the coming months. That effort is beginning nearly a year after the city started surveying residents online about what they would like to see change.
Early results from the online survey, expected to close Jan. 15, were made public for the first time Tuesday, showing 7 out of 10 people respondents would ride a bike 15 minutes or more to get around — if conditions were safe and comfortable.
Roughly 47% of daily motorists who responded to the survey said they would prefer driving not be their primary form of transportation but 69% saw challenges in navigating San Antonio without a car. The survey received roughly 1,700 responses.
City leaders say they still need far more public input to make a strong case for an eventual plan that will come before City Council, as well as for their applications for federal grants to help pay for it.
But so far the efforts of Hubbard’s team, which includes urban planners from across the country, seemed to please the craft-beer drinking bike advocates at the ice house. Representatives from Strong Towns San Antonio, which advocates for thoughtful urban planning, SATX Social Ride and the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization were invited to the meeting, along with other community bike advocates.
Hubbard, 28, sought feedback on what kind of lane protections made bikers feel safe, while the group poked fun at old bike plans that directed them to ride alongside speeding car traffic.
Bemporad, a 28-year-old San Antonio native with a master’s degree in Urban Planning from Harvard, chatted with attendees about efforts to integrate the latest design standards for bike infrastructure into street planning.
“We have really great recreational biking here, so I’m excited the [new] network plan is also focused on commuters and just trying to get around town or grab coffee or make small trips on a bike,” said Yamini Karandikar, an engineer who moved to San Antonio from Rochester, New York, and started Strong Towns San Antonio. “We definitely have a lot of potential in San Antonio because you can really bike year round.”
Yet even the most cutting edge plans run the risk of once again disappointing San Antonio cyclists if the planning stage drags on too long, or it isn’t followed up with adequate funding and implementation.
Dreams of a commuter route down Broadway Street — viewed as a major win for bikers in the 2017 bond — have been canceled over disagreements with the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).
City Council likely won’t see a new bike network plan until spring of 2025.
“I wish there was a way to do a more iterative approach, where you do short cycles of plans, build, feedback,” said Karandikar. “It doesn’t sound like that’s the plan, so I guess we’ll have to wait.”
Hubbard said the bike plan “is taking a really long time because we’re doing a lot with it.” But bikers should expect to see elements of it take shape before then.
TxDOT recently awarded San Antonio almost $16 million for a cycle track along Market and Commerce streets downtown. Construction is expected to start in 2026.
Some pilot programs will also be implemented ahead of time, so that the city can study them while putting together its formal plan.
“The really exciting part of this plan is to do some pilot projects and introduce some design into San Antonio that might not be currently all in our streetscapes,” Hubbard said.
Development reporter Shari Biediger contributed to this report.
