This week, the City launched an interactive website and survey to complete new bicycle implementation plans for downtown and midtown along with a citywide micromobility policy.
These efforts represent the next steps of the City’s first Bike Master Plan published in 2011, said Timothy Hayes, the City’s pedestrian mobility officer.
The community can provide input through an interactive online map to help City officials prioritize four to six projects in the downtown and north-of-downtown areas that could be funded through the city’s annual budgets or 2022 bond program. Survey responses ultimately will be presented to City Council as it considers a micromobility policy that will govern how streetscapes are adapted for pedestrians, bikes, skateboards, scooters, and other modes of transportation.
The survey asks how streets should be divided among uses (sidewalks, bike, buses, trees); how residents feel about combining bike and scooter parking; and whether City should prioritize traffic calming measures, traffic enforcement, bike lanes, or other measures. The survey also seeks some demographic information, such as the respondent’s zip code.
The survey closes at the end of September, but further outreach could be done if certain demographics are missed, Hayes said. “What shape that takes and how that looks is difficult to answer,” he said. “… [Given the pandemic] we can’t do traditional, in-person meetings.”
At the City’s wikimapping.com page, visitors are asked to identify on a map of downtown and midtown corridors what they like or dislike in terms of infrastructure that exists (or doesn’t exist) such as bike lanes or wide sidewalks, points where they’ve experienced a crash or near-crash, and other problem spots.
This detailed analysis is not meant to supplant the Bike Master Plan but build on it and use more up-to-date information, Hayes said. “The landscape has changed in terms of [built] infrastructure and our understanding of what works best.”
In 2011, electric scooters hadn’t yet entered the urban landscape. Pre-pandemic, scooter companies had already seen a decline in ridership in San Antonio, but now that traffic has plummeted further. Still, Hayes says they may make a comeback, and the need for improved bike infrastructure persists.
The City is starting with downtown and Midtown area implementation plans because they have the most cyclists in the area, Hayes said. The conversation surrounding bike lanes on Broadway Street last year highlighted issues on and around that corridor.
Discussions – at times protests – about a multimillion-dollar redevelopment of lower Broadway (which ultimately will not have bike lanes) “definitely spurred [the] decision to start there,” Hayes said.
For more information, residents can visit the City’s website or San Antonio Bikes page on Facebook. Call the Public Works department at 210-207-7228 to take the analog version of the survey.
