ATX Walk Bike Roll plan presented to boards and commissions

ATX Walk Bike Roll, an update to Austin’s active transportation plans, is heading for City Council approval in the coming months. 

Over the past few weeks, city staffers have made the rounds at boards and commissions, presenting the draft plan for feedback. 

Walk Bike Roll unites plans for urban trails, bikeways and sidewalks under the same banner. The plans – and the public input helping to shape them – will guide the locations of new infrastructure. 

“We saw a lot of synergies in bringing all three of these plans together,” said Nathan Wilkes of the Transportation Department. Trails, bikeways and sidewalks “are all kind of short-range mobility tools.”

The city last updated the urban trails and bike plans in 2014 and the sidewalks plan in 2016, meaning they’re out of date with the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan, or ASMP. The plan, aimed at reducing traffic and carbon emissions, calls for half of Austinites to be able to get around the city in some way other than just by motor vehicle. Making it easier and safer to walk, bike or roll is key to achieving that goal.

City staffers also emphasized the individual benefits of active transportation. “Studies show that people are happier and healthier if they walk or bike in their daily life,” Wilkes said. 

Walk Bike Roll has been in the works for about two years, with thousands of community members engaging with the planning by participating in polls, online surveys and virtual meetings, and by serving as community ambassadors, according to the city’s website.

At a Planning Commission meeting Feb. 28, staffers addressed a common concern raised by community members: the risk of displacement as new infrastructure is put in place.

The thinking goes that a new urban trail, for example, might lead to increased property values – and property taxes – for homes along the route, forcing some to leave their homes. The plan calls for studying the potential for that to happen, staffers said, because there is limited data on whether active transportation projects can contribute to displacement.

But Wilkes said other factors are the more likely causes of rising home prices. “If we stopped building sidewalks and bike lanes and urban trails, do you all think our affordability problem would stop? My hunch is not, and that the drivers (of displacement) are fundamentally much deeper than that,” he said. 

A separate conversation at the Zoning and Platting Commission last Tuesday highlighted a tension often present in these types of planning efforts: how much of a say current residents directly impacted by proposed infrastructure improvements should have versus current and future users of the infrastructure.

Some argued that neighbors are being ignored when it comes to concerns like increased traffic or removal of parking spaces for a bike lane. Others said that the improvements should be based on adopted plans, and that the localized concerns of a few should not delay or derail much-needed upgrades.

After some debate about what language to include in a recommendation, the Zoning and Platting Commission decided to tell staff to consider feedback from “directly affected stakeholders” instead of “directly affected neighbors,” as they originally contemplated. 

Community members can continue to comment on the draft plan through March 20. The plan will go through another round of board and commission feedback in April before Council votes to adopt the plan in May. 

Photo by Larry D. Moore, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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