Urban Transportation Commission to seek more action, updates to trails plan

The Urban Transportation Commission has signaled it wants the city to take a more ongoing approach to evaluating how and when to add trail segments that had been long planned but were removed from the 2023 Urban Trails Plan. Commissioners opted Tuesday to postpone a recommendation related to updating the map of the 2023 plan, out of concern that city staff could be overwhelmed by a series of recent and forthcoming recommendations from UTC related to that plan.

Chair Susan Somers proposed the item after hearing concern from community members in recent months that small trails and connecting segments that were included in the 2014 trails plan were not in the 2023 update. Rather than have to wait close to a decade for another update to return those trails into the city’s planning, Somers suggested Department of Transportation and Public Works staff initiate a process by March to reevaluate the assorted trails projects around the city based in part on new community input.

The recommendation also asked staff to make public all submitted public comments and maps collected during the creation of the ATX Walk Bike Roll transportation plans.

Last month, the commission approved a recommendation asking City Council to direct staff to revise the goal of completing the trail plan’s tier 1 trails by 2043, instead reaching 65 percent buildout by 2032 and completion by 2038. The July recommendation also asked Council to initiate the process of creating a strategy for promoting equitable trails-oriented development.

“What I am worried about is we’re going to end up having five resolutions for urban trails or six or seven and then it’s gonna get lost, because each of these are gonna have its own unique thing,” Commissioner Arlin Alvarez said. “I would really like to see if there is a way to limit the number of resolutions we have for urban trails so it doesn’t get too convoluted and then staff has to go back and say: Did we meet this? Did we not?”

As discussion progressed Tuesday, Somers, who said she has another trails-related recommendation likely in store for the commission’s October meeting, joined other commissioners in deciding to postpone the new item so she could look at possibly integrating it into another item in the near future.

Commissioner Daniel Kavelman also cautioned that a rolling or intermittent process of reconsidering and updating the trails plan could spread staff resources thin and further delay work on a trail plan that already has a horizon of nearly 20 years.

“The process and the amount of staff time or consulting time to do these updates is long and expensive and, we also have another goal of accelerating this,” he said. “I would be maybe concerned about if this is going to take staff time away from the design of the projects that are already on the plan to do another big extensive community engagement process. Obviously we want that, but are there other best practices out there for establishing a rhythm of map updates that would take into account the amount of time and money it takes to run those.”

Prior to the vote to postpone the recommendation, Commissioner Spencer Schumacher said he’d heard the same concerns as Somers regarding the unexpected removal of trail segments that had been included in community plans and other development-related documents.

“There were a lot of people really focused on the sidewalks and crossings plan, and I do think the urban trails plan got the least amount of attention because those two were moving at the same time,” he said. “I think creating a process where we can make those ad hoc decisions when opportunities arise is gonna be beneficial to everyone.”

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