Gonna do this as a link roundup so I can get this out of my system. See here for the starting point.
Whitmire stresses maintaining public safety as fears grow over future of Houston’s bike lanes.
Emphasizing his priority toward public safety, Mayor John Whitmire addressed growing concerns over the city’s commitment to bike lanes at a news conference Wednesday, two days after workers began tearing up a bike lane on Austin Street without notice.
The discussion came amid a series of controversies surrounding Houston’s bike lanes.
The city removed protective barriers, known as “armadillos,” from bike lanes in the Heights, citing maintenance concerns.
Meanwhile, Monday’s removal of the Austin Street bike lane in Midtown has sparked debate over the balance between infrastructure improvements and bike accessibility. These actions have fueled tensions among cyclists, city officials, and residents over the future of Houston’s mobility network.
Whitmire also answered questions about the bike lane on 11th Street in the Heights, a popular street for cyclists that features bike lanes on both sides. Community members fear it may be the next to be removed.
Whitmire said businesses, residents, and a local doughnut shop have expressed concerns about the 11th Street bike lane, prompting a review of its impact. He cited past emails from fire department officials warning that emergency response times could improve if the bike lane were removed.
“I don’t go looking to create disagreement; I like to think I’m a consensus builder, trying to do the best job,” Whitmire said. “But when I have fire department officials tell me, ‘We won’t go down 11th, we go down 10th, a residential neighborhood,’ because of parked cars and narrow space, that’s not my controversy. I’m just trying to solve it.”
When a reporter suggested it sounded like he planned to remove the bike lane, Whitmire said that he is listening to the public and public safety officials.
“It’s all driven by public safety,” Whitmire said.
Such transparent bullshit, I can’t tell you how mad this makes me. I know, the world is on fire, Trump and Musk are actively destroying the federal government and the United States’ standing in the world as well as its economic engines, Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick and the Lege are doing the same for Texas, and so on and so forth. I guess I feel this the most directly right now, and I’m angry about the casual disrespect for anyone that doesn’t already agree with Whitmire. He’s been so much worse as Mayor than I thought he’d be when he was elected. For crying out loud, public safety includes the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists too!
Deep breath.
BikeHouston director critical of Mayor Whitmire’s removal of bike lanes.
BikeHouston Executive Director Joe Cutrufo said Wednesday he believes Houstonians support more cyclist infrastructure — not less.
Cutrufo’s comments came the day after Houston Mayor John Whitmire criticized the backlash from cyclist and pedestrian advocates over the Austin Street bike lane removal during a Tuesday appearance on Houston Public Media’s Hello Houston show, and said they did not represent the majority opinion of Houstonians.
“I think he has selective hearing as far as that goes, but you know who does a really good job of listening to Houstonians, the Rice Kinder Houston Area survey,” Cutrufo said, speaking Wednesday on Hello Houston. “What they found was that 50% of Harris County residents … would be willing to live in a smaller home if it meant they could walk places more easily. They found that 52% of Houstonians want to be able to ride a bike more often than they currently do.”
Cutrufo also argued that Whitmire had a “moral obligation” to ensure that residents were safe, regardless of their mode of transportation. He specifically mentioned the recent removal of physical protections, known as “armadillos,” along Heights Boulevard.
“What we’re hearing is that the mayor has no intention of putting back any protection for people on bikes and that’s really unfortunate, not just as someone who rides a bike, but as a Houstonian because everyone benefits when we make streets safer for people on bikes,” Cutrufo said. “The mayor may not agree with our perspective and our perspective is additive. We believe that Houstonians should have more options just as the Rice Kinder Houston Area survey shows people want more options.”
A spokesperson for Whitmire previously told Houston Public Media that the armadillos were being removed due to “safety issues and disrepair in several spots, including exposed bolts.” The spokesperson did not clarify if new protections would be installed.
Regarding the removal of the Austin Street bike lanes, Cutrufo said the decision did not make financial sense.
“The stuff that has been built, Frank, had been paid for already,” Cutrufo said to Hello Houston co-host Frank Billingsley. “He is tearing it out. That costs money, too. … Maintaining it costs a lot less than tearing it out and having to repave Austin Street, which was just paved only five years ago.”
Fiscal responsibility, baby. Which leads to this:
Pivoting, Whitmire says Austin Street will get a dedicated bike lane, but no physical barrier.
After a week of public backlash, Houston Mayor John Whitmire announced that the Austin Street rehabilitation project will now include a dedicated bike lane modeled after the one on Heights Boulevard—reversing earlier plans to replace the protected lane with sharrows, or shared lane markings.
The new plan includes an unprotected, one-way bike lane, a compromise that maintains some level of dedicated space for cyclists but without a physical barrier. Construction crews had already begun tearing up the old protected bike lane on Monday before the mayor’s office made the change public Thursday in an interview with the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board.
“I was briefed by all the parties,” Whitmire said during the interview. “It’s going to improve the mobility and the access of the homeowners and certainly the fire station and it will allow the bike lane to continue. It’s been modified to follow the Heights model.”
[…]
Joe Cutrufo, executive director of BikeHouston, said a dedicated bike lane is an improvement over sharrows but still lacks meaningful protection.
“When people on bikes are forced to share space with multi-ton motorized vehicles, then they are vulnerable and reliant on whoever is behind the wheel,” Cutrufo said. “When a driver isn’t paying attention and they’re sharing the road with people on bikes, it’s the people on bikes who lose every time.”
Asked whether the mayor’s reversal signals broader changes to future infrastructure decisions, Cutrufo said Whitmire is clearly hearing from the public.
“We know that the mayor has heard from hundreds of Houstonians since his unilateral decision to rip out the protected bike lane on Austin Street this past Monday,” he said.
Imagine if he had talked to, or more to the point listened to, someone outside of his bubble before Monday. We could have avoided this whole stupid, expensive mess.
In re: the Chron Editorial Board.
The Austin Street bike lane was just one piece of a much larger yearslong effort to transform the city’s outdoor spaces. It connected the Buffalo Bayou Park trails with paths through Hermann Park and along Brays Bayou. Some of Houston’s bike lanes suddenly evaporate just when you need them most. Not this one. The Austin bike lane was the spine of Houston’s growing network of safe and comfortable paths. It was central to a vision for a city where people can move around safely whether by car, foot, bicycle or wheelchair.
After news of the lane’s removal circulated, bicyclists showed up to Tuesday’s City Council public comment session to share their frustration. Fincham was one of them.
Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis was angry about the news too. Ellis’s office paid around $2 million to build the Austin Street lane. “Why are you eliminating things that are making streets safer?” he puzzled to the editorial board in reaction to Monday’s news.
After the City Council meeting Wednesday, Mayor John Whitmire insisted that removing the bike lanes was about public safety, that he had been asked by the area’s councilmember right after being sworn in as mayor to take a look at it. He also said that the city is working on a new bike plan. He said he couldn’t yet reveal the plan’s details, but that it will be “major.” His critics weren’t convinced.
Their pushback worked. Sort of. By Thursday afternoon, the mayor and public works department had a new plan. Rather than remove the protected lane entirely, the mayor told the editorial board, it would replace what was a two-way lane with a one-way bike lane, matching the flow of car traffic. And instead of concrete curbs, cyclists would be separated from cars with a stripe of paint.
Like the bike lane on Heights Boulevard.
“We’re convinced we’ve got a good model now,” Whitmire said.
We, however, are not convinced.
[…]
The mayor had said residents along Austin St. complained about lost parking, difficulty with their garbage bins out and confusion over a two-way bike lane on a one-way street.
We’ve got some more feedback for him.
Hundreds of people — drivers, bikers and pedestrians — die on Houston’s streets every year. In 2024, Whitmire’s first year in office, that number went up after two years of declines: Some 345 people died on Houston’s roads. Nearly 2,000 were injured. Roughly a third of fatalities were people killed outside of a vehicle. These aren’t just along feeder roads. In fact, 250 fatal crashes occurred on roadways with speed limits under 50 mph;, 140 of those were on streets with speed limits under 30 mph. While cyclist deaths were down to 8, the number of riders seriously injured went up. Houston bike advocates regularly point out that no bike riders have ever died in a crash on a road with protected bike lanes.
That’s because protected bike lanes consistently make roads safer for all users — including people in cars. The city’s own data from Austin Street and other stretches with added bike lanes show that injuries from crashes dropped 17% on Austin between Holman Street and Commerce Street after the lane was added in 2020, according to the city’s 2022 Vision Zero report. One of the more comprehensive and recent studies, done by researchers at the University of Colorado Denver and the University of New Mexico, looked at protected bike lanes across 12 major cities, including Houston, and found that overall road fatality rates dropped by as much as 75%.
Protected bike lanes can be part of what’s called a “road diet,” intentional designs that slow cars to a safer speed.
Though the mayor and public works head said Thursday they’re always open to hear “new” information, the city has already torn up infrastructure without much warning. The city didn’t have to wait until this week to hear these concerns: Before a street redesign, everyone could have been asked more transparently for comment. Yes, the people who complained have valid concerns. But public engagement is supposed to include the entire public. And acting in the public interest requires balancing everyone’s concerns, ideally before the acting part.
See also the letter from 106 moms urging the Mayor to take bike safety seriously, or at all.
And finally: City official says Austin Street bike lane hindered HFD — firefighters say they used it.
Houston officials say an Austin Street bike lane interfered with firefighter training at Station 7, justifying its removal as part of a controversial street rehabilitation project.
But the Houston Fire Department says firefighters regularly trained in that space — until construction forced them to move.
“Each fire station has different access to public space for training, depending on the neighborhood,” said HFD Communications Director Brent Taylor. “At Station 7, firefighters perform apparatus training, such as deploying the aerial ladder or practicing cab operations, in the space where road maintenance is now underway. Our firefighters will accommodate the work by moving this training to another nearby location.”
Taylor added that the fire department has maintained a positive relationship with residents who use the Austin Street bike lane, “along with anyone else who passes the station.”
The least you can do is get your story straight first. If you want more, listen to Evan Mintz go off on Friday’s CityCast Houston podcast. I’m going to go for a walk and calm down now.
