Lundeen was thrilled. "This is huge," he exulted in the Houston Chronicle in 1997. "This is the biggest undertaking of any city in the country." Wurth also remembers being overjoyed. He proudly hung a huge wall map of the proposed bikeway network in his shop. "I was so stoked and happy, like this was my dream deal, you know? Society was changing more the way I wanted it."
But after Lanier left the mayor's office and Lee P. Brown took over, Wurth's map started to seem like a cruel joke. Year followed year in Brown's administration, and the most exciting projects — the dedicated bike-only trails, often laid down along abandoned rail lines in the Rails to Trails program — met delay after delay. At the end of 2002, all bikeway projects ground to a halt when the city declined to budget even the money that would guarantee it triple returns in federal matching funds.
"Half the shit on that map never happened, and the rest just turned out to be striping the gutter of a road," Wurth says. "Like, 'Go stripe Antoine, the first three feet by the sidewalk, and then never maintain it.'"
Meanwhile, millions of dollars flowed into the hands of consultants and the people who consult about consultants. City Councilman and current mayoral candidate Peter Brown, an architect in private life, was hired in 1995 to helped design a bike trail along White Oak Bayou. In 2004, work had not yet begun, and he told the Houston Chronicle that the city had spent $6 million paying "program managers," as people who oversee consultants are called. Brown said the waste was downright "frightening."
Meanwhile, many of those aspects of the plan that were put in place — specifically, the bike lanes — failed to live up to Wurth's, and most other area cyclists', expectations. (The sign-posted bike routes are more popular.)
Wurth derides the bike lanes as "striped gutters." Far from resembling those in "a college town," Houston's narrow, often debris-strewn versions looked more like a slapdash way to quickly and cheaply enact flashy displays of fairly meaningless "progress" and grab those federal matching funds.
Dan Raine, the City of Houston's Bicycle/Pedestrian Coordinator, acknowledged that the striped gutters were a quick fix. In an e-mail interview with the Houston Press, he cited "the great pressure to expedite the creation of bikeways to meet air quality goals," and wrote that "the shortest path to meet these goals was to re-stripe roadways to create bike lanes."
Wurth believes that the majority of striped bike lanes are actually harmful to cyclists. For one thing, he says, they encourage motorists to believe that cyclists must use them. In fact, cyclists are entitled to the same rights as any other vehicle operators; riding in the bike lane is optional. (Lundeen says that he has even had the same argument with a police officer; anecdotally, quite a few police are ignorant about local cycling laws.) Second, Wurth says the bike lanes are dangerous even if there are no cars on the road. "The pavement's all broken up, there are missing sewer covers and storm grates," he says. As they are also liberally sprinkled with broken glass, bits of metal and nails, Wurth calls riding in them "the fastest way to get a flat tire in this city."
"We send out street sweepers to clean bike lanes when we receive e-mails and photos of debris, but there are not enough street sweepers to clean all the bike lanes on a high-frequency basis," Raine says. He also points out that another advantage of the bike routes, as opposed to the lanes, is that large vehicles travel closer to the curb when there is no bike lane, and that the air they disperse sweeps away debris.
Lundeen further contends that the bike lanes lull motorists into a false sense of security and don't cede enough space to the left of each cyclist. "Drivers don't worry as much about cyclists when cyclists have their own lane," he says. Furthermore, the roads on which the bike lanes were painted are supposed to have been divided up into two ten-foot lanes for cars and two four-foot lanes for bikes, but Lundeen suspects that road crews measured out the ten-foot lanes for cars first and then gave the bikes whatever was left over, whether or not that measured a full four feet. And he says he has seen places where the crews have painted a stripe right through the middle of pre-existing potholes. (Raine, an avid cyclist himself, cites the Heights Boulevard bike lane — which does indeed look like one in a sylvan college town — as a shining example of one that is well developed. Lundeen agrees, but it seems very much the exception to the rule.)
