How Will Dallas Roll Out New Bike Plan? Just Look at the Plan For Fort Worth Avenue.

How Will Dallas Roll Out New Bike Plan? Just Look at the Plan For Fort Worth Avenue.: Click to enlarge for a better look at a proposed plan to redo Fort Worth Ave.​By 2021 the city of Dallas hopes to have 1,296 miles of here-to-there dedicated to cyclists, 456 of which would be off-road — trails, let’s say. Which leaves the rest, 840 miles, spread up and down the cracked concrete, bike lanes and cycle tracks chief among the options. So, then, how to roll out the new bike plan approved by the council over the summer? The answer’s contained in a briefing sent to council last night in advance of the Quality of Life Committee’s meeting Monday morning, during which they’ll take up Bike Plan Implementation.As Theresa O’Donnell, head of Sustainable Development, told me last night: The Bike Plan will be treated like the forwardDallas! Comprehensive Plan, which more or less tells developers where they can kinda do what, but not exactly.Says O’Donnell, “You can go to the forwardDallas! plan and look for the general location of your
property and see some fuzzy brown color on it, which means it’s
appropriate for high density mixed-use transit-oriented development. But that doesn’t mean you can build something 300 feet high there. You have to go
through the zoning process, and if you make it through and if the property is suitable and you can plat it, then the vision becomes the
reality. The Bike Plan is exactly the same way: It provides policy
guidance about proper location and priority areas, but in most instances
you’re going to have to go through a thoroughfare amendment process before you stripe lanes.”And a thoroughfare amendment is no simple slam-dunk: There would more than likely be a series of town halls followed by the requisite public hearings in front of the CPC and council before their respective votes. Says O’Donnell, there are a lot of folks to consider when remaking a roadway: “commuters, residents, merchants, developers with beautiful grand visions. But public input and public consensus is a good thing and something we appreciate.”We’ll get into this more on Monday; I know, you can’t wait. But to see how this is going to play itself out, time and time and time again, the council’s being presented with its first concrete look-see: creating a dedicated bike lane for Fort Worth Avenue, between Beckley and Hampton, in an effort to get cyclists in Oak Cliff and West Dallas into (or at least close to?) downtown. But how? Oh, the options.

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12145750-2']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true; ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’; var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();