Hello Petition Signer -
This is an update on a front we have opened in our fight with city hall on the 11th Street road diet and bikeway.
Here is a quick summary
The Houston Police and Fire Departments approved the City’s 11th Street Safety Project under the mistaken belief that there will be a center turn lane on West 11th Street. They were not even brought into the planning of the project until the design was almost complete. This is just plain wrong. First responders should be in on these plans from the very beginning.
The longer story
We discovered that first responders were not brought in at the beginning of the planning process for the project. Nor were they kept up to date as the project evolved.
In the beginning, a center turn lane was included in the plans. But sometime before April 2022 the roadway was measured and determined to be too narrow. The bike lanes won out, the center turn lane was scratched.
By the time first responders were asked for final okay in July 2022, the push was on to get the 100% project design approved by all departments and signed off quickly.
Mayor Turner is intent on leaving his mark on the city, a paradigm shift he calls it. The mayor says he consulted in May with Chiefs Finner (HPD) and Pena (HFD) during his review of the project, and that they approved of the plans. The police and fire chiefs are appointed by Mayor Turner. How likely is it that they would go against their boss’s desires if they want to keep their jobs?
Through open records requests and relentless follow-up emails, we obtained this official HPD Response from A. Guzman, Commander, Central Patrol Division to Transportation & Drainage Operations dated June 24, 2022, on both the 11th Street and Michaux Street signing and pavement markings -
"The conversion of traffic lanes to bike lanes could have an impact on response times during heavy traffic. However, the center turn lane should help with this. This project is not anticipated to have any public safety issues. HPD has determined this project should not impact public safety.”
Commander Guzman stated that if traffic backs up, although not ideal, HPD can find ways around it such as driving in the bike lanes if need be and over armadillos. Not being an engineer, Guzman said he read the plans as best as he could and spent a lot of time trying to make sure he read them correctly.
The HFD Executive Assistant Chief Justin Wells was given the engineering plans and asked to review them. No one thought it important to point out to him that the center turn lane, which had been in the original plans, was missing from the final plans. To our knowledge, he had no questions about the center turn lane. HFD was mostly concerned with whether the engines had space to turn properly in normal traffic. Chief Wells gave an okay to the project in an email on 8/17.
Bike lanes on West 11th from Shepherd to Yale will be 6 ft wide and buffers will be 3 ft wide with cast-place-concrete curbs, making the space probably less than 7.5 ft wide if the curbs are centered in the buffers. There will be no armadillos. The curbs are 6 in high, low enough for most trucks to straddle. But if a cruiser or fire engine needs to travel in the bike lane due to traffic congestion, that may put the truck partially in a travel lane where vehicles are traveling or stopped in gridlock. How wide is a fire engine?
The minimum width of a travel lane is 10 ft. The center turn lane would have been 10 ft. too. When 2 bike lanes with buffers total of 18 ft. are added, there is not enough room for the center turn lane as the width of W 11th Street is 40 ft. If the bike lanes were instead 5 ft wide each with no buffer, the street could accommodate a center turn lane.
Many of the rank-and-file first responders that we talked to do not like this plan as they believe it will slow response times. Mayor Turner said you may miss a light or two due to the changes on 11th Street. Will there be additional traffic congestion caused by the I-45 and I-10 construction? Will motorists divert to 11th Street and Washington Avenue because of it? Onto neighborhood streets, too?
And you know what? This 4-to-2 lane road diet with protected bike lanes is coming to North Main Street and other areas too.