Fort Worth approves extensive new bike plan

City seeks to improve biking

Steve Hawley, Feb 11, 10.

The Fort Worth City Council unanimously approved a ‘radical’ new bike plan on Tuesday night, according to Streetsblog Los Angeles.

Fort Worthology offers a good breakdown of the plan, including maps:

Bike Fort Worth’s primary goals are:

* Increasing bicycling in Fort Worth. Double the rate of cycling for all trip purposes and triple the bicycle commuter rate from 0.2% (approx. 645 daily commuters) at present to 0.6% (approx. 2,000 daily commuters) by the year 2020.
* Improve bicyclist safety. Establish a system to track bike crashes, and reduce the rate of crashes by ten percent by 2020.
* National recognition. Earn a “Bicycle Friendly Community” designation from the League of American Bicyclists by 2015 (Austin is currently the only city in Texas with such a designation).

The plan will increase the city’s bike paths from 100 miles of largely recreational trails to over 900 miles of bike facilities, of which 225 would be recreational trails and 700 would be on-street bike lanes.

The City of Fort Worth has posted the complete plan on its website.

Fort Worth, along with Houston and most other major Texas cities, ranked near the bottom in the recent benchmark report from the Alliance for Biking and Walking. Fort Worth ranked in the bottom one-third in five of the six benchmark categories, and in the middle one-third in the other. The city also ranked 50th out of 51 cities in combined levels of biking and walking, as well as for bicyclist and pedestrian fatalities. Prior to the adoption of Bike Fort Worth, the city was 46th out of 49 cities in terms of per capita pedestrian and bike funding.

Recommended Fort Worth bike network (pdf, 2.0 mb)