MONDAY TOP NEWS LINKS:
Aman Batheja, Texas Tribune
In Fort Worth, the mayor hosts occasional bicycle rides called “Rolling Town Halls.” The Dallas City Council may soon require new businesses to set aside space for bicycle parking. Over in El Paso, officials are developing plans for a bike-share system, which is expected to be the fifth such program in the state after Austin’s makes its debuts this year.
In car-clogged communities around Texas, a biking movement is gaining speed. Midsize and large cities are expanding bike trails and putting roads on “lane diets” to accomodate bike lanes.
“Biking has just exploded over the last year in Houston,” said Laura Spanjian, director of Mayor Annise Parker’s office of sustainability.
While curbing traffic and air pollution prompted earlier interest in such initiatives, those concerns are now overshadowed in some cities by other motivating factors, particularly boosts to public health, quality of life and economic development.
“It’s really being embraced for solving a lot of problems. It’s not this sort of fringe, tree-hugger issue anymore,” said Linda DuPriest, a former bicycle-pedestrian program coordinator for Austin who is now a senior planner for Alta Planning + Design, a Portland, Ore.-based design firm that focuses on bike infrastructure. In June, DuPriest opened the agency’s Texas office in Dallas.
“Texas is really ripe” for an expansion in bike infrastructure, said Mia Birk, the firm’s president and a former bicycle program manager with the City of Portland, widely regarded as a national model for biking infrastructure. “There’s so many cities that are growing and thriving, and really looking for ways to create healthier opportunities for residents and businesses.”
Rising obesity rates across the country have drawn increased attention to Texas, where two-thirds of the state’s residents are overweight or clinically obese. The unwanted publicity of landing high on various “fattest cities” lists has heightened interest in doing more to encourage bicycle use, according to some city officials.
(Read more of this story at the Texas Tribune)
LOCAL AREA HEADLINES:
- Rare plants, wildlife found on undeveloped land in Deer Park (KPRC 2 News)
- Rape kits no longer backlogged at the Houston Police Department (KRIV 26 News)
- Ft. Bend restaurant helps officials track down parasite spread (Chron.com)
- Pearland raising funds for family of train wreck victims (Chron.com)
- METRORail Update: When Are the New Lines Going to Start Running? (Houston Press)
- $1 million gift to fund Ehlers Danlos syndrome research at BCM (Your Houston News)
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TEXAS HEADLINES:
- Perry Appoints New Water Development Board (Texas Tribune)
- Giving a Voice to Texas Veterans (Texas Monthly)
- 2013 Wildfire Season Proving To Be More Mild Than Wild (KUT Austin)
- AG Abbott raises privacy concerns with HHS rules governing Obamacare’s ‘Navigator’ program (Your Houston News)