After delays and hurdles, the city on Tuesday celebrated the completion of protected bike lanes on Avenue B and North Alamo Street and said the completed lanes are just one piece of what will become an interconnected bike network.
“This is our first way of showing it’s possible,” District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur said Tuesday. “Our advocates on the ground keep pushing us to say we need more resources for bikers, more resources for safety measures for bikers and we need more nodes of transportation in general.”
Construction on the $6 million midtown Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ) project started in August 2021, more than two years ago, creating a two-way bike corridor, known as a cycle track, that runs next to car traffic on Avenue B and connects to North Alamo Street via McCullough Avenue.
The project changed Avenue B from a two-way street to a one-way, southbound street to accommodate the protected bike lanes by adding landscaping and reducing traffic lanes on McCullough between Broadway and North Alamo.
“This provides a dedicated and safer space for each [person], no matter if you’re driving, biking or walking,” said Razi Hosseini, director of the city’s public works department.
The Avenue B bike lanes have been open to cyclists for several months, but work on the three blocks of North Alamo Street bike lanes had been ongoing.
In San Antonio, seven out of 10 people are willing to bike 15 minutes or more, Catherine Hernandez, interim director for the city’s transportation department, explained, citing department research. That’s about two miles on a bike, she said, which gets you from Avenue B and Broadway to King William.
“These bike lanes are just the beginning of a comprehensive, interconnected bike network plan that we have in store for our community,” Hernandez said. “This type of infrastructure helps support our goal of eliminating serious injuries and deaths by creating safer environments.”
David McBeth, an assistant city engineer, said the city wants to expand the bike network as much as it can.
“We have new cycle facilities that on Santa Rosa that are being built right now, we just reopened Main Street that has dedicated bike lanes on it. You start somewhere, but we’re building and expanding the bike facilities,” he said.
The city wants to add more bike lanes north of Avenue B and 1-35, he said. “We’re hopeful we could extend this to the Witte [Museum] in the future. It’s not a funded project right now,” he added, but that’s the vision.
A $16 million grant from TXDOT will fund bike lanes along Market and Commerce streets downtown and one mile of separated bike lanes to be built from Flores Street to Interstate 37 across downtown San Antonio. Construction is expected to start on those lanes in 2026.
Phase one of the city’s comprehensive bike network plan sought information on where residents and bike riders want to connect to, and phase two will ask which types of bike lanes are safer and most comfortable for users.
To take the survey, go to sabikenetwork.com
