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Follow TURFBill would mandate all streets be 'complete'
No matter how you slice it, 'complete streets' are Agenda 21 and sustainable development initiatives designed to be anti-car by mandating streets accommodate bikes and pedestrians at the expense of drivers. Bikes can already lawfully share all roads, so this really seeks to give cyclists special lanes all their own. It's also resulted in shrinking the existing footprint for autos in order to re-do our streets for bike lanes and sidewalks. Since 99% of all travel is done by vehicle, such a law would use scarce resources to re-structure our roads for hike & bike lanes only 1% of travelers use.
And this bill would leave it up to an un-elected Transportation Commission as to how to decide what defines a 'complete street,' not our elected officials.
A Texas Lawmaker Wants Every New or Redone Street in the State to Be "Complete"
By Eric Nicholson
February 8, 2013
Dallas Observer
In November, Mayor Mike Rawlings took a stroll down Bishop Avenue to inaugurate its status as a complete street, the term of art for roadways designed as much to welcome pedestrians, cyclists and small-scale retail as to accommodate cars. It was a consummation of sorts of the city's prolonged flirtation with the concept.
But if you thought the embrace of a generally hidebound bureaucracy like Dallas meant the whole complete-streets thing had jumped the shark, you'd have been wrong. It had only partially jumped the shark. Now, the Texas legislature could push it the rest of the way.
Yesterday, Irving state Rep. Linda Harper-Brown filed a bill that would require pretty much every roadway in Texas built or repaired using state or federal funds be made a "complete street."
Highways would be exempted from the requirement, as would little-traveled rural roads. Other than that, pretty much everything else would need to be made more pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly.
What this will mean in practice depends on what exactly constitutes a "complete street," which Harper-Brown's bill doesn't attempt to define. That's left up to the Texas Transportation Commission, which would have until 2016 to consider various sources -- the Federal Highway Administration and a publication put out by the Institute of Transportation Engineers called "Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Contest Sensitive Approach," to name a couple. An official complete streets policy would follow.
Harper-Brown told Public News Service that Texas needs to do better at accommodating bikes and pedestrians and that it's more cost effective to simply require needed changes while the road's already being built or repaired.
It didn't make enough sense for Harper-Brown's similar 2011 bill to pass the legislature, but she's hoping this time is different.
"It's smart for taxpayers. It improves safety. It reduces traffic and it's good for health," she said, "so I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get it through the Legislature this year."
Seems reasonable enough. Then again, the Texas legislature has long been known as where reasonable goes to die.