METRO rolls out buses with bike racks!
They have been a
long time coming, but bike racks are finally here for METRO’s buses!
METRO launched its bike racks on buses program Friday with a press conference and festival event at their headquarters. Woody Speer of BikeHouston and I were among the first riders to test our bikes in the new racks!
The simple idea behind bike racks on buses is improved mobility: a rider can reach more places more quickly with a bike and a bus than she can with either one alone. For example, if I have a 10-minute walk to my bus stop on Westheimer, a 10-minute bus ride, and a 10-minute walk to my destination, then my trip takes 30 minutes. If I can ride my bike to my bus stop in 4-5 minutes, park it on the front of the bus for the 10-minute ride, and retrieve it to ride to my destination in another 4-5 minutes, then I have saved 10 minutes. The bus ride may be the same, but I cut my travel time by a third!
Great access is about having mobility choices, and putting bike racks on buses gives more Houstonians more choices. For more on the merits of bike racks for buses, check out CTC’s 2006 brief (365 kb PDF).
Thanks to Senator Rodney Ellis, Houston City Council Member Carol Alvarado, Council Member Anne Clutterbuck, Mayor Bill White, and other elected representatives for tirelessly promoting the bike rack concept. Thanks also to the many dedicated bicycle advocates — including BikeHouston, Houston Bicycle Club, Greater Houston Offroad Biking Association, Texas Bicycle Coalition, Lilibeth Andre with the City of Houston Bikeway Program, Dan Raine with the Houston-Galveston Area Council, and many others — who persisted in building support for the program. It truly took a village!
And a big thanks to METRO for supporting multi-modal trips, and deciding it’s time to make it happen! The first set of bus routes with racks will run in July 2007, and a map will be available soon. Look for racks on every bus in the fleet by the end of the year. Yay!
For more, read the Houston Chronicle article.
Comments (and bikes) are always welcome in our online forum.
UPDATE: Also check out the great live video feature KPRC-2 did Monday morning: “Some METRO buses go green”.