Houston trip recap: bike trails

I should write something to cap off my Houston trip, now that I've been back in Phoenix for a week. That something will be about bike infrastructure, and how Houston is putting in a lot of it.

Buffalo Bayou Trail, with the Downtown skyline in the background.

During the afternoon of the last Sunday I was in town, I had some time to kill, with the two constraints that (1) I was starting near Memorial Park and (2) I needed to make it to a friends' house in the northwest side of town by six o'clock, more than four hours later. Before setting out, I consulted a foldout map of the city's bikeways and got a notion to go Downtown and see its library branch, which began renovation just before I moved away in 2006, and maybe also tour around Hermann Park to the south. But what I ended up seeing most to my pleasure was something unexpected: a lot of construction signs, construction equipment, and freshly moved dirt—all part of the Bayou City's many efforts to create, extend, and improve its bike trails.

Excavators making things better for the future along the Buffalo Bayou Trail.

Some highlights. From Shepherd, just south of the I-10, there's the Buffalo Bayou Trail, which casually winds its way to Downtown. Most of this trail has been around for years, as this wasn't the first time I've biked it, but there are some new bike bridges crossing the bayou and some trail construction work taking place now. The result is a continuous path that goes from one end to the other without ever crossing a street except by underpass. By the way, tucked under the Waugh Dr bridge are thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats (click the link and search for bat colony). During the day you can't see them, but you can hear them squeaking, just like many of the bicycles passing below.

The signs on the Waugh Dr bat bridge caution to stand back during flight to avoid bat droppings and to never handle a grounded bat.

I noticed only after returning to Phoenix and studying maps that there's another, parallel east-west trail also starting at Shepherd and ending in Downtown: the Heights Bike Trail. Its west terminus at Shepherd is less than a mile away from the south terminus of the West White Oak Bayou Trail, which begins at the intersection of T.C. Jester and 11th St and continues to Antoine, north of Little York, if I'm to believe Google Maps. On my ride, I exited three miles sooner, at 43rd St, which has a continuous stretch of bike lane or wide shoulder westward out of the city, all the way to Bear Creek Park, which abuts my favorite trail, the Cullen Park Trail. I had the pleasure of riding through Addicks Reservoir and the Cullen Park Trail after midnight later that night, and it was spooky dark, with deer and armadillos snapping twigs and rustling fallen leaves to scramble away into the safety of the thick brush a few feet from the pavement. But I forgot to mention about the West White Oak Bayou Trail: Some of the underpasses are currently under construction, and I had to do some awkward bike-carrying across the I-610 access roads and an unfinished median to complete my ride. But soon the trail will provide a continuous, uninterrupted ride.

But I'm still too far ahead of myself. Earlier that day I discovered that the Downtown library branch is cerrado en Domingo. (Seriously, the sign on the door was in Spanish only.) So to Hermann Park I went. There's no dedicated trail that connects Downtown to Hermann Park; I used the bike route signs to stay on low-traffic roads. A Monday–Friday commuter might opt for the light rail to traverse the same route.

At Hermann Park, partially circling around it on the south and east sides, is Brays Bayou Trail. It's about twelve miles long, though I rode it for only one. It connects the University of Houston with Braeswood near the US-59, with plans to extend the trail at that western terminus along Keegans Bayou to Kirkwood. That's only a mile or so from the city limits of Sugar Land and two more from the elementary school I went to for grades one through three.

The newly finished and marvelous Bill Coats Bridge over Brays Bayou.

And of course there's the concatenated super-trails of Terry Hershey Park and George Bush Park. Together they connect the Sam Houston Tollway to Barker Cypress with a dedicated trail that allows for uninterrupted riding from one end to the other. I used it on five out of my six trips into or out town over the two-and-a-half weeks I was in the city.

A blog post is only so long, yet there are many more trails. This .gov page describes many of them, though not all. And there are many more without names, spanning short distances of a mile or so, that follow unnamed drainage ditches in the newer residential developments beyond the city limits. Those might be token bike developments, but they're more than I had growing up in a neighborhood built in 1980's.

Phoenix still holds an advantage over Houston in terms of bike friendliness, though with Phoenix's tepid pace of development these days, Houston is catching up fast. Nevertheless, I like to see a city—even one I don't live in—putting otherwise worthless land along waterways to good use for bicycling. Houston's chief challenge for bringing itself up to a 21st-century mix of transportation, like most other car-centric cities, is finding the will to put some otherwise worthwhile land to that same end to stitch together its patchwork of trails.