Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, March 8, 2011,
Item 7
>> item number 7 is to consider and take appropriate action on proposal to create a joint task force to address bicycle safety on Travis County roads in the unincorporated areas.
>> a few weeks ago we brought to the court the notion of establishing a task force to look at a very narrowly focused aspect of bicycling in unincorporated areas of the county, and that is safety.
we think there are unique challenges particularly in the eastern parts of the county where we have historically had pavement cracking to the extent that you won't see elsewhere.
opening cracks as wide as three or four inches and going down several feet because the roads were built over very spansive soils.
that is not something you find in many places.
I have worked in many places around the country and it's an unusual problem, to me anyhow.
so what we wanted to do is to compliment what we see the city of Austin has completed as far as a bicycle plan, a wonderful document, very comprehensive, a lot of partners involved.
we don't want to recreate that or duplicate that.
we want to compliment it with another component that just speaks to the unusual things that bicyclists might encounter in parts of Travis County.
toward that end we do have some folks who have expressed independent in participating in that.
joe gieselman for one, lee row click communicating back and forth with the city.
we wanted to draft up some information that could be attached to what the city of Austin has done to further alert bicyclists about these unusual problems. Whatever we come up with, we will distribute that amongst the bicycling community to receive their comment.
make they have a better way of stating something that we didn't.
or they may have other thoughts about how best to communicate this information to the bicycling community at large.
with that we would like to ask the court's permission to proceed with forming the task force and developing our ideas on how we are going to communicate this information, then inviting input from the public and the bicycling community.
>> at what point does the court get to see the task force numbers?
>> well, the task force members at this point are going to be joe gieselman, charlesberg, leroy click, any member of the court, if you have staff that would like to be put on that.
we would offer to the city as well as an opportunity to sit on that, although I don't know that they would jump at that chance because it is such a narrowly focused study, so to speak.
but we would offer that.
whatever comes out of it would be something that we would present to the bicycling community.
that would be the plan.
if you would rather us proceed in a different manner, that would be fine too.
>> I think the court ought the approve a list of members.
>> okay.
>> because they will be acting on behalf of Travis County.
>> okay.
>> right?
are the four bullets listed on the issues and opportunities what you would consider to be the charge?
>> yes, sir, I do.
>> I think we ought to see the membership.
and if you are inviting court members today to give you one or two names, I guess mine would be Commissioner Eckhardt is the only bicyclist I know well.
is that the invitation today?
>> yes, sir.
>> I will happily work with the task force.
would it be your direction for us to go find, say, two additional individuals from the cycling community to be included on the task force?
joe gieselman technically is a person from the cycling community rather than internal at this point, having retired.
>> right.
>> joe accepted this assignment before he was appointed to the citizens bond committee.
can he do both?
have we asked him about doing both?
>> I have spoken with him.
he is on board with doing both.
>> the luxury of being a retiree.
plenty of time.
all right.
>> judge, I need to ask how are you going to facilitate the initiative to actually contact the biking community to see if there is input, which would be input driven to some degree from the bicycling community, how will that be done?
>> my understanding is there are bicycling organizations.
>> bicycling community is very well organized and there are several groups that are represented, pretty much the full spectrum of bikers.
perhaps the only one I can think of is the skirt commuters like myself don't really have an organization.
but I think that we could quite easily develop a list serve of interested organizations as well as identify two or three or however many the court suggests additional citizen members to work with the task force that are representatives of the bicycling community.
it breaks down roughly into hard core athlete cyclists and commuter bikers.
roughly those are the two categoer.
and within the hard core athlete cyclists there are road bikers and trail bikers, but we would be looking at road bikers.
>> okay.
>> what I would propose, unless you need us to come back and present a full list of names, is that we now have Commissioner Eckhardt, joe gieselman, leroy click, charlesberg, could the court direct us to select a task force member from one or two of the these organizations and go forward from there?
or do you want us to come back with those additional names?
>> I believe the court ought to approve the membership.
>> the precise name.
okay, that is fine.
>> I don't know that that should take forever.
>> no.
>> if you find out on Friday at three in the afternoon, we can put it on as an added item and get it done.
>> I think we can have a list complete by next week.
>> that ought to give them official status that otherwise I don't know that they have.
>> okay.
>> Commissioner Eckhardt, is there a motion?
>> I move the creation of the task force with the additional work of identifying two to three additional citizens to work on the task force for these deliverables.
>> seconded by Commissioner Davis.
discussion?
all in favor that passes by unanimous vote.
thank you much.
>> thank you.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, March, 2011 2:19 PM
