Montrose loses another planned bike lane as Houston Mayor John Whitmire preserves width of car lanes | Houston Public Media

A proposed bike lane along West Alabama Street through Houston’s Montrose neighborhood won’t be built, marking another piece of cyclist infrastructure lost due to Mayor John Whitmire’s transportation policies.

“We have an administration, a new administration, and they have a slightly different take on roadway and how roads should be built,” said engineer Muhammad Ali with HR Green, the firm creating the design.

The 1.6-mile West Alabama Street reconstruction project stretches between Shepherd Drive and Spur 527, from Upper Kirby through Montrose to Midtown. It includes street repaving, drainage improvements, sidewalk expansion, street lighting and new traffic signals.

Ali pointed to Whitmire’s “guiding mobility principals,” which call for the preservation of the number and width of car lanes. The protected bike lane would have eaten into the width of the car lanes, which now must be maintained at 12 feet. At the same time, city guidelines require the reconstruction to expand sidewalks to 6 feet, up from 4 to 5 feet.

“You’ve got all these elements competing for space, so you have to see what can you fit within that 60-foot right-of-way,” Ali said. “So if you have three lanes of traffic, 6-foot sidewalks and trees, then it’s really very difficult to accommodate bike lanes due to these right-of-way constraints that we have.”

The Montrose Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ), which is funding the project along with the Upper Kirby and Midtown TIRZs, is accepting public comment on the proposed design concept via email until Monday, July 7.

Jeff Watters, one of the Montrose TIRZ board members replaced by Whitmire this year, said the administration’s guidelines “put very narrow shackles on the design team on what they can do.”

“Montrose is one of the parts of Houston that people think about where you can have a bikeable, walkable neighborhood with shops and restaurants and bars and all the things that you look for in a community,” Watters said. “We’re losing the opportunity to keep that as a part of Montrose and its character. Bikes and walking paths are being sacrificed to cars, which is not something that the neighborhood has told us that we wanted, and it’s not something that’s in keeping with the character of Montrose itself.”

Marlene Gafrick, a planning advisor to Whitmire, said in a statement Thursday the new design concept “complies with the Mayor’s Guiding Mobility Principles by maintaining the general purpose mobility lanes, providing for pedestrian safety with 5-6 foot wide sidewalks and safe pedestrian crossings.”

“Bicyclists have the option to ride in the general mobility lanes or on the sidewalks,” she added.

West Alabama Street is not the first project to face changes under Whitmire’s administration.

The nearby Montrose Boulevard reconstruction project lost proposed 10-foot, shared-use paths after Whitmire intervened to pause the design and overhaul the local management board. Under his administration, proposed shared-use paths along Antoine Drive in Northwest Houston were also spiked.

Improving safety was a goal of the redesigns, including the projects by the Montrose TIRZ, which uses a portion of local tax revenue for infrastructure projects and other initiatives. In the geographic area served by the TIRZ, there were two fatalities and 18 serious injuries as a result of traffic collisions in 2022 and 2023, the last two complete years on the City of Houston Crash Dashboard. Among those impacted, 15 were pedestrians or cyclists.

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The Montrose Boulevard project led to tension between community members who favored the preservation of old-growth oak trees as well as the width of car lanes and those who were excited about increased walkability and bikeability in the dense neighborhood.

“What I hated about the Montrose Boulevard project was that it pitted Montrose residents against Montrose residents and others about two things that Montrose residents love — which is pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, mobility-friendly neighborhoods, including bike facilities, versus trees,” said resident Sarah Frazier. “I think there are other ways to put in bike facilities, including bike lanes, and part of the answer is probably to do that on some smaller streets.”

Frazier supports the current West Alabama Street reconstruction project because it prioritizes tree protection and preservation. Because Whitmire’s mobility principals prohibit the reduction of car-lane width, a bike lane would have been impossible without affecting the buffer that currently houses trees. She said the city should “find intelligent places to put those bike facilities, but in ways that don’t threaten our shade trees, which are precious.”

The changes to the Montrose Boulevard project drew bitter protests from many residents, who showed up to TIRZ board meetings in large numbers. They also attended a recent open house about the West Alabama Street project to voice opposition to that redesign.

According to Watters, the pause and additional work on the West Alabama project cost more than $80,000. A spokesperson for the Montrose TIRZ said there’s not a final price tag on the redesign yet because the organization is “at the beginning of the process and in fact need to complete the contract in order for an engineering company to start the design.”

Houston City Council member Abbie Kamin, whose district includes the majority of the 1.6-mile reconstruction project, said the situation represents “the insanity of redoing plans, wasting taxpayer dollars, redoing good plans that worked and that listened to the community.”

“All of these redos, the going back, requiring additional drawings, designs, plans, to fit this arcane way of doing infrastructure is driving the city off a fiscal cliff,” Kamin said. “We have to be able to compete longterm with other major cities. That includes having areas that are safe and walkable, that are shaded, that include multimodal transportation — but above all, safety and a forward way of thinking, so that Houston has the opportunity to attract people to our city. We are losing sight of that.”

Engineering firm HR Green expects the two-year construction project to kick off in late 2026.