Albuquerque City Council is scheduled to discuss and vote on the staff/advocate-proposed 2024 iteration of the City’s “Bikeways and Trails Facilities Plan” at its December 16th session.

In other words, near as I can tell, seven City Councilors who don’t give a rat’s ass about cycling and Councilors Tammy Fiebelkorn and Joaquín Baca are gonna approve the newest Plan after hearing how great it is from a number of local cycling advocates while City staff try to stay somewhat objective.

And then pretty much nothing will change.

ABQ will continue to be great for cycling in some places until the cyclist gets to where, sometimes quite suddenly, it is far from great. This isn’t necessarily the fault of those who developed the plan (heck, I had a microscopic role in its development) and you’ll see below some very nice dots indicating change/improvement. The problem comes down to the same shortcoming existent for countless public policy issues, particularly those in which 7/9ths of a governing body (and a Mayor, now that I think about it) don’t really give a rat’s ass about the public policy issue.

Doubtlessly, there will be public statements from some/many/all of the 7/9ths and Mayor stating that they very much do care about cycling in Albuquerque. But what’s that line, “Never believe what political leaders say, only believe what is in their budget”? That axiom fits very well here, as a close reading of the proposed 2024 Plan recommends funding streams be developed but does so in a City that, in actual practice, doesn’t even fund a full-time Vision Zero coordinator despite much, much high talk and hot air about ABQ’s lofty status as a Vision Zero City.

To wit, here are pages 125 and 126 from the proposed Plan in all its talk and no money glory.

Wading through the verbiage above, I think it perhaps most important to lock in on “However, federal funds are competitive, require substantial staff resources to administer, and are not available at the levels needed to address the full range of desired improvements.”

Well….

If that’s the case, the City’s budget needs to address “additional staff resources” (e.g., full-time Vision Zero coordinator) and outside funding “not available at the levels needed.” In short, CABQ needs to write cycling infrastructure checks to pay for at least some of its cycling bluster. Instead, the Plan meekly does that irritating thing where somebody tells you what you could do without helping you do it in any way.

Which makes sense, sorta, given our 7/9ths and Mayor reality. Those who don’t give a rat’s ass aren’t gonna do anything, anyway, so why aggressively outline how to do something? There is also the long-game aspect inherent in such plans, and it’s possible that, some day, the City will be led by folks completely on-board with budgeting sufficient funds to put this plan into action. I truly admire such optimism and long-term consideration, but in addition to not sharing the optimism, I’ve noticed that political leaders hot-to-trot about anything, a *Rail Trail or cycling in Paris for instance, make things happen regardless of a plan sitting on a shelf. And they tend to do it on their own without even looking at some silly plan.

At least for the foreseeable future…we’re not Paris.

But what about the other parts of the Plan including those aforementioned “very nice dots”? Let’s close this installment up with a look from the proposed Plan’s “story board” illustrating today’s bike map, followed by the proposed future map, dots-a-plenty.

And here’s a legend for the maps above:

I’ll expand upon this further in an upcoming post, but here’s a couple of very quick observations about the present/future maps above:

1. The biggest difference between present & future above are a bunch of “bike boulevards” following low-stress streets/routes that many entreprenurial cyclists have been using for years, after discovering them amid the many, many very far from low-stress streets/routes nearby.
2. The proposed Plan seeks to formally recognize these low-stress streets/routes (yay!) as bike boulevards through inexpensive improvements (improvements?) like striping and little sharrow stencils, etc. (boo!) and meaningless recommendations with zero backbone for expensive treatments at where these low-stress great bits suddenly end/run into very ungreat bits (e.g., where Claremont runs into San Mateo).

I don’t want to spoil the next post on this, but can’t help myself. In other words, the proposed Plan essentially acknowledges the already great aspects of ABQ cycling while doing essentially nothing to further ABQ cycling.

Maybe I don’t really need a “next post” on this. I think I’ll save those possibly interested the trouble and just call the previous paragraph good.

Have a fabulous weekend.

*There are precisely zero mentions of a “Rail Trail” or anything remotely close to what’s included in Mayor Keller’s Rail Trail plan in the latest, 2015, iteration of the Bikeways & Trails Facilities Plan.