According to Austin’s Community Impact Newspaper, the City of Austin has tasked a new City department with studying the impact of adding bike lanes to city streets, to improve transportation flow and decrease the environmental impact of vehicles on the city and its infrastructure.

Creating continuous bike lanes throughout Austin is another project on which Howard Lazarus and Rob Spillar are collaborating, armed with recommendations from the city’s Street Smarts Task Force.

“The focus right now is to repaint bike lanes when we happen to resurface a street,” Spillar said. “We need to move that the other way around — identify bike corridors and try to rearrange the resurface program to do the whole corridor at once. We want to make this a bike city.”

Jennifer Schaffer, a coordinator for nonprofit Yellow Bike Project, said cycling in Austin is becoming a lot more popular as gasoline prices fluctuate.

“We’re fairly decent compared to Texas. But compared to other parts of the world, there’s a lot of work to be done,” she said.

While building bike lanes and trails are important in helping new cyclists acclimate themselves, getting people out of cars and onto bikes requires radical changes in lifestyle, said Schaffer, who chose to live in east central Austin based on her decision to cycle instead of drive.

“It’s really a chicken-and-egg kind of problem with infrastructure. The infrastructure is there,” she said. “We just need room. And the only way to get room is to have a bunch of cyclists out there.”

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