What? There's ANOTHER plan?

Plans, plans, everywhere! Seriously folks, the city of Austin loves to plan. One of the more recent plans they released (in February '08) was Phase 1 of the Downtown Austin Plan, entitled "Issues and Opportunities" (click to download).

The plan is trying to address some of Austin's growing pains by reshaping downtown into distinct (and unique) districts, maintaining affordable housing in the area, revamping the transportation infrastructure, and all sorts of other great sounding ideas that include words like "livable", "diverse" and "sustainable". Phase 1 is all about planning to plan, and Phase 2 is the actual planning phase itself.

According to this news from the League of Bicycle Voters' own Rob D'Amico, we now have a rough draft of the Downtown Austin Plan/Transportation Framework Plan (can't tell what it's actually called, but this is it), aka Phase 2. They're hosting it on their site, where they've been kind enough to break it up into bite sized chunks for easier consumption. The entire document is 174 pages, but if you had a heavy breakfast earlier and need some light bathroom reading this afternoon, go crazy.

A couple highlights are the planned changes to many of the main downtown bike thoroughfares, which include adding sharrows, 3 foot wide spaces between parked cars and bicycle lanes (aka. protected door zone), more traffic calming devices, and doing a lot of new re-striping to add bicycle facilities where there aren't any as well as improve the few previously-existing bike lanes (San Jacinto, Trinity, are there any others?) that were given to us under the old plan.

I've only skimmed the plan briefly but it actually looks like some good stuff. I'm going to read it in greater detail later, but so far I like what I see. Nice.

Bottom line: Plan almost done, looks pretty good, now lets get some implementation!