Austin City Council ends 24/7 hike and bike trail pilot program by Elizabeth Williams November 7, 2013

Austin City Council voted to end a pilot program that kept hike and bike trails open 24 hours a day Thursday. Three trails were kept open through the program: the Shoal Creek Greenbelt Trail, Johnson Creek Greenbelt Trail, and Ladybird Lake Trail. City Council ended the program because the Austin Police Departments overtime budget, put towards paying officers for overnight duty, had been spent. Councilman Chris Riley read testimonies from cyclists who used the trails in an effort to convince the rest of the council to continue the pilot program. Cyclists cited reasons including safe proximity from late-night drunk and distracted drivers. [The] number of cycling fatalities tripled in [2012] from one to three, Riley said. We actually had three cycling fatalities in 2012. What we're hearing from many cyclists is that for them the trails represent a safe alternative to the roads at night. The item to end the program passed with a six-to-one vote, with Riley voting no. Councilwoman Kathie Tovo voted to end the program, but said that the city should seek alternatives that somehow still allowed the use of the trails at night. Mayor Lee Leffingwell reported that an average of 10 cyclists used the trails at night and that the program, since it began in June, cost the city approximately $1 million in police overtime and trail maintenance. APD Police Chief Art Acevedo came to the stand to explain why the police department was in favor of ending the program. Acevedo said that the overtime budget used to pay overnight officers on these trails had been spent. He also said that there were not enough cyclists using the trails to constitute allocating major resources towards keeping the trails open. The trails are not like the streets where you can see them, Acevedo said. They are isolated and you can't patrol them with police cars like we do the rest of the city and it's just a very challenging and different environment. So we would anticipate moving those DRs at the end of this month and then adding the other three [officers] for our overtime, which is about $300,000 a year. The city initially set aside $350,000 for a four-month trial, from June to September. The vote to end the program was postponed until October. If the program continued, the officers assigned to patrol the three trails at night would be pulled from direct representative neighborhood patrols. Acevedo estimated that six to nine DRs would be pulled away from neighborhood patrols.

Citizens voiced concern over losing their direct representatives to have protection for what many felt were too few cyclists. Citizen David King spoke at the meeting in favor of finding a way to protect the trails without pulling direct representatives from neighborhoods. Neighborhood patrols are important and their presence there does make a difference, King said. I wouldn't want to have to give up that protection, that presence in the neighborhood for a little bit of a good benefit for a few trail users at night. Seems like that's not a good cost-benefit there. Roy Whaley, conservation chair for the Austin regional group for the Sierra Club, spoke on behalf of continuing the program. Whaley said that the trails do not need to be closely monitored because the rest of the citys streets are not consistently closely monitored. [Direct representatives] don't patrol every street every night, Whaley said. Why do we have to patrol the trails every night? We know that we use our transit system at a certain risk to ourselves. The same is true with our trails.