The sight of students cycling to Tennyson Middle School on Sanger Avenue might be cause for alarm given the road’s current condition.
That stretch of Sanger has four lanes of traffic, no bike lanes, an incomplete sidewalk on one side of the street – and a history of crashes.
The Waco City Council on Tuesday approved a “road diet” that will slim the stretch of road to three lanes, including a center turn lane, and create room for bike lanes. The improvements are focused on eight blocks between Melrose and Richland drives, where Sanger currently divides two neighborhoods like a moat.
Improvements will also include modified traffic signaling, pedestrian signals and curb ramps. Construction is set to begin in 2028.
It’s the first step toward remedying a roadway that city transportation staff have long deemed dangerous. That section saw three serious injury crashes and four other collisions between 2021 and 2023, one of which involved a pedestrian.
Federal funding administered through a Texas Department of Transportation grant will pay for most of the project’s $1.3 million construction cost. Waco is responsible for 10% of construction costs — about $134,000 — and associated design costs.
“It’s safety improvements, not only for pedestrians and bicyclists, but also for the road’s primary users, the drivers,” said Enrique Perez, a senior planner with the City of Waco. Perez was not directly involved with the Sanger project but lives near a similar road diet and rehabilitation project that is wrapping up on Cobbs Drive.
“That project opened up the feeling of safety for cycling, but also for running and people walking,” Perez said. “You have that added level of barrier from that car that would now be nine feet away, as opposed to right up to the curb.”
Anecdotally, Waco Bridge staff this week observed children biking to the Lake Air Montessori School on a stretch of Cobbs where young riders were seldom seen before.
Safety benefits
Waco Metropolitan Planning Organization Director Mukesh Kumar said road diets typically see pushback at first because people worry they will increase traffic congestion.
Counterintuitively, he said the opposite occurs when an overbuilt roadway is whittled down to match its actual demand.
“It’s not going to reduce the overall speed of travel – you’ll simply smooth (traffic) out, reduce the conflict points, and improve the overall safety,” he said. There are more subtle benefits for drivers, too, Kumar said.
Center turn lanes can reduce the risk of fender benders, for example. Center lanes reduced rear-end crashes by 39% and serious injury crashes by 26%, according to a Federal Highway Authority study pooling data from four U.S states.
The road diet concept is not new in Waco or other cities across the U.S. The downtown stretch of Austin Avenue was redesigned decades ago with traffic-calming features such as curves and “bulbouts” at intersections.
Washington Avenue, formerly a one-way, four-lane street east of 18th Street, reopened as a two-way street in 2022, with bike lanes and parking replacing two car lanes. Other projects in recent years have shaved lanes from parts of 17th and 18th streets and from Herring Avenue.
Kumar said Waco now has about 35 miles of bike lanes.
The first known case of reducing lanes to calm traffic took place in Billings, Montana in 1979. Safety data accumulated as more cities experimented with the approach, and in 2012, the Federal Highway Authority designated road diets as a “proven safety countermeasure.”
In general, road diets seek to reduce conflict points between road users and excessive speeding with design changes, rather than speed limit signs or punitive enforcement.
E-bikes a challenge, opportunity
The explosive growth of “micromobility” vehicles such as e-bikes and e-scooters could make road diets and bike infrastructure a pressing need for Waco in the coming years.
Brazos Bike Lounge owner Floyd Colley said he’s noticing the shift in his customer base. “I definitely have a lot more people with electric bikes or electric scooters,” Colley said.
Some of those new riders “are getting into it for fitness, but more so for local commuting,” he said.
While Colley’s traditional customer base of avid cyclists and racers will happily decamp for a 20-mile ride through the countryside, e-bike and scooter riders tend to go for short, practical trips inside the city, he said. Improved cycling and pedestrian infrastructure becomes more important with the addition of new, often inexperienced micromobility users.
The combination of limited cycling infrastructure with booming urban ridership can be a risky mix. Micromobility-related hospital visits have surged since the pandemic. That trend is becoming a source of tension in larger U.S. cities as e-bikes and scooters funnel onto sidewalks and mingle with traffic on roads, particularly where cycling infrastructure has been an afterthought.
“If you don’t have that infrastructure, it certainly makes it a lot harder, or scares people off (from riding),” Colley said. “Or they don’t even try it.”
