Music People are biking more and more in Austin in the center part of the city. This is about 40 square miles about the size of San Francisco. We're up to about 5 or 6 percent mode share. People are biking on bicycle lanes that we've been retrofitting, pulling parking out of bike lanes. We've been adding protected bike lanes. We have things like the Fluger Bridge, a 10 plus million dollar bike and pedestrian only bridge. We're connecting our trails to our on-street protected lanes to our quiet streets and just making a whole network. A lot of people are moving into Austin because they want to be under bikes. They want to walk. They want to be in the cars. We have problems here and also with traffic. So people walking and biking. It's an attraction for people from outside Texas to come and live here. It's a fantastic place. It's such an active culture. People running biking and getting around the city. There's a great deal of vitality and vibrancy to the place. Music So the first thing that we're going to get on and we're going to return to at the end of the tour is this third street protected bike lane. The project you see here is a protected bike lane here on third. This is our premier bike facility in downtown. It's our premier east west connection between our radial routes coming in and out of central Austin. And it's painted concrete. So it's a pink paint here. The raised barrier is a device that can actually be removed. So you know at some point the street will need to be repaid. You got to think in four dimensions, not just east west north south and up and down, but also in that time dimension. How do you maintain these facilities? Austin is a bicycle friendly community. It's a silver door right now and they want to become a gold. And now Austin is in such a great job, other staff, all the people, all the community to move forward and getting all this psychoproxmic work, all these trails done. I'd say in the last five or six years the bike facilities here have grown tremendously and people come here just to ride to hundreds of miles of paths that they're planning on building a ride town. I'm really excited about retooling the way we're looking at bicycling is a tool to bring benefit to the city rather than just serve people to bike. And one of the number one ways we're doing that is looking at creating a complete network of all ages and abilities, bicycle facilities. So we are on the Fluger Bridge, this is a bike and pedestrian bridge, and I really consider this sort of the heart of physical activity here in Austin. We're on the Fluger Bridge now, this is probably Austin's best public space. There's huge gatherings, rides often times leave from the bridge. You can come here any time of day and see people riding, walking, taking time to linger. You get some of the best views of the city from here. You can look out onto Ladybird Lake, and it really is a fantastic activity asset for the city. I guess it started five or six years ago. You know, people love to do group rides and it's just kind of a rolling party a bit organically. We like to think of the social ride and it's something like a polite, critical mass. You know that they're observing the stoplights, they're not trying to piss anybody off. They generally do a really good job of marching with each other and watching each other through intersections without upsetting the other road users. A real structure in the organization of the whole thing. It's just people like riding bikes and having fun and socializing and partying with each other. I think the first one I ever went on was less than 30 people and I know I've posted someone over 500 people on the floor. So we have zero conflict between authorities and the social rides in Austin. My shop name is Flowers on the Fly, but I am the cutest little succulent cart in Austin. So I came up with this idea of just going out on an ice cream bike and just setting up all over town like where all the good foot traffic is and just using my bike as a display and as a store, like a mobile store. A lot of succulents and cactus, just because it is a lot easier to handle into care for. So it's worked out pretty much as like the best job I've ever come up with and I'm doing it full time now. We pick up compost from houses and businesses and pretty much connect them with urban farms and local gardens in the area. I do this a couple of times a week. I pretty much have it out and I pick up the compost and then drop it off at a place called Springdale Farms over the east side and it has a lot of fun. This is Austin Bike Tours and Reynolds. We're a downtown bike rental shop. We operate out of a shipping container, pretty simple operation. We rent bikes to tourists, we give them tours, show them a good time. I just heard two ladies today riding down on some bikes. They weren't any of ours, but they were saying how safe they felt while they were riding. So I would imagine those ladies wouldn't be riding unless that facility was right here. Biking Austin is great. I can think of very few trips that I can get to faster by driving. It's a great way to be congestion. It's fun. The weather is great, most of the year. I didn't have a bike for the first two years I lived here and once I got on it, it came to my life. I stopped driving everywhere. If you lived essentially, you can see your bike everywhere and it's often quicker than driving because the traffic's so bad. I lived with people from maybe California, from New York and all this place. I'm moving here. Austin is growing very quick and everything is one of the best coming to St. Louis, to grow at this moment.