A red sedan pulled up behind me, its engine almost growling. I was riding a B-cycle from Baldwin Park to Hermann Park in the far right lane of Almeda Road. It was 5:45 p.m.

The driver blasted his horn.

It startled me, but whatever. This is Houston. If you've biked or walked here, you've been intimidated — harried, at the least. We vulnerable road users, as we are known at City Hall, are familiar with mistreatment.

I gestured for the driver to pass, but he blasted his horn again. And then he revved his engine and swerved at me, missing my legs by inches, before peeling away.

My adrenaline spiking, I sped up, pulled equal to him at the next intersection and shouted at his tinted windows.

"You have to give me three feet!" I screamed, among other things. "I have a right to the lane!"

That's not an expression of existential arrogance or entitlement. It's the law, at least inside the city limits. In 2013, City Council passed the Vulnerable Road User Ordinance (Safe Passing), which requires a minimum of three feet between a vehicle and a pedestrian, someone in a wheelchair or on horseback, a construction worker or a bicyclist.

GRAY MATTERS: Houston is hell on cyclists and pedestrians

Anyway, my vigilante advocacy aside, I didn't die. I wasn't injured. But this near-miss put me in the wrong mood to learn about a new education campaign to promote safety for pedestrians and bicyclists in Harris County, launched this month with a partnership between the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).

Titled "Walk Bike Safe Texas," the campaign wants us to pay more attention to each other. We must be alert, and we must be predictable. The campaign's website is loaded with safety tips and rules of the road for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists alike. You don't have to click to guess what they are: Put away smartphones. Yield to vehicles that have the right-of-way. Use hand signals. Don't block crosswalks.

I would like to teach the driver of that red sedan a thing or two — don't play fast and loose with people's legs, you jerk.

But I would prefer a protected bike lane instead.

GRAY MATTERS: Want safer streets? Stop looking for a single answer.

Because the city is getting more dangerous. According to the Houston-Galveston Area Council, since 2015, pedestrian fatalities are up 47.2 percent and bicyclist fatalities 16.7 percent.

This year, a study by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University found that, in a one-week period for a small sample of pedestrians and bicyclists (187 people), there were 133 "near-misses" like mine with cars.

"Safety campaigns focus on behaviors," says Dian Nostikasari, a transportation researcher who authored that study. "But we need to think beyond behaviors."

She says that we also need to think about how those behaviors are shaped by the way our built environment is shaped. "It's about attention and protection."

This is something the campaign itself and its representatives do seem to understand. Neal Johnson, who works for the TTI, wrote in an email that the campaign is meant to be one part of a larger effort.

.@allynwest we understand safety campaigns are 1 way to address safety for ALL road users, urban design is critical. — WalkBikeSafeTx (@WalkBikeSafeTX) July 25, 2017

Eventually, "urban design" is something the Houston region will have to confront. As frustrating as it can be to see a bicyclist riding on the sidewalk, I sympathize and understand why some might be skittish about taking to Houston's streets.

"If you have a big, empty, wide street," says Jon Orcutt, who's the director of communications and advocacy at TransitCenter, a nonprofit in New York City that tries to improve the ways people get around cities, it tells people that "this is a place to drive fast, and this is a place that's not welcoming" to pedestrians or bicyclists.

But if you build and engineer changes into that big, wide, empty street — making the lanes narrower, adding bike lanes, increasing signal time for pedestrians to cross it, widening sidewalks — he says, "that sends a different signal."

What signal is Houston sending its pedestrians and bicyclists? Despite Mayor Turner's promising talk of a "paradigm shift" in transportation when he first took office, not a single bike lane has been added during his administration. Developers are placing bicycle racks outside their apartment buildings and bars and restaurants, but no streets are being restriped or reconfigured to accommodate bicyclists.

"There's nothing wrong with a public campaign, but they tend not to move the needle when it comes to safety," says Orcutt. "It's a proven fact that infrastructure tells you what to do far more effectively than exhortation."

Bookmark Gray Matters. It has a right to the lane.

