This old nugget came up on social media again. At least here in Boulder County there is a belief that the number of unlicensed vehicles are the reason that the roads are in such a poor state of repair. Boulder … Continue reading Car Registrations pay for Roads? Nope.
Back in July, @_anthonyhahn wrote an article which appeared in both the Daily Camera and the Colorado Hometown Weekly about a potential new Kohl’s store in Lafayette CO, and what that meant for the Louisville CO store. Kohl’s to open in #LafayetteCO, leaving future of department store’s #LouisvilleCO site in question https://t.co/aImC6qPMKF via @_anthonyhahn — Daily Camera (@dailycamera) July 9, 2018 While pitting the two adjacent cities against each other in a battle for sales tax is valid, it totally misses the point about all the new development around the 287 Corridor, north of Lafayette. At the time, I wrote … Continue reading Kohl’s and Car Oriented Development
So prop-1 failed, no bad rail, no gloating from me. We still have a major commuting problem. Repeat after me though, we don’t have a traffic problem. One of the problems we have, that comes from growth is so many places are having infrastructure work. Google are all over south Austin laying underground conduit for fiber optic cables, mostly though they are not the problem, apart from a half day here or there where the close off a lane. The RapidBus dedicated lanes have caused some problems downtown, but slowly people have got used to not using the bus lanes, … Continue reading Austin Traffic: Poor planning
It’s been an interesting month. I live in Austin Texas, boom town USA. Everything is happening in construction, although nothing much in transport. In many ways Austin reminds me of rapidly developing cities in China, India and other developing countries. I’ve travelled some inside Texas, but most on I10 and out East. I’ve tended to dismiss what I’ve seen in small towns, mostly because I figured they were unrepresentative. Earlier this month I did my first real US roadtrip. I had my Mum with me for a month and figured a week or so out of the heat of Texas … Continue reading Decaying Texas
Austin Business Journal Editor Colin Pope published an op-ed on the future of I35 through downtown Austin. In the op-ed he was basically saying that any attempt to sink and cover I35 was a waste of money, and they should just add lanes. I added a biting comment pretty quickly on the dependency on cars, the division of the downtown area. Later in the morning, ABJ added a poll to the article, and in the process, my comment disappeared. I re-wrote a comment and posted it last night. Just in case it vanishes again… You want growth in downtown, but … Continue reading Austin, divided by roads
@DanKeshet @cathcam Warehoused cars get driven far less often. It’s not perfect but best we can hope for right now. — Mike Dahmus (@mdahmus) January 2, 2014 @cathcam Yup. I’m trying to understand if they’re “needed” because required by policy, required by investors, or desired by devs. — Dan Keshet (@DanKeshet) January 2, 2014 I got some interesting responses on twitter about my parking madness post. Yes, if was writing a critical analysis, I should have covered all those points, but then the blog entry wouldn’t have been as catchy and would have taken too long to read. Here are … Continue reading Mor on parking
Nothing demonstrates the failure of the current City of Austins approach and transportation policy than these two pictures. We are constantly being told than density is key to Austins future, the central neighborhoods are ripped left right and center for opposing unrestricted growth, either through bogus PUD applications which for the most more about raising the lot property than actually doing something useful. This week, Michael King in his point Austin column makes some great points about affordability, but then takes the easy way out by blaming the central neighborhoods for opposing multi-family development. Finally, the City recently agreed to … Continue reading Parking Madness
The Texas Tribune has a great article reporting on the announcement of a road maintenance program that will convert hundreds of miles from badly damaged road, to a gravel road. The Tribune reports “paving roads is too expensive and there is not enough funding to repave them all, our only other option to make them safer is to turn them into gravel roads”. Later in the article it quotes Darlene Meyer is a 77-year-old rancher whose property sits along a portion of FM 469 in LaSalle County that is marked for conversion to gravel. She has lived in the county since … Continue reading More roads agony
This is an open appeal to my Austin Cycling friends and contacts. Please call Austin 311 and tell them to stop laying chipseal on the inner-city roads they maintain. The cities current double talk is just too confusing. They are heavily promoting a bike share program, they have a roadshow and are asking people to vote for locations to the bike share points. There are seven alone proposed in a strip of South 1st St, that was last night covered in chipseal. If you don’t know about chipseal, I couldn’t have done better than to built this website. Chipseal is … Continue reading Goodbye Mr Chips