The author makes the same mistake as so many others in assuming that people's behaviour cannot change and that car traffic will always be present. The reality is that when car infrastructure is correctly priced and alternatives are available, the behaviour of people changes and car use declines. There's no need for any of this elaborate separation of traffic.
The answer to Austin's traffic problems is the same as for all cities. Reduce space for cars (roads and parking) and put that space to better use, whether it be for more efficient transportation options (ie. bicycles and public transit) or for housing and amenities.
The author cites Vancouver's grade separated Skytrain as a model to follow but didn't bother looking at the real success of Vancouver's transportation system, which is that as of 2014 only 50% of trips are taken by car. This milestone was achieved not just due to Skytrain, but due to huge gains in walking and cycling trips. Vancouver built a great transit system yes, but has also densified the city, built a great deal of separated bike lanes, never built a freeway, and most important of all has not expanded road capacity at all for decades. Traffic entering the city decreased by 5% since 1996 and entering downtown decreased 20%, while the population living and working in the area has dramatically increased.
The amount of cars entering Vancouver's downtown has been unchanged since the 1960s.
Having lived in Vancouver, we've still got a long way to go towards improving our alternative modes of transit. The car still remains king in the suburbs, and the political force of suburban drivers has been a significant blockade towards further public transit infrastructure funding.
One of the main issues with elevated roadways / trains / bike lanes / what have you over city streets is the relatively dark and undesirable areas they create below them. Seattle had this problem back at the turn of the century, and it generally doesn't create a nice urban atmosphere to have massive elevated roadways above the main city, even if it's trains or bikes that run on them.
That's why cities like San Francisco consider tearing down their elevated freeways and replacing them with surface streets -- it creates a more desirable atmosphere when you're below. (Think the Embarcadero.)
Chicago's L is efficient, certainly, but the entire downtown core is hidden under a dark, loud, shaking train track. It's not the most pleasant thing to spend your time around.
Yeah that's definitely an issue. A way Tokyo has solved this is by building buildings underneath roadway/train lines. Things like cheap restaurants, cafes (and of course the train stations themselves).
This works pretty well because you're usually close to a station so people wanting to use these facilities don't often require parking.
EDIT: A particularly clean example of this is 2k540 in Okachimachi. A bunch of kinda artsy stores, lots of lighting... kinda feels like a small mall except it's outside.
The Boston Big Dig was a great improvement -- buried the highway and revitalized downtown and Seaport.
Maybe Austin should do something similar. It can narrow the streets and build some underground highways. Leave the above-ground for pedestrians and bicycles, traffic that can actually stop if it spots something interesting. Cars mostly go from here to there, never stopping in-between.
Buses are much cheaper than trains and can be re-routed if it turns out the population centers shift.
You make a good point. I wonder if the effect of an elevated bikeway would be as undesirable as a roadway. One guess is that an elevated bikeway would require significantly less space both because of the width of bike lanes vs. cars and the need to bear the weight of semi-trucks. Surely the underbelly of a bikeway could be significantly less sketchy?
I think an elevated bikeway would definitely be less terrible than an elevated train or six-lane freeway. It'd be both narrower and quieter. It would still be kind of unfortunate for those under it though, especially if they wanted to proceed with the "urban elevated parkway"-type concept (which granted is pretty cool for the people above).
That said, from the sound of the traffic problems in the article, I think Austin is going to need a lot more than just bike lanes. It's expensive, but they might need to bite the bullet and build a proper subway.
It's only Wabash, Wells, Lake and Van Buren in the downtown core, so you can always head one block over. Of course, depending on the time of day it'll still seem dark due to the size of the buildings.
The noise is the major issue with the L. And they certainly could do something about that, but honestly, the city has more important issues they should be spending money on (the schools are getting completely screwed over, and a couple of high crime areas need real solutions).
> Has any city jumped from regional center to international metropolis so quickly, without ever passing through a period of being a national city? Austin has emerged as a world-class destination and a world-shaking center of innovation in a decade.
Why do I keep hearing this, but only from Austinites? I put Austin in about the same category as Minneapolis; I'm vaguely aware it exists but not of anything going on there.
What are the major globally relevant corporations headquartered in Austin? Major NGOs? Famous cultural events? (Compare the level of coverage of SXSW to London Fashion Week). Dominant, influential film studios or publishing houses?
Why do I keep hearing Austin talked about in the same breath as SF or New York as a major global city? It's not even a "national city" to me.
Austin has... something of an ego. It thinks of itself as the center of Texas - not completely unjustly, as it is the capital. Since Texas is obviously the best, greatest, most important, and all-around awesomeist place in the worst, it obviously follows that Austin is the best city in all of time and space.
It's got some hipster cultural cache and is a regional cultural and economic center... if your primary language is English.
Don't get me wrong, Austin is probably the best city in Texas, but it's still in Texas.
Honestly, I think only New York and Los Angeles really qualify as "global" cities in the US. Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and DC would be a step below that, and then it gets harder to define - Seattle, Minneapolis, Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, and a number of other cities could be considered a third tier, depending on the criteria you use (major companies based there, cultural attractions, etc.) But again, that gets much more subjective.
> The abruptness of Austin’s success ... is causing a whole range of problems, unfolding in fast-forward — water supplies, electric supplies, gentrification.
We have to stop calling what's happening in Austin "gentrification." We are segregationists. Our laws prevent mixed-income neighborhoods from existing.
I agree that we are segregationists. I think it's in our nature as well as our laws. What's wrong with the term gentrification? It looks like it's a noun with two meanings, neither of which seem bad.
gentrification:
1. the process of renovating and improving a house or district so that it conforms to middle-class taste.
2. the process of making a person or activity more refined or polite.
You can call it whatever you like, but for reference, the laws that are being described as "segregationist" are laws regarding minimum lot size. These laws are no more inherently racial than "gentrification". In both cases they only affect black people disproportionally because (quoting from the video) "black people have less money"
Actually, he said that "minorities make less money" in the video. That seems like a racist statement, as he chose to ignore an important minority group, asians.
Why downvote this one? I corrected the misquote and pointed out how the speaker in the video chose to ignore asians to misconstrue his issue as being about minorities in a racist way. If the video had featured a white person whispering something disparaging (and false) about minorities would you feel the same way?
I just moved to Austin. I am super blessed to live 8 min bike ride from the heart of the city downtown. It's a nice city and I experience(d) the killer traffic jam every time I want to go somewhere which is outside of my bike-able range. I can't believe what it must be like to live north or south and have to be stuck in your car daily. Maybe feels like Elon Musk when he came up with the Hyperloop idea?
I think the option with the elevated bike would work well, considering there are a lot of cyclists and "free bikes" (like in London you can get them for free for 30min with the membership card).
As someone who's lived in Austin (left in Sep 2012 to the Bay area and still have friends there) I chuckle when people say Austin is a tech hub. Sure there are satellite tech offices and a growing startup scene, but it is nowhere close and I mean like light years away from the innovation done in the Bay area.
And I don't understand the fascination with Austin; downtown area is nice, rest is all boring suburbs (IMO) just like any other place in Texas.
Edit: Does anyone care to comment on the downvotes?
My experience of living in the Bay Area was mostly "boring suburbia" as well, which I suspect you can find nearly everywhere in the US. There's SF, which is a very dysfunctional city, and incredibly expensive to live in. But most of the tech jobs and employees are in Silicon Valley, which is slightly cheaper but still expensive, and very much suburbia. The quintessential Bay Area experience to me is sitting in traffic on the 101, while trying to get to or from a suburban office park in Santa Clara or Mountain View. Followed maybe by dinner in a San Jose strip mall. I would not move back unless it was really a can't-say-no offer job-wise.
>Edit: Does anyone care to comment on the downvotes?
Probably the dismissive tone.
The Bay area is unique throughout the world, so saying a city isn't a tech hub just because it isn't the Bay is silly. Forbes and others have written quite a articles about how Austin (And Dallas, and Chicago, and others) are all well on their way to being tech Meccas, and have backed it with actual data, e.g. http://www.forbes.com/sites/navathwal/2015/02/12/5-markets-p...
So, your comment can come across as antagonistic and with a fair amount of hubris.
How do you define a tech hub? Is it R&D or is it operations (maintenance/sustaining, DevOps, tech support, biz dev)?
If it's R&D, clearly Austin is no tech hub. Only a handful of semiconductor companies and maybe a few software companies do _substantial_ R&D in Austin (a minor project doesn't count).
I think you are missing the acknowledgement of the understandable myopia that most greenhorn Austinites have.
Austin has had many years of tech manufacturing and roots for large enterprise companies, so in a sense it has been heavily a tech hub for decades, but not when it comes to software and startups for which Silicon Valley is known for.
Your pretentious and heavy-handed description description of the suburbs and outer environs ignores the beautiful nature trails, pristine open-land, outdoors-oriented, and mostly nice attitudes of comforted Texans.
I also lived in Austin and am in The Bay Area now as well. Back in Austin I had a drum kit to play, rent was $1000/month for a decent one bedroom (took time to find but it was there), and there were plenty enough tech meetups and companies that were plenty substantial to check out, and I personally would love to move back there in a decade or so when I'm more senior in my career, especially when it comes to owning property downtown, which is impossible in The Bay. That being said, your opinion is valid and I don't know why it was downvoted either.
In my experience, most of the people that really love Austin are the types that have never lived in a large diverse city before. Of course Austin is great compared to some small town. There's no point of reference.
Tech hub comparisons to Bay area don't mean much, I think. Is there any place at all that's comparable? Anywhere in the world? It doesn't mean other places aren't tech hubs. (and doesn't mean Bay area can survive this kind of unique environment for long) I'd rather see comparison by tech-vs-size that involved other, more normal places. Or as a percentage of jobs.
Has traffic decreased anywhere? It seems like everyone in every city is complaining about how much worse traffic is. This whole country needs massive improvement in people movers. Dedicated bike lanes, hyperloops, driverless cars - we need them - bring it on!
In the last couple decades, rural areas/small metros have lost people, medium sized metros have been stable, and large metros have gained. Large metros were already the ones with bad traffic, and now it's worse.
I live in Austin and i walk/Uber everywhere and largely agree with the author, we need better public transit absolutely. I'm wary of this line of thinking however "Our population is largely young and vigorous. ", a significant portion of people who could use better non single passenger car options are certainly not so young and vigorous, and it's worth noting that even those that are now won't be forever ;)
I think bikes are great, more bike options for sure, 10000. However in my opinion they're not a great solution to the transportation problem for most people.
Elevated anything kills the street experience for pedestrians, which is once of the central points of having urbanism in the first place. Urbanism isn't about getting to point A to point B as fast as possible, it's about a dense network of interactions.
I bet the writer would change his opinion if he learned more about urban design. The final image is pretty much a poster child for what NOT to do (similar to Le Corbusier's vision for Paris).
The solution is to build more densely to make car trips less practical and to have better public transit that can't get stuck in traffic.
The writer is also talking about raising the pedestrian areas as well though. Surely it doesn't matter how dark and uninviting the ground level is if no one actually needs to walk there?
It's the biggest fallacy in armchair transit planning: Misunderstanding what induced demand means. If the system is at capacity everywhere, but you build to the point where a modality(any modality) is no longer congested, new demand will shift towards that modality. Thus, you can have a city where all the trains are packed, or one where it's the highways. Presumably, if you invested enough in them, bikes and buses could go the same way.
But what you can't do is create an "all-around" city where every transit option has equally low congestion. People will show a preference for whichever mode they got used to, and fill the others only as they hit their tolerance limits - not because one is faster, or cheaper, unless it's substantially so(and then congestion will arise to even the odds). This typically manifests today in a city crowding the highways but leaving the buses empty. New construction will mostly be used by newcomers unless there is some disincentive to drive, like downtown congestion charges, reduction of parking, smaller roads, etc.
The bus lane capacity thought experiment equates velocity to throughput. This is obviously wrong; while a bus interferes with some traffic, it also pulls more people into less space. Multiply that along the whole route, at high frequency, and you end up with geometric efficiency. A bus may go at a third of the speed, but it carries easily 10x as much as a four-seater, and bigger buses could hold even more. At the peak hours, congestion and slow speeds are assumed and vehicle capacity starts to matter for delivering the most commuters home in a timely fashion.
Then consider the network benefits of running more routes and connections at higher frequencies. Public transit has to hit a certain critical mass of densities and destinations before it really takes off; most of the US today, being heavily suburbanized in the mid-century fashion, does not enjoy this. But the New York City region got there, and several other metros are showing signs of moving in this direction. Access to transit is implicitly improving now that we're in the era of electric rideable vehicles and people making their first/last-mile connection can go at 10-15 MPH on whatever weird gadget they want without breaking a sweat or having to find lockup space. Capacity becomes a complicated equation with all these factors.
The answer to Austin's traffic problems is the same as for all cities. Reduce space for cars (roads and parking) and put that space to better use, whether it be for more efficient transportation options (ie. bicycles and public transit) or for housing and amenities.
The author cites Vancouver's grade separated Skytrain as a model to follow but didn't bother looking at the real success of Vancouver's transportation system, which is that as of 2014 only 50% of trips are taken by car. This milestone was achieved not just due to Skytrain, but due to huge gains in walking and cycling trips. Vancouver built a great transit system yes, but has also densified the city, built a great deal of separated bike lanes, never built a freeway, and most important of all has not expanded road capacity at all for decades. Traffic entering the city decreased by 5% since 1996 and entering downtown decreased 20%, while the population living and working in the area has dramatically increased.
The amount of cars entering Vancouver's downtown has been unchanged since the 1960s.