I just heard from an acquaintance with the Austin Streetcars group that, at Tuesday’s meeting for Future Connections, the Capital Metro consultant pointed at the ends of the UT shuttle bus line as examples of “Bus TOD” to presumably answer the complaint that I (and nearly everyone else in the world) state about TOD (transit-oriented development) and buses, namely, that it simply doesn’t happen in this country unless you have frequent rail transit, not just buses. In Europe, where gas is six bucks a gallon and there’s no parking anyways, you can get it with a bus station, but even there, the focus is on rail transit.
Good lord. I don’t even know where to begin with this, but I’ll try anyways. While I expect Capital Metro to continue with bogus claims that they can get TOD from the commuter rail line and maybe even the Rapid Bus line, I didn’t think even they would go so far out into left-field as to claim you can get TOD from regular, crappy, city buses.
- I’m pretty sure the apartment complexes predate the shuttle bus lines, at least some of them did, and their density is, if anything, lower than apartment complexes elsewhere (some are only two stories instead of the typical three you get in MF-3 zoning, for instance).
- Those apartment complexes have just as much parking in just the same places as similar apartment complexes do along Jollyville, or Metric Blvd. In fact, transit coverage of the Far West area is poor, except if you want to go to UT during classtime. Riverside, at least, has decent transit coverage, but you have to walk a long ways to get to them. In NEITHER place is there EVER any incentive to use transit other than to get to class – it’s going to be FAR easier and FAR quicker to use that car conveniently (and freely) parked in the lot next to your door. The very OPPOSITE of TOD.
- There’s no mixed-use development of any kind in the vicinity of either ‘student slum’. If you dodge driveways and walk a long ways one direction to get out of the area where there’s only apartments, you get to an area where there’s only single-family houses. If you walk a long ways the other direction, you get to an area where there’s only strip-malls. NOWHERE do you find a place where there are buildings with offices or apartments on top and retail on the bottom.
- Neither area is remotely pedestrian-friendly. You have to walk a long ways to get to those strip malls, and then cross a huge surface parking lot to get to the stores. Again, this is the very OPPOSITE of TOD.
Any more? Man, I’m flabbergasted that they could sink this low. It’s one thing to claim that buses can generate TOD (some people claim that BRT, at least, can do it). It’s quite another to point to two student slums as your example.
