The Plan

So here’s my view on today’s unveiled proposal from Project Connect for 2020:

It’s about 80% great, 10% OK, 10% horrible.

I’m not going further than that, read on for why.

I nearly single-handedly kept the idea that Guadalamar light rail was (not only a good idea, but the only responsible place to start) alive for more than a decade after 2000. This was not fun; and it did not win me many friends!

Later, I was the one who taught AURA that it was OK to oppose a bad rail plan, and I was their only model for that, because I was literally the only pro-rail person in Austin who publically opposed the Red Line in 2004. Along with one other ur-urbanist1, I helped build their organization from the very beginning; from absolutely nothing to a significant force in 2013-2014. They exist, at least partly, because of me.

Now, you largely don’t hear from me2, because a couple of years ago, AURA chose to dishonestly cut off my air supply in order to curry favor with liars and grifters. When that happened, the audience for this blog dropped about 95%3. It’s simply not cost-effective to write anything that takes me a significant amount of time for an audience that small; so instead, I’ll continue to use my snippets of low-intensity multitasking time to attack those who help AURA instead.

If you want this to change, do something about it. If you don’t care enough to do something about AURA, you don’t really care to hear my thoughts on transit in Austin.


  1. term-coinery credit to Caleb Pritchard in this excellent piece on Towers Dot Net 

  2. and stop with the helpful advice on other paths. I work in the burbs; asyncronous comments and writing online is the only avenue I have; that other ur-urbanist works downtown in the business; he can still be engaged in ways that simply aren’t available to me 

  3. this is apparent to me by looking at ad statistics from our friends at Google 

m1ek

blahg