Short and not-so-sweet; still no time for this.
Those who didn’t think it was a big deal when the ANC crowd were appointed en-masse to several critical boards and commissions should be ashamed of themselves.
Go to this video. If it doesn’t advance automatically, health care no rx go to C11.
What’s here? Well, it’s just ANC guys Bryan King and Jeff Jack pressuring a property owner on a downtown block to tear down a deck so he can add more off-street parking. Note that not a single time in this entire conversation does anybody, to be fair, including the applicant, even mention the fact that some people patronizing this small business or living in the apartment might not drive every single trip. Only once does anybody bring up the fact that ample on-street parking exists (of course, gasp!, people would have to pay!)
This is downtown, people. This isn’t the suburbs. For those who think the government influence on development is mainly to force density, this ought to be (but probably isn’t) a wake-up call: the primary influence of the government is to force car-dependent development patterns to continue even downtown.
And those who think the ANC crowd and their patron Laura Morrison are going to leave downtown alone and just focus on keeping the neighborhoods suburban should think again, too. Nowhere is safe from these people; right before this video I watched the Planning Commission fail to come to a recommendation on a hotel at 5th/Colorado because the ANC contingent wanted to force another couple hundred grand in concessions for affordable housing (used as a convenient crutch in this case; none of those people actually have any interest in affordable housing or they’d support more multi-family development in their neighborhoods).
Sickening. You were warned; but most of you didn’t listen.
Recording this email for posterity, stomach since I firmly believe this kind of discussion should be in the public eye – so it’s possible for others to see whether the input was acted on or just ignored (as is commonly the case).
Nadia,
This is expanded feedback from the forum – as you may know I was on the UTC for 5 years and used to be a serious bicycle commuter and still maintain a healthy interest, and I live about 500 feet from the intersection in question.
First issue is the fact that the bike lanes ‘downstream’ of the intersection were recently restriped all the way back to the intersection. This removes much of the supposed reason for bike boxes (in the old design where the bike lanes didn’t start for 100 feet or so past the intersection, the bike boxes would have allowed cyclists to be at the front of through traffic so they could get ‘up and over’ rather than having to wait behind motorists – now there is literally no reason to even get in the bike box.
The second problem is one of signage and paint – without a “Stop HERE on Red” sign, motorists don’t typically stop that far back from the intersection – even when white lines exist on the pavement. Coloring the bike box would help but would, I think, not be sufficient.
Please forward my email to the CTR people and invite them to contact me if they would like. I’d be very happy to share continued observations as I go through this intersection an average of 2 times per day, usually in the rush hours.
Regards, Mike Dahmus
mike@dahmus.org
Extracted from a comments thread on facebook; name omitted to protect privacy in case they mind.
we can always count on our buddy Mike to leave no dead horse unbeaten! Certainly Urban Rail will be great (if we do it right) and we all need to support it, approved but calling the redline ‘useless’ is a bit much. Perhaps useless to you, Mike, but so are dozens of bus routes (and roads for that matter) you will never use – that doesn’t make them useless to the folks who do (and will) use them.
And my response:
http://mdahmus.monkeysystems.com/blog/archives/000573.html
(done with the old rail timetables, not the new presumably slower ones which aren’t up yet).
The Red Line is ‘useless’ because for most people, it will be a slower commute than the existing express bus service. We spent a lot of capital dollars, in other words, to get lower quality service than what we already had. (And operating costs are likely to be close to express bus with the shuttle-bus costs added in).
And it is most definitely not a dead horse – because your agency continues to seek to spend additional scarce rail dollars on the Red Line (repeating Tri-Rail’s mistake of trying to polish a you-know-what instead of building something more useful somewhere else) and on other similarly useless commuter rail lines – meaning those dollars obviously can’t be spent on the CoA project.
So tell me, readers, is the argument of the CM guy compelling at all? Before the rebuttal? After? I really mean what I say here – the horse isn’t dead, because it keeps getting fed. Those rail dollars (federal and local) could in fact be saved for the City of Austin’s urban rail program – but once they’re spent on commuter rail they’re gone for good, and we aren’t exactly swimming in other money to make up the difference. We need to stop further ‘investments’ in commuter rail, in other words, if the urban rail line is to have a decent shot at getting built in our lifetimes.
