At the end of last month, we opened a little survey to learn more about our readers and their interests around Austin. The carrot to this survey’s stick was the possibility of winning one of five copies of our recently-released Austin coloring book, and we’ll be sending those out next week. For the time being, let’s take a look at the results and see what we’ve discovered.
To start, we asked our readers to provide the zip codes for where they lived and worked. The top three locations for where people lived were 78702, 78701, and a tie between 78704 and 78751. The rest of the responses were an even spread of areas, with a few more people reporting they lived in Austin’s northern suburbs than south.
In terms of where folks work, obviously downtown takes the cake — 78701 had the most responses by far, almost half. Next was 78704, then 78702 — lots of interesting office space south of the river and plenty emerging on the east side as well.
Photo by James Rambin.
A little more than half of our respondents drive to work in their own cars, with the second-largest bloc working from home. The rest use a combination of biking, walking, and public transit for their commute, but together, only about 25 percent use alternative modes besides cars. One thing we noticed in a surprising number of responses is that people used to ride the bus to work, but the recent route overhaul by Capital Metro has made that inconvenient for them in some way, so they drive instead.
Another bummer we discovered was in the responses to our next question, about whether our readers have ever considered living downtown. A vast majority of people answering this question say that they have, and would actually love to live there — they just can’t afford anything downtown.
Our next question was a fun one — “What’s your favorite unsolved Austin mystery?” Here are a few responses:
“When will the gondola system be built?”
Image: DCI Engineers
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