After six-ish years working in urban planning and design, I can confidently say that nothing gets people more riled up than parking -- not even traffic compares. This is especially true in Austin, as we frequently hash out the merits of parking-centric topics like parking minimums, parking podiums, event parking, and residential parking permits. The city's Residential Permit ...
walkability
Austin Can’t Build Its Way Out of Traffic
If you live in Austin, chances are you drive a car to get most places you need to go. And chances are at least some of the time, you sit in traffic and get pretty frustrated about that. And chances are, you don’t necessarily want more of our city’s precious natural beauty to be paved over, but that’s just what we have to do to alleviate this traffic that’s grown so awful, ...
These Are the Downtown Streets Austinites Want to Transform
The intersection of Fourth and Lavaca Streets in downtown. Photo by James Rambin. We recently asked our readers to tell us which downtown Austin streets, if they were given the keys to the city through some supernatural force, they might like to close to traffic and convert into shared pedestrian plaza spaces -- think of something like the 16th Street Mall in Denver, ...
Pretend You’re the Mayor for a Day and Close a Street in Downtown Austin
As downtown Austin residents and true believers in the power of design to shape the human experience of the urban environment, it's our job to periodically remind y'all that the best way to create fun, safe, and memorable public spaces in cities is to pick a street and take away some (or all!) of the cars. Denver's 16th Street Mall is a mile-long downtown space designed ...
Can We ‘Tidy Up’ Our Cities?
Marie Kondo is the diminutive dynamo of breakout Netflix series Tidying Up,which examines how people with disheveled homes can find peace and harmony by applying her approach to surveying, discarding, organizing, and displaying the objects that fill our homes, known as the KonMari Method. “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it.-- Marie ...