![]() ![]() "That was the strategy of the day - 'if we don't build it they won't come,'" Skaggs says. He says, when he moved to Austin three decades ago in 1990, roadway infrastructure was lagging behind. Skaggs led the movement to defeat rail in 2000 and again in 2014. "That rail would have done nothing to resolve the problem that we're facing today," says Jim Skaggs, a Travis County resident who's part of the Coalition on Sustainable Transportation. However, twenty years later there's still disagreement. "We would have been better positioned to have a more effective transit system overall," says Riley. It wasn't a bond and wouldn't have come with a property tax hike. The plan that lost would have planted an urban rail line down the Guadalupe and Lamar corridor. "Frankly, we really still haven't recovered from that," Riley adds. "We came so close and people in the central city were strongly in favor of it, but it just lost," recalls Riley. "We really missed a huge opportunity with that rail election in 2000," Shea says. "If you don't have a reliable, fast, convenient alternative for people to driving in their cars- they're going to drive in their cars and that's where we're at today," says Travis County Precinct 2 Commissioner Brigid Shea, who moved to Austin in 1988 and served on Austin City Council from 1993-1996.īoth Shea and Riley agree on a pivotal place it all went wrong. Across the region about 76 percent of people commute alone in their cars everyday- that's approximately 800,000 people. According to the Austin Strategic Mobility plan, 74 percent of people who live in Austin drive alone to work every day. "What we failed to foresee was the impact of so many people coming and continuing to drive," Riley says.īy 1998 the traffic trouble was imminent. "I remember feeling like you could get most anywhere you needed to get in about 10 minutes," says Chris Riley, an Austin native who served on Austin City Council from 2009-2014.įollowing World War II, the car was the future. Drivers are accustomed to snarled roadways for several hours each day, but it wasn't always this way. There's no denying we're in the heart of a transportation crisis but to understand how we got here we're looking back several decades. By 2045 the number of people living in the region will double - pushing five million, according to a regional arterials study by the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization.Īccording to that same study, by 2045 travel speeds in the region are expected to slow by 11 miles per hour. This model of socialism has powered American capitalism for over 50 decades.Central Texas is growing at an unprecedented pace. Cars will continue to be sold by private makers and dealers, and even more roads will be built by the state/public. And why should we go through all of this trouble and great social expense to develop this unknown? Because when autonomous vehicles arrive (and this is not a certainty), they will maintain the current order of things. So, instead of doing the rational thing (investing in a technology-rails and trains-that is available and has a cost history), do the irrational one (invest in a technology whose usefulness and true costs are completely in the mists of the future). If humans stop driving and just let computers do the damn thing, so the dreaming goes, the traffic problem will be solved once and for all. Lastly, there is this business of dreaming, which in Seattle's case (and in the rest of the country, for that matter) takes the form of the growing talk of self-driving cars. In all of this, we see that Seattle Times's editorial board is employing what Mirowski calls " agnotology" -deliberately casting doubt about a problem and the effectiveness of an obvious solution-in much the same way an octopus ejects a black cloud of confusion when threatened. And more thought requires exactly what the pressing issue of congestion no longer has: more time. An excellent example of delay can be found in the Seattle Times's recent call to pause ST3 (the aggressive expansion of light rail service) so that the public can put more thought into the plan.
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