April 16, 2007
Urban Development News: Re-Donkey-Kong!
So much urban development is happening in Austin, we barely have time to hit the highlights. We'd love to offer more fulsome coverage, but we need help. If you are interested in writing urban development posts for Austinist.com, email urban(@)austinist.com (remove the parenthesis) with a few sample posts and some information about yourself and why you want to write for Austinist.com.
Villa Muse Development: Villa Muse (shown right) is a proposed 681-acre mixed-used development 15 miles east of Austin (near Webberville). While we aren't generally fans of sprawling, toll-road based developments, it's hard not to like a plan centered around a record studio. The layout is pretty good - gridlike, few cul-de-sacs, odd-angled intersections, centered on a mixed-use area. Interesting.
Trans-Texas Corridor v. Expanded I-35: Highway-loving Statesman columnist Ben Wear discusses a recent report by HNTB Corp. (consultant to TxDOT) indicating that widening I-35 would cost approximately $21 Billion, while building the Trans-Texas Nightmare Corridor would cost only $9 Billion (neither figure includes lost property taxes - more would be lost expanding I-35). We especially don't want the TTC to get built, but especially don't want I-35 to get expanded. Highways out in the country make some amount of sense. Highways in the middle of a city destroy the urban fabric and increase traffic. We don't want to see farmers get their land taken for the TTC, but we really don't want 2,351 businesses; 166 schools, churches and government buildings; eight parks; and 11 cemeteries to have their land taken to expand I-35.
Battle at Stoneridge Redux: Stoneridge is back on the City Council's agenda this Thursday. Sounds like they are still struggling with how to reconcile the benefits of increased density and increased housing supply with removal of existing affordable housing.
Developing Stories: Seems like Katherine Gregor over at the Chronicle is having the same problem we are - she wrote two Developing Stories column last week. One is a run down of various urban planning events around town. The other is an interview with "New Urbanist guru" Andrés Duany. Interesting point on mass-transit: Austin doesn't have the density to do it right. Austin should focus on building density, leave space for transit, then build transit after the density to support it is in place.
Image from Villa Muse.
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Something has to be done about I-35. Its current design has destroyed the urban fabric. Say what you will about Dallas but the redesign of Central Expressway has reunited both sides of the freeway and improved congestion. We need to emulate what they did in Dallas and get rid of double-decked I-35 . Property values along Central have increased astronomically since the rebuild. I know if we do this we'll lose the asian modeling studios and Taco Bells but that's the price we have to pay for progress.
I certainly agree that something has to be done about I-35, but adding two more lanes would make it worse than it is now in every way. I suggest re-routing it around Austin (bring back East Avenue!). That plan might even make money if we paid for it by selling the land that it currently sits on (to condo developers, natch).
The Villa Muse project, while maybe not the perfect design aesthetically, is a long time in coming for this city. Major production centers up until this point have been LA, New York, Nashville and London. With the right support from local government, this could be a major turning point for Austin's music and film industry...not to mention that of Texas as a whole.
Duany is full of crap - Austin has enough employment density in the three central nodes (UT, Capitol, downtown) to replicate the light-rail success seen in many other US cities - IF AND ONLY IF the rail went directly to them (as it would have in 2000), and not requiring a shuttle-bus transfer (as it will in the current plan). The Feds rated our 2000 plan very highly on ridership criteria.
Rob,
TXDOT is legally prohibited from using eminent domain against cemetaries - and there's also a historic area in the way, too. (That's why the double deck happened in the first place). There's very little they can do; even the large 20-year-horizon rebuild they sometimes talk about involves largely reconfiguring the existing lane capacity in that stretch (not adding very much).
I'd suggest just getting rid of the frontage roads - maintain ONE lane for property access if you need to as a perimeter road; but keep the traffic on the freeway where it belongs.
The other place where Duany swings and misses is the idea that we can build transit-supportive density and then go back and add the transit. Not gonna happen; if there's no rail transit alternative, developers will continue to build with 1 parking space per bedroom / per N sqft retail - you can't get there from here. Even when we relax the zoning requirements, very little will change until that rail transit is there to signal to customers/residents that they can get by with less than one car per adult.
Gotta go with M1EK - a rail line connecting UT, the capital, and downtown would have made a ton of sense, especially if such a line could be linked to a commuter rail running on freeway frontage to residential centers. Do we really need 3 lanes in each direction for frontage roads?
Other cities (not Texas ones that is) don't have frontage roads at all, or have limited access roads, and as a result their freeways are nowhere near as ugly as ours, attracting development to pedestrian unfriendly highways instead of neighborhoods.
heyzeus,
You had me until the "connect the in-town rail to the commuter rail in the freeway" part. That thinking fails everywhere it's tried - requiring a transfer to a mode which then runs next to everybody's cars without going where you actually want to go is a recipe for disaster.
There's one (and only one) model which has succeeded in this country in the last 30 years: run in the street close-in to hit the activity centers; continue out of the urban center and hopefully join an existing rail right-of-way soon to raise speeds, before you run out into low-density land to pick up/drop off at the park-and-rides. This matches Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, Salt Lake, Dallas.
One transferring to the other has failed - outside a few outliers like New York, people won't take a 3-seat ride to work every day; and the commuter rail by itself always fails (South Florida, Seattle, here). IE, unless you have to pay 20 bucks a day to park your car, even a transfer from rail to rail isn't going to win over many drivers. Only rail "straight there" works in the common case of abundant and relatively cheap downtown parking (like we have here in Austin).
Light rail which never leaves the street usually underperforms (Buffalo, San Jose) with an occasional success (Houston); so I wouldn't bank on that either. That's why the naive fools who think we can just fix the 2004 plan by adding more segments of rail piss me off so much - commuter rail took away enough of the 2000 route that it's now impossible to build a successful light-rail starter line in this city without tearing up commuter rail first.
wow, urban development needs a writer and M1EK loves to tell the world the "truth."
i foresee a future divorce.
i-35 needs its version of boston's big dig: put it all underground, redevelop the top land.
of course it'll never happen, it would cost billions.
Hey M1EK: The light rail referendum of 2000 was nearly 7 years ago. It is time to move on.
Hey Bob: It's still the only starter rail line possible in this city which would actually get enough choice commuters to be viewed as a success.
...and if I'd shorted Enron back in 2000 then I'd be a very rich man today. The light rail ship has sailed.
Btw I was one of the 2,000 or so votes that kept the light rail plan from happening.
Villa Muse? Yet another lame suburb. No thanks. Texas sucks. Austin is the only place worth stopping in. Why? Why. Villa Muse=global warming.
Bob, you are a DIPSH*T
First Agave, now Villa Muse. Will East FM 969 become the South Congress of the future? I think not. But I can tell you that traffic in and out of Villa Muse is going to be a biotch. There's only two ways out of that area (FM 969 & SH 130), and one of them is gonna cost you.