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- Wildflower displays this year expected to be only moderate since there wasn't much rain this fall.
- Hard hit by drought, Bastrop County asks Gov. Perry for state of emergency status.
- San Antonio and Austin city leaders working together to lure solar companies to Central Texas.
- Is the honeymoon over? Speaker Straus refuses to hear a motion to allow Reps to voluntarily switch committee assignments.
- Capital Metro rail test today showed that cars at 53rd Street are not stopping far enough away from the tracks.
- Three-alarm fire sparked at a Northeast Austin business at about midnight this morning.
- Whole Foods profits down 17.4%.
Among the Wildflowers [Extra Extra]
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ACL Fest is full of shit. http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/music/entr
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I cannot understand why people still pull their cars onto train tracks when it is obvious that they will have to sit there for awhile. People do this all the time at 45th and Airport and it really pisses me off because not only are they endangering themselves, but they are also putting the lives of the people operating the trains and the people in the vehicles around them at risk.
You're not going to change the behavior of people overnight, and some of them will never change - which is why relying on people to 'be nice' or 'be smart' or whatever at major intersections is not a real good plan. In South Florida, cars got (and still get) hit by both freight trains and Tri-Rail on a still surprisingly frequent basis even after more than 15 years of operation, and most of their approaches have a lot more room with, usually, no side streets anywhere near the tracks.
In the case of some of the intersections in this area, I've been tempted to park on the tracks when there's been guys who would otherwise get in front from a side street and make me miss a green light, and I even know better.
Unfortunately, this is hard for me to blame on commuter rail. 2000's LRT plan wouldn't have run trains here (at least not at first), but there's other intersections further northwest that have similar approach problems where LRT would have run in the same place. I do think, though, that the decision to make this as cheap as possible meant that there was no political or financial will to rebuild or even close intersections like the ones between 45th and 53rd, while there may have been such will with a project like 2000's where there were going to be 2 brand new tracks put in the whole way anyways.