Results tagged “masstransit”

The Austin Contrarian did a nice post yesterday on the Design Commission's Density Bonus Recommendations. A "density bonus" isn't quite what it sounds like - developers don't get a bonus for building more density. Instead, developers pay the city (generally to provide money for parks, affordable housing or mass transit) in exchange for the right to build more density. Parks, affordable housing and mass transit are all good things, but density is also a good...

Will Wynn renewed calls for an Austin streetcar at today's Downtown Austin Association Annual Luncheon. Moving forward would require two votes in the 2008 election - one to allow the project and another for bonds to finance it. The new plan would include connections to the airport (along Riverside), downtown, UT, the Triangle and Mueller.

Our market is bringing world markets down with us. . . all because of the subprime mortgage market. Universal Music joins the move away from the use of DRM (except through iTunes). Preview of the nation without net neutrality: AT&T censors Pearl Jam's Lollapalooza performance online. Parisians provided with 10,000 self-service bikes: Citizens bike downhill to work and take mass transit home. The Perseid Meteor shower may be visible late this weekend. Hannah Montana's...

It's the short-haired waitress at Spider House, or the barista at Flipnotics. It's the winsome Bookpeople guy with glasses, or that guy in all the plays at Salvage Vanguard. It's your local secret crush. It's old news that Austin has evolved from a sleepy college town into a burgeoning city of big-city transplants, international ex-pats, Houston/Dallas refugees and former Californians. With this influx has come the influence of new ideas about urban density, mass...

We realize that we often harp on about street-level retail, but it looks like we're justified in doing so: Austin recently ranked second in Prevention magazine's list of the top 10 "most walkable" American cities. Citing each city's use of mass transit, the percentage of folks who walked for exercise, parks and points of interest per square mile, climate, and (oddly enough) how many athletic shoes were sold, the list was heavily skewed towards states...

As 2006 ends and 2007 begins, the -ists look back not at the past week, but at the past year. So here it is, your Best of 2006 Spectacular. And from all of us at the -ists, happy New Year! Austinist was all about controversy as new construction to increase urban density ran rampant in 2006, as did threats to the city's image from gigantic corporations looking to set up shop in town, leading...

Um ... ok. This appears to be some sort of an extremely early stage rendering of Legacy Partners' proposed condo tower, Legacy @ Town Lake, on the NE corner of Rainey and Cummings. It is clearly meant to convey an idea of the size and shape of the building. The details will probably change a lot before this is built.

If you're one of those enviro-avengers styled after the heroes of I [Heart] Huckabees who chained themselves to bulldozers in the name of protecting Mother Earth, a new environmentally friendly business called Austin CarShare may appeal to you. Like Zipcar, it aims to provide urbanites with short-term car rentals, something especially useful to students who typically use mass transit, or to families with an occasional use for a second car. The neat thing is that,...

Ever the champion for green energy, Mayor Will Wynn was in Las Vegas today for the 74th Annual U.S. Conference of Mayors, where he accepted awards on our city's behalf from Sustain Lane (Most Sustainable Cities) and the U.S.C.M. (City Livability Award). Wynn, serving as the Chairman of the Energy Committee, has been the leading proponent for the national Plug-in Partners campaign, a grass-roots initiative that's trying to convince automakers that a market for Plug-In...

We got beat out by Eugene, Oregon in The Green Guide's list of the top ten green cities for 2006. That's cool; we'll take it. The Guide's criteria for the list include: air quality, electricity usage/production, green design, recycling, public health and other factors. What they think about Austin [from their article]:Austin . . . stands out for its commitment to solar power and green building. Offering its customers one of the highest solar...

Earlier this week kissy couples were wading through roses and red tissue paper deeper than an east coast snow dump and singles shook a tiny, lonely fist (no ring!) at it all. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 - Valentine's season is in the can, finally. Austinist is already pulsing with SX energy and posting on the People's Choice Award nominees and the short films that will be playing while the...

Some fast-talking on the part of Mayor Will Wynn helped prevent a strike by Capital Metro employees that had been set to begin at noon Monday. While unionization and the ability to organize and strike certainly does help workers get fair pay, strikes by transportation workers hardly hit people in positions of power.

The terror alert in the U.S was raised to code orange for the nation's mass transit systems in response to the rush hour explosions in London.

Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, streetcars were a fixture in most American cities. Their slow, deliberate, and emission-free navigation served as the early progenitor of today's mass transit systems. And were it left to the environmentally conscious, they might still function as the backbone of intracity transportation. Sadly, apart from a few shining exceptions, streetcar lines today serve more as nostalgic tokens of our recent past.