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What the fuck is wrong with you, Austin?

crash_davis

By crash_davis
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Samson's Wig

Samson's Wig 3167

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The wife dragged me down to Taquero Mucho the other night, and it felt very much like a metaphor for the entire city.  It was shiny, colorful, and fun on the surface.  The service was atrocious and the food was even worse.  They made a decent margarita (and by decent I mean they weren't chintzy on the tequila quantities).  All in all a terrible experience, though, and not one I would recommend to anyone who enjoys eating good food.  Great spots for Insta pics, though!  /eyeroll

We've become a bright shiny thing with no substance.  Very little about Austin is unique to Austin anymore. You could drop someone in most areas of town and they would have no clue what city they're in without asking someone.  It's not a bad thing, necessarily, but it is a little sad for those who prefer a city with a personality.  No soul left whatsoever.  It's a perfect city for tourists and a terrible place for residents, and our local policies both purposefully created this and continue to cater to it.  Everything is just good enough to be attractive as long as you don't stick around too long, and the margaritas will make sure your memory of the experience is at least a little bit fuzzy.  Underneath it all we're just a cold, bad-tasting taco with chewy carne asada and bland salsa.  (but we have tons of bike lanes, so you should move here for all that time you'll spend commuting to work on your bike and being healthy - we promise you won't stop doing it after the first time when you realize you will have to burn the clothes you were wearing and your coworkers won't' get near you.)

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Bozo_Casanova
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Well for starters it’s the one and only good public buidling we’ve got and it’s so popular that pretty millennial women take their instagram shots and hang out in groups on nice afternoons on the outs

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PvilleStang

PvilleStang 2824

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2 hours ago, Armybrat said:

Austin voters should perform due diligence when researching candidates for local office by inquiring what their exact ties are to real estate sales & development, plus vendor groups that do business with the city.

And how long they have lived within the city limits. plus previous places of residence.

 

You give Austin voters way too much credit.  Most will vote for the farthest left candidate.

2 hours ago, bschoolprof said:

This is a total goatfuck by the way.  Lamar needlessly backs up for hundreds of yards now and it takes an extra 3-4 minutes to get through.  

Too many people busy on their phone and not paying attention to the road...

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Samson's Wig

Samson's Wig 3167

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12 minutes ago, Mittens said:

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/why-austin-tx-sidewalks-suddenly-end/

I'm all in on completing sidewalks where they don't exist.  People should have a place to walk out of the street.   

The widening of already existing sidewalks (to double the standard size) is what drives me insane.

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Armybrat

Armybrat 40648

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41 minutes ago, Samson's Wig said:

I'm all in on completing sidewalks where they don't exist.  People should have a place to walk out of the street.   

The widening of already existing sidewalks (to double the standard size) is what drives me insane.

Yes this, like in my son’s 1960s  St. Elmo neighborhood - but some of the older sidewalks are deteriorated badly.

 

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Samson's Wig

Samson's Wig 3167

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The wide sidewalks come at the expense of the roadway.  It's about narrowing the roads, limiting vehicle access, and widening sidewalks that are not used with enough foot traffic to justify needing to be ten feet or more wide.  Ideologically driven nonsense that will ultimately make the city unlivable for most people.  You can't force people out of cars when there is no viable alternative.  We're doing it backward because we're a young and foolish city.

We should absolutely have 5-6 feet wide sidewalks that meet the standards necessary for the disabled absolutely everywhere it's feasible to do so.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 104226

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Just now, Samson's Wig said:

You can't force people out of cars when there is no viable alternative.  We're doing it backward because we're a young and foolish city.

It all comes down to this.

DITCH YOUR CARS!  So that you can...

- die of heat stroke 5 months of the year riding a bike?

- take a choo-choo train that goes nowhere near 98% of the population?

- take a bus that operates on a route system that can take an hour and a half to go 7 miles?

- take an Uber/Lyft for $30-40 round trip each day?

Those are your choices.  You get to choose HOW fucked you are, but not WHETHER you'll be fucked -- you will be.

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Samson's Wig

Samson's Wig 3167

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5 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

It all comes down to this.

DITCH YOUR CARS!  So that you can...

- die of heat stroke 5 months of the year riding a bike?

- take a choo-choo train that goes nowhere near 98% of the population?

- take a bus that operates on a route system that can take an hour and a half to go 7 miles?

- take an Uber/Lyft for $30-40 round trip each day?

Those are your choices.  You get to choose HOW fucked you are, but not WHETHER you'll be fucked -- you will be.

This is why if we continue down this path it will eventually kill the city.  Anyone with the means to do so will leave.  The jobs will dry up because anyone worth hiring won't be willing to live here.   On the positive side, housing prices will come down.

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Samson's Wig

Samson's Wig 3167

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46 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

They did this near my parent's house on North Hills Drive.  It's rather huge.

Yeah, I'm familiar with that one.  They tried to stick them near schools in the first phases under the guise of it being "for the kids".  Every parent knows it was way too easy for parents to get in and out of those areas for pick up and drop off, so what's the big deal?  Another example of putting ideology before common sense.  If we truly want neighborhoods to be more walkable, first you need to build more schools, zone neighborhoods for some commercial development, and, I don't know, maybe have public transportation.   But no, we're just going to skip all those steps and go straight to making it difficult to drive a car in a city that leaves you with no other choice.  

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ChickenSandwich

ChickenSandwich 9795

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2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

It all comes down to this.

DITCH YOUR CARS!  So that you can...

- die of heat stroke 5 months of the year riding a bike?

- take a choo-choo train that goes nowhere near 98% of the population?

- take a bus that operates on a route system that can take an hour and a half to go 7 miles?

- take an Uber/Lyft for $30-40 round trip each day?

Those are your choices.  You get to choose HOW fucked you are, but not WHETHER you'll be fucked -- you will be.

The smell of hot Pachouli in summer will cost lives. 

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 104226

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20 minutes ago, MissingInAction said:

I got a job offer with a good 15% increase in salary, but they wanted me to come into the office 4 days a week.

Fuck that noise. I dont know what dollar amount it would take to get me back into the rush hour butt fucking.

How much do you charge for regular butt fucking?

Asking for @immamac

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In good news, we've moved into no-murder November. Currently at 55 and after playing catch up in October, things have cooled off. KXAN only updates where there is a change. The line would be where the red dot is:

image.png.15b56c678f9f737e0bb6c8ed9c1ed20e.png

 

image.png.eb7ef6fa426cf725d608757a06686f91.png

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Dbeasy

Dbeasy 14931

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It’s pretty refreshing reading thoughtful, reasonable viewpoints about what Austin’s doing right and wrong, with people not tightly glued to their political party typical party lines. There seems to be common ground around Austin sucking at some things. 

Seriously, the people running tech companies in Austin will tell you that if Austin doesn’t start figuring some stuff out, the parade of tech workers launching into the area is going to reverse. 

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Deej

Deej 76396

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10 minutes ago, Dbeasy said:

It’s pretty refreshing reading thoughtful, reasonable viewpoints about what Austin’s doing right and wrong, with people not tightly glued to their political party typical party lines. There seems to be common ground around Austin sucking at some things. 

Seriously, the people running tech companies in Austin will tell you that if Austin doesn’t start figuring some stuff out, the parade of tech workers launching into the area is going to reverse. 

Donald Glover Reaction GIF

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15 hours ago, Dbeasy said:

It’s pretty refreshing reading thoughtful, reasonable viewpoints about what Austin’s doing right and wrong, with people not tightly glued to their political party typical party lines. There seems to be common ground around Austin sucking at some things. 

Seriously, the people running tech companies in Austin will tell you that if Austin doesn’t start figuring some stuff out, the parade of tech workers launching into the area is going to reverse. 

Just give us 10, 20 years and we'll have a bus that can take you part way to the airport. That'll be $7 billion.

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crash_davis

crash_davis 23076

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On 11/7/2023 at 10:42 AM, MissingInAction said:

I got a job offer with a good 15% increase in salary, but they wanted me to come into the office 4 days a week.

Fuck that noise. I dont know what dollar amount it would take to get me back into the rush hour butt fucking.

Think about the cost of commuting to work.

 

1-2 hours of commute/day, 4-8 hours per week of your life that you'll never get back. Think of all Surly and porn that you'll miss. Plus you'll have to deal with bike lanes. Fucking bike lanes.

Waking up an 1.5 - 2 hours earlier. Less sleep, more bitchassedness.

Buy more clothes for work. Metrosexual clothes aren't gonna buy themselves.

Dry cleaning is expensive, assuming you're not a slob. Just more laundry which is more energy and water usage. You're going to collapse the grid and drain the fucking lakes!

Increase car maintenance cost (tires, oil change, consumable shit). 

Home will be empty allowing thieving assholes to thieve from you.

Your dog is gonna shit and piss himself 4 days of every week.

 

All that shit is not worth 15% salary bump. Fuck that.

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PvilleStang

PvilleStang 2824

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1 minute ago, crash_davis said:

Think about the cost of commuting to work.

 

1-2 hours of commute/day, 4-8 hours per week of your life that you'll never get back. Think of all Surly and porn that you'll miss. Plus you'll have to deal with bike lanes. Fucking bike lanes.

Waking up an 1.5 - 2 hours earlier. Less sleep, more bitchassedness.

Buy more clothes for work. Metrosexual clothes aren't gonna buy themselves.

Dry cleaning is expensive, assuming you're not a slob. Just more laundry which is more energy and water usage. You're going to collapse the grid and drain the fucking lakes!

Increase car maintenance cost (tires, oil change, consumable shit). 

Home will be empty allowing thieving assholes to thieve from you.

Your dog is gonna shit and piss himself 4 days of every week.

 

All that shit is not worth 15% salary bump. Fuck that.

Just do like Fitlump: go work on the City Council, get your dog emotional support animal certified, and BOOM, you can take your dog to work, do jack shit, repeatedly vote for a pay raise when you get bored...

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blacklab

blacklab 11838

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Holy shit WFT on barton springs. Haven't been that way in a while, and now the only way to Mopac from the river to 70/290 is one fucking lane in each direction?

Made a round trip and used it twice. Hundreds of cars, traffic backed up eastbound, and I saw one dude on a bike between mopac and lamar. This was around 10-11am. I can't imagine how bad it is during rush hour.

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Samson's Wig

Samson's Wig 3167

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13 minutes ago, blacklab said:

Holy shit WFT on barton springs. Haven't been that way in a while, and now the only way to Mopac from the river to 70/290 is one fucking lane in each direction?

Made a round trip and used it twice. Hundreds of cars, traffic backed up eastbound, and I saw one dude on a bike between mopac and lamar. This was around 10-11am. I can't imagine how bad it is during rush hour.

Don't worry, everyone will be on a bike soon.  You just have to wait for it.

 

Mad Looney Tunes GIF by MOODMAN

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Mittens

Mittens 8126

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28 minutes ago, blacklab said:

Holy shit WFT on barton springs. Haven't been that way in a while, and now the only way to Mopac from the river to 70/290 is one fucking lane in each direction?

Made a round trip and used it twice. Hundreds of cars, traffic backed up eastbound, and I saw one dude on a bike between mopac and lamar. This was around 10-11am. I can't imagine how bad it is during rush hour.

On 8/23/2023 at 8:19 AM, Mittens said:

I'm a cyclist who uses that stretch of road fairly often and acknowledge it's a bit sketchy.  This is the dumbest fucking idea and it's going to back traffic up into Lamar, way up into Barton Hills, and well back into Zilker.  Just ridiculously stupid.

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Texas Jeff

Texas Jeff 1930

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On 11/6/2023 at 2:18 PM, Samson's Wig said:

I'm all in on completing sidewalks where they don't exist.  People should have a place to walk out of the street.   

The widening of already existing sidewalks (to double the standard size) is what drives me insane.

I'm both pro and anti sidewalk...

If a street has a yellow line in the middle of it, it probably needs a sidewalk.    If it doesn't, it may not.  The sidewalk/bike lane/car lane paradigm put buffer between the people and the cars.  The new wide sidewalks have folks walking a lot closer to traffic, but mostly they are empty.  It's also a little weird for bikers, because I thought you were not supposed to ride bikes on a sidewalk, but I clearly see bike lanes ending with a ramp onto the wide sidewalk ... are wide sidewalks OK for bikes but narrow ones off limits?

I walked my kids to school on roads without sidewalks, except for a small stretch on a yellow-line road.  We walked over 1000 miles without a problem.  I walk around our neighborhood, sidewalk free, almost every day.  Putting sidewalks everywhere would coat about 3% of our neighborhood in concrete, with a lot of that occurring over the root zone of mature oak trees.  Austin does not maintain sidewalks, the ground does move and a lot of our older sidewalks are broken.

We do need a solution for wheelchair-bound folks, and I'm not sure how you balance that need with the desire to keep the green space.

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tx 3 putt

tx 3 putt 75959

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On 11/6/2023 at 11:51 AM, Brisketexan said:

Yep.  Phase two of the Austin brilliant transportation plan.

Phase one lasted decades, and was the "if we don't build it, they won't come" plan.  The fact that the City actively recruited any and all businesses that utilized 1s and 0s in their business for the past quarter century might seem to be contradictory of that plan -- and it fucking was -- but don't question the genius of our leadership approach.

Since phase one didn't work we are now onto phase two: "okay, they came here....let's make it impossible to drive now."  This will surely meet with similar success....as we continue to recruit business after business to relocate here.


Austin has a traffic plan ?

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tx 3 putt

tx 3 putt 75959

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1 hour ago, Texas Jeff said:

I'm both pro and anti sidewalk...

If a street has a yellow line in the middle of it, it probably needs a sidewalk.    If it doesn't, it may not.  The sidewalk/bike lane/car lane paradigm put buffer between the people and the cars.  The new wide sidewalks have folks walking a lot closer to traffic, but mostly they are empty.  It's also a little weird for bikers, because I thought you were not supposed to ride bikes on a sidewalk, but I clearly see bike lanes ending with a ramp onto the wide sidewalk ... are wide sidewalks OK for bikes but narrow ones off limits?

I walked my kids to school on roads without sidewalks, except for a small stretch on a yellow-line road.  We walked over 1000 miles without a problem.  I walk around our neighborhood, sidewalk free, almost every day.  Putting sidewalks everywhere would coat about 3% of our neighborhood in concrete, with a lot of that occurring over the root zone of mature oak trees.  Austin does not maintain sidewalks, the ground does move and a lot of our older sidewalks are broken.

We do need a solution for wheelchair-bound folks, and I'm not sure how you balance that need with the desire to keep the green space.


I’m pro sidewalk. I live in an old Mexican Houston neighborhood full sidewalks and metro. When it’s not 120 out, I walk Al over as do a lot of other people 

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TexasHooch

TexasHooch 5115

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Not a government issue, but what the hell?

https://www.fox7austin.com/news/peanut-allergy-lake-travis-high-school-students-football-teammate-severe-allergies

Quote

 

The school district confirmed with FOX 7 Austin that it was two varsity football players that spread peanut powder and peanut products on a fellow teammate's locker and clothes.

The teammate had a severe peanut allergy and broke out in hives.

 

Whatever happened do TPing his yard, or putting icy Hot in his jock.  Hell, even dumping his head in the toilet is better than this.  At least that won't kill him.

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1978horn

1978horn 880

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Not a government issue, but what the hell?
https://www.fox7austin.com/news/peanut-allergy-lake-travis-high-school-students-football-teammate-severe-allergies
 
The school district confirmed with FOX 7 Austin that it was two varsity football players that spread peanut powder and peanut products on a fellow teammate's locker and clothes.
The teammate had a severe peanut allergy and broke out in hives.
 
Whatever happened do TPing his yard, or putting icy Hot in his jock.  Hell, even dumping his head in the toilet is better than this.  At least that won't kill him.

Seems like assault to me.
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Armybrat

Armybrat 40648

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On 11/8/2023 at 4:37 PM, blacklab said:

Holy shit WFT on barton springs. Haven't been that way in a while, and now the only way to Mopac from the river to 70/290 is one fucking lane in each direction?

Made a round trip and used it twice. Hundreds of cars, traffic backed up eastbound, and I saw one dude on a bike between mopac and lamar. This was around 10-11am. I can't imagine how bad it is during rush hour.

I’m sure Adler was very smug when he sneered at you while he pedaled by.

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