This was already in the plan we approved, right?
Either way, this sounds good to me. Fewer exists means fewer points of friction where drivers want to cut across lanes to catch the exit. Should improve flow once the traffic signal times are tuned.
Plus more bike and pedestrian infrastructure, yes please!
Agree that this is a bad idea.
Small quote from the article:
“The Austin Core Transportation Plan, which is still being developed, aims to prioritize traffic flow, public transit, cycling lanes, pedestrian walkways and overall safety.”
One of these are at direct conflict with the other. You cannot “prioritize traffic flow“ while also making room for public transit, cycling, and walkways.
It’s non-trivial, but the only way to truly expand a downtown’s business district is to increase the population density. Every car parking spot and extra traffic lane is a reduction in population density. Therefore the solution is always something other than “improve the situation for the individual car”.
Thanks for the repost. Sincerely.
W.r.t the comment about the mods at r/austin, I have very little interaction with them. But the back and forth argument between OP and the mods in the old.reddit link you posted look to me like OP wasn’t behaving.
I’m not going to deep dive that further, since it isn’t this community, and would be meaningless anyway. Drama from Reddit has plenty of other spaces here on lemmy.
Thanks again for the general info though.
Sure, let’s look at a more recent example. In 2019 Hong Kong began protesting the CCP. The world watched and threw some support towards the protesters. If it weren’t for the 2020 pandemic that support could have changed into economic sanctions, bad global politics and loss of influence for China.
Those protests were mostly peaceful.
Imagine if they had been massively violent against the CCP military. The world would not have given two shits if the CCP stomped them harder.
Some might consider what Hong Kong was doing as “doing nothing”. Their politicians said a lot of words. And personally, I see a lot of parallels between the current CCP leadership and other dictatorships. So I think the comparison to the current US direction and action is pretty close.
Looks like this all started with “where is the line in the sand” where violence is the only option. I don’t have a concrete answer for that. Violent revolutions don’t tend to happen in developed countries with reasonable economic conditions. Despite high prices, the US is still a developed country with reasonable economic conditions. If we look at the Irish wars of the 90s it looks a lot like gorilla warfare with a lot of collateral damage. Also they didn’t get a lot of outside support, and not much changed.
So, do you want to play the long game or the short one? That determines the line in the sand. And, it is going to be different for everyone. Doubt anyone on the internet can give you a good answer on that, and if they try I’d be super skeptical.
We can look to the civil rights movement as an example of how to successfully enact change. Hundreds of people were killed either directly or indirectly by the state or states inaction. Thousands were injured.
Peaceful, stern protest with minimal escalation is exactly how you keep the support of outside-group ally’s. You need that. You really need that. We are a vast land mass with drastically different cultures throughout.
The alternative is more total bloodshed.
People are going to die, people are going to be injured. All we can do is attempt to control “how many” and “for how many years”.
Let’s say by some magic every person who thinks like you do is suddenly armed, in a group, and is willing to die for their ideas. Let’s say this group escalates the issue with force. How many ICE die? How many of this group dies? Now…. How might politicians spin this conflict? Think it is in your favor? Hell no. The conflict lets them abuse more power. Could it be used to expand executive authority until Trump literally dies of age? How many years is that? Is it worth it to find out?
The US civil war was the single deadliest conflict the US was in. We have only gotten better at killing each other since then.
You may have a different measure of “gone sideways” but I’m guessing thread OP has a much clearer action plan and understanding of just how sideways things can get. Our leader is still “playing” with the idea of a dictatorship. We aren’t actually in one by ‘law’ yet. That distinction is delicate and extremely important.
Nice to see a new food option, but as a chain I wasn’t all that impressed the one stop I did a couple years ago at a different location.
IMO Canes is better for fast, and Tumble22 is better for sit down.
But hey, at least it isn’t “holy chicken”.
Additional article with slightly more context. https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/city-austin-suing-6th-street-bar-pour-choices-repeated-crime/269-0fbe1291-08b1-49f5-b3ae-741b0cf7944f
I didn’t quickly find statistics on “bar” police incidents. However, 19 in 18 months for “the bar and surrounding areas from April 2024 through October 2025” doesn’t sound too unexpected for an alcohol serving establishment along a known party street in a city with a high profile university.
I do wish the reporters had found those statistics.
I guess the up side is that if we have the private business prevent crime, we don’t need APD.
Ok, so a school district does the following:
How is this news?
Not directed at you OP, but something smells like this is just school vouchers support in the journalism. Government contracts always take years, funds get allocated and spent, the public landscape changes and then we blame them that they didn’t predict the future. This shit happens for public road works too. And in general, I don’t support heavy investment here. Though, at least I don’t give them too much shit when “one more lane” doesn’t solve the systemic congestion problem.
This is a great idea. When people are nervous that they will drift from their lane, they are going to pay greater attention. People generally don’t want the hassle of getting their car fixed. The extra space can then be used to add armadillos to the bike lanes or dedicated bus lanes for improved mode capabilities.
Road calming measures can really go a long way to reducing accidents, vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to pedestrian or vehicle with road obstruction. The only downside is going 5-10 mph slower. But on a per-person trip average that might be 2-5 minutes of time. Barely anything for the upsides listed above.
Sure, for a small business this really sucks. Cash flows might be a problem for them after this hit.
But, the burden of fraud losses must fall on something. In my eyes, that means either the individual, the financial institution that facilitated the transaction or the other businesses involved are the only options.
With those options only one entity is capable of building procedures to slow the fraud at scale, properly protect against it, perhaps via insurance or reserved capital with write offs, and is directly involved in the contract creation/transaction, clearly that is the small business here.
The alternatives seem worse to me. The loss of 80k from an individual’s account is crushing. At least the small business has the opportunity to split that loss over a wider group, and has access to business friendly loans.
The payment processors don’t need more reasons to get included in the contract creation or transaction process. They are already exerting their influence on censorship of online stores. And getting regulation to cover the finance sector is a massive uphill battle.
TLDR: sucks that it happened, hope they can stabilize and recover. Alternatives to this seen like bad ideas to me.