$300 Million dollars to "combat" gentrification

[verybadgnome]

Originally Posted by Need4Camaro

Transit in the US is broken for multitudes of reasons. We import the majority of our steel making rail costs extremely high, we have labor unions and more protective laws than nations existing in Asia who have developed light years better transit systems than we have, social conditioning which incurred when many transit systems went bankrupt after the advent of automobiles due to not being able to competitively match them early century before traffic snags became a real issue… …this in turn forced them to be bought up by local governments funded by tax payers rather than riders and their primary focus was to keep them available rather than pricing them to keep them competitive thus they were unable be designed in such a way to allure most would be drivers…

Problem is… …transit is still important… cars can’t solve all commute needs, especially in denser urban areas where there is little volume to make road improvements & parking spaces with higher numbers of people living in one area. It’s a double sided coin. Can’t do with it, can’t do without it. What needs to be done is in some way make transit more effective while somehow reducing its costs but there’s no practical way to do that in the U.S.

As for this plan in terms of making housing along transit lines affordable, it doesn’t really do any good when the majority of home owners throughout Austin will be continuously paying for that affordability, thus making their homes less affordable in process. It’s basically only tipping the scale (increasing housing costs for most residents to decrease housing costs for a few residents) or only entitling one class of people to affordability which most of us would probably not qualify for. Another problem it brings is what happens when these homes need repairs. Most times people sell their homes to investors isn’t because they were priced out of living in them due to the external market, but because they cannot afford growing repair needs on the house itself. I will not lie to say investors will often lowball these potential sellers, but removing these sellers potential equity gives them even less means of restoring their home or moving to a newer home if they ever needed to.

The particular reasons why rail is more expensive to build in the U.S. is not as relevant as the effect. Also that rail and trolley systems went away in the first place has as much to do with buses as it does with cars. If you have this complete roadway network already why not throw on comparatively cheaper buses than build a dedicated, complicate rail system? The last I checked the percent of car free households in Austin was at 6.4% which means transit will remain a niche solution unless there are drastic changes to land use and cost to operate a vehicle......And so to my point is for us not to do anything that makes it less affordable than it already is. The city of Leander is putting their membership to Cap Metro on the line with a new ballot measure. If they pull out that will further weaken the system and concentrate the costs to fewer taxpayers.

As for home repairs I would not be surprised if there isn't a component of that $300M for this. AFAIK there still is a pot of money for home repairs in the area around the old Holly power plant, though the number of people qualifying for it, i.e. low income, is ever dwindling.

On a side note a lot of cities are experimenting going fare free like Kansas City. I mean it sounds good but if, e.g. 20% of a system's budget comes from fares, where now will that lost revenue be made up? Probably new local taxes in one form or another.

[austinnerd]

In the future, "robotaxis" IMHO will further push contemporary public transportation into a niche. Higher capacity autonomous shared fare vehicles (think vans) that have the advantage of point to point (or near point to near point) all managed ad-hoc/real-time by scheduling algos accessible via phone, super shuttle on steroids. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

But then again, I'm a nerd so I would think that.