KT 90 said:
evan_aggie said:
They say it won't effect anything today. So what happens in 3 years when they can't accomplish even half of what they promised at a given price and if federal money doesn't land?
They will reboot a bond or something else stupid to make up for it.
They way I understand it is that a certain amount wasn't approved (like for bonds), but rather a pretty much permanent tax rate was approved to fund it. So this may never go away if they can just keep adding more and more onto the total tab and claim it is all part of Project Connect.
You have to ask at this point, is there any way out of this? It would probably take another election to get this boondoggle overridden.
I'm sadly with you, and I don't see this ever going away. The first portion of it was very ineptly managed, way over budget, and extremely late. Guess what happened after that? People love the romantic idea of it, but these same people cannot balance their home checkbook, nor do they expect anyone else to, so they voted for more of it!!!! It's a touchy feely masterpiece for the folks getting rich off of it. Most times, the people pushing for it the hardest are folks that know where it is going and have already bought up that ROW so they can profit massively off that transaction. Or they are some management company that is going to make money off of it somehow with a percentage of the taxes, not a percentage of the ticketed ridership. Roads aren't sexy, but when everyone prefers to drive a car, see the study below, they are what is effective. A sexy looking concept drawing of a rail station and a sleek (although empy ironically enough) train, gets lots of votes.
Here's a great study on light rail:
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/bridges/winter-20032004/lightrail-transit-myths-and-realitiesIt's a geography problem. It won't work in a sparsely populated southern city, as it will never have more than 1 to 2 pct of the people ride it. Heck, how much has Austin ridership increased in 2022 with gas prices up 2 or 3 times their normal price? I would guess hardly any, although I haven't looked TBH.
Unless you work and live within a mile or two of the station on both ends, it doesn't make sense. Austin is not a densely packed urban area where these type systems thrive due to massive amounts of riders in a very small space needing transport. Sure, downtown is dense in some areas for maybe 10 or 15 blocks, but I am talking about something like Manhattan Island with 1.7 million people living in 22 square miles. That's the kind of place where rail works, and even there, it is below ground because the land up top costs way too much. That's some of the most dense real estate on the planet. But if you can't see the difference between Austin and Manhattan in terms of why it would work there, and not here, then I am wasting my breath.
Class of '93 - proud Dad of a '22 grad and a '26 student!
