Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Austin

Cities Want to Save Lives With Lower Speed Limits, But States Stand in the Way

By Angie Schmitt | Dec 22, 2016 | 316 Comments

Many cities want to prevent traffic deaths by designing and managing streets so drivers travel at safe speeds. But first they have to overcome state laws that obstruct local action.

How Unrepresentative Is Your Regional Planning Agency?

By Angie Schmitt | Sep 12, 2016 | 7 Comments

Do the people who make transportation funding decisions in your region represent the people who actually live in your region? After sitting through dozens of meetings presided over by a legion of white men, Texas transportation reformer Jay Crossley wanted to find out. He recently released the first phase of a report on the Austin region’s Capital […]

Vision Zero Fail: Austin PD Wants to Ban People From Lingering By Busy Roads

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 26, 2016 | 5 Comments

The Austin Police Department doesn’t seem to understand what Vision Zero is about. Instead of making roads safer by enforcing pedestrians’ right of way or ticketing speeders, police are proposing to ban people from standing by dangerous, high-speed roads. As if being next to roaring, dangerous traffic weren’t deterrent enough, Austin police want to fine people who […]

Austin: The Most Bike-Friendly City in Texas

By Clarence Eckerson Jr. | Feb 2, 2016 | No Comments

I was in Austin a few months ago for the NACTO Designing Cities Conference. While in town I was able to put together this look at what the city is doing to improve bicycling, including the dazzling 3rd Street curb-protected bikeway. Also captured on camera: many bike paths along the Pedernales River, car-free nights on 6th street, and the ridiculously long […]

Check Out Austin’s New Polka-Dotted Intersection Neckdowns

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 1, 2016 | 8 Comments

Safer streets for pedestrians don’t have to be expensive, or boring, for that matter. That’s the lesson from Austin’s new polka-dotted intersection neckdowns. In an effort to get drivers to slow down and give extra room to those on two feet, the city recently installed this colorful intersection treatment at the intersection of East 6th Street […]

Highway Boondoggles: Texas State Highway 45 Southwest

By Jeff Inglis and John Olivieri | Jan 21, 2016 | 1 Comment

In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2 (the original came out in 2014), U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group teamed up to profile the most wasteful highway projects that state DOTs are building. Streetsblog will be serializing the case studies in the report. Today, we focus on a road project that risks contaminating the water supply in and around Austin, […]

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