‘Where ambition goes to die’: These tech workers flocked to Austin during the pandemic. Now they’re desperate to get out.::Drawn by the promise of an emerging tech hub, some tech workers who flocked to Austin found a middling tech scene, subpar culture, and scorching heat.
The traffic argument is so infuriating. When will American journalism, and Americans at large, realize the very simple truth: no large city in the US will ever exist without traffic, without a fundamental shift from our car-centric culture and development to transit-oriented?
Yeah, I hear you, but what if we add another 7 lane highway that cuts right through the center? I think that would solve the issue
-random US city response, probably
random US city response, probably
Not random. You just described Houston, Texas.
Atlanta as well. The frustrating thing is that Atlanta has MARTA, but the state refuses to fund it and MARTA’s answer for everything is to divert funds away from rail to bus lines. But then the degraded rail service means more people drive than ride trains, thereby increasing gridlock, which causes bus service to suffer. So then MARTA diverts funds away from rail to bus lines…
not just any rando city, literally Austin https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/27/a-75-billion-boondoggle-advances-in-austin
It is not possible to explain the horribleness that is Austin road planning and the complete and utter lack of available transit. Exhibit 1 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/2/27/a-75-billion-boondoggle-advances-in-austin
Just consider what it must mean for an average Californian to say traffic is bad. These aren’t people coming from rural Montana complaining about city traffic.
I feel like for $7.5 billion they could build a city wide monorail system with tons of stops. Charge a few bucks a ride and it pays for itself. Or make it totally free and see what happens when your city suddenly has total freedom of movement. Bet it would have huge economic benefits for everyone. (So of course it’ll never happen.)
I’m not sure. Public transportation infrastructure is insanely expensive. Where I live (France), there was a project to add a new subway line. A single one. Estimated cost was more than 2 G€. And that’s before taking into the numerous issues of another subway line modernization program…
The issue with Austin is most of the traffic isn’t Austin residents. A shitty Austin house will cost $300,000 more than the exact same house 30 miles away.
Austin is quickly becoming one of the most expensive cities in the county. Which, by the way, is another reason it’s being abandoned. Companies came here on the promise of cheap housing, and house prices in the area tripled in 5 years
So it’s super expensive, hot, has shitty traffic, and it’s a liberal island trapped in a state run by land developers and fascists.
When you are at the point where you are building roads from hell like that maybe it is time to start looking at alternatives. It smells like a sunk cost fallacy in the works.
I see the article addresses something I saw firsthand. I remember they expanded rt 3 (a popular route to access rt 95/128 into Boston) because it was getting jammed during commutes. I said to myself “That will be jammed again in a few years”. Sure enough, everyone moved to places fed by it and started switching to it and it was jammed up again.
People moved there because anything inside 128 costs a million dollars. I have friends with pretty good jobs who can’t hope to afford to live closer to Boston. MA has their “MBTA Communities” upzoning push but it doesn’t go far enough, IMO. We need to eliminate single family zoning entirely.
City Beautiful also has a good video on the shitshow that is I-35. TX DOT must have a little shrine to Robert Moses in their lobby.
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It’s not all or nothing. Most people are willing to deal with a 30 or 40 minute commute If they’re not already working from home. The reason people point out LA in Austin is because they are significantly worse than other cities like Atlanta Philly and Baltimore.
significantly worse than other cities like Atlanta Philly and Baltimore
Wait. Atlanta resident here. There are cities worse than us?
You have bad traffic but your average commute times are actually kind of nominal. The MARTA could be better You’re like right on that line where you have bad traffic but your public transportation hasn’t been made effective yet.
You should check out San Francisco’s problems. Half their commuters are coming ovary major bridge from Oakland or elsewhere in California and the city itself is a peninsula so everyone’s squeezed coming up from the south. And the bart is hands down awful
There’s traffic in NYC and Chicago. As long as there are roads people will drive. There will always be traffic. Public transit only affects how bad the traffic will be and limit growth of the city.
You are so close to understanding … as long as there are roads … there will be traffic …
The solution isn’t build more roads and enable car culture more, the solution is to stop catering to cars and build less roads. Instead build more public transit. Literally stop catering to cars, make cars less viable as a transportation method by limiting how much space is available to them. Cities can work just fine without cars.
Cities can work fine without cars if they have viable alternatives
I know you mentioned this but it bears repeating, because so many of the “fuck cars” people don’t bother to prioritize investing in alternatives, just making driving more miserable.
If you make car commutes twice as long but offer trains, you get more people on trains.
If you make car commutes twice as long but don’t offer any alternatives, you just have the same people sitting in cars for twice as long.
I think there’s something to be said for places like Houston vs Chicago though. In Chicago I can easily find and take public transit to get around. You don’t necessarily need a car.
In Houston however you pretty much need it. It’ll take you at least half an hour to get anywhere, no matter how close it may be geographically
I support things like light rail but only where it makes sense. I think a lot of comments like yours are from people who live in dense cities and have no idea what life is like in suburban and rural areas that constitute a large part of the US. Also, the last mile issue is very real and needs to be solved.
Folding bikes, sure. Or you get a bikeshare sub. Regular bikes aren’t allowed on trains because they’re too crowded.
- Dense city dweller
There are differences between cities though. It makes. A difference how they developed, what their geography is, and how concentrated their growth phase was. Austin is a place you can’t take a shit without driving to a bathroom. It’s not laid out for public transportation even if they could fund it. It is massively spread out with pockets of hills and rocks all over. The weather is hostile to walking and biking anyway.
I have many friends in Austin and visit often. People there obsess about traffic, working overtime to tune their day around finding low traffic windows and such. It’s not like that where I live, and I don’t live in some Amsterdam style utopia.
The deal with a lot of places like Austin where you have homes way over there and a shopping plaza waaaayyyy over there is not only do you have to drive usually but even if it is close enough to walk there is no frigging continuous sidewalk. You always end up with long breaks in it between developments, having to walk out in the road where it is overgrown, deep drainage ditches stopping you, etc.
I will never understand why anyone trusted Texas, how blind can you be
The majority of my friends leaving Austin have done so because of state politics. It’s hard to feel safe when you’re queer in Texas.
That’s exactly what those politics are there to do. Texas is not as deeply red as its reputation. Might suggest, and it has been experiencing an influx of people. They are afraid of losing the balance of power in the voters. They are actively trying to get blue voters to leave / not come. And they think gay voters will be liberals, plus hating gays makes their base feel good. This is the what and why of what’s happening. As a somewhat older LGBT person, I know what it’s like not to feel safe because that used to be virtually everywhere.
In terms of political strategy it’s remarkably short sighted. By preserving their supermajority in Texas and Florida, Republicans assure that they will win both states in the electoral college… Which is the base case. There’s no net improvement.
But to accomplish that, they’ve pissed off people who now have strong incentive to vote against Republicans and driven them away to other states – including swing states. Diehard Republicans from other states are increasingly moving to Texas and Florida however, which further reduces their voter base in swing states. A voter base that is getting smaller by the day due to aging vs their opponent’s base that’s getting larger by the day, and a base that had preventable deaths from COVID had they not believed in conspiracy theories.
They’re just shooting themselves in the foot to own tech workers and turn them against Republicans. This is one reason why I think Republicans couldn’t win in 2022, and only managed to barely take the House and lose a Senate seat. The factors are piling up against them, to the point that they have a mixed election result, when the economy was rough and inflation was high and Democrats had a trifecta.
Fingers crossed, I think the crows are finally coming home to roost.
it’s also really stupid considering the liberal cites are literally what MAKES Texas. There’s mass amounts of population in rural areas that just flat don’t vote. If everyone voted in TX it’s be blue as fuck.
Either way when the cities themselves lose all the workers that high paying jobs need the cities start to fall and the revenue for the state will follow.
Literal idiots that just think the oilfield will go on forever and nothing else will matter
No, actually the people in charge are rich enough that they don’t need those tech workers, or really anyone.
They’re pretty close to grabbing the brass ring, which is full government control through political violence. That will be the practical end of the democratic republic.
Liberals just don’t understand the end game here and they need to wake the fuck up.
“Where ambition goes to die” has been an unofficial motto here in Austin for decades. We’re too busy enjoying our lives to be bothered overworking ourselves. Guys like this dude have been trying hard to ruin the vibe recently, and he’s welcome to return from whence he came so we can keep chilling
Lived there for a decade. Moved to NC this past July. Getting out of the state was the best thing I could have done.
He is right about it being scorching hot tho. It’s starting to feel like I’m living in Palm Springs.
Maybe, but it’s only ever going to get worse. All of Texas and most of the west as a whole are going to be unlivable soon.
The smart people are leaving now. Anyone who isn’t is going to be fucked when it becomes a genuine refugee crisis.
I’ve never lived in Austin but it was very underwhelming to visit. It’s hard to fathom why people would choose to live there over CA. Just look at the quality of life metrics. And it’s not even affordable to live there.
Good BBQ though.
