“Building a more robust mass transit system is critical to solving Austin’s mobility challenges, but Austin’s sprawling development makes successful mass transit impossible today.”
A new Evolve Austin Transit Study reveals that under the current CodeNEXT draft the minimum amount of housing and jobs needed to support transit would not be allowed along or near 75% of the transit corridors.
https://evolveaustin.org/content/2017/9/12/evolve-austin-transit-study-released
The underlying assumption throughout this document - that our low transit ridership is due to bad land use instead of decisions made by Cap Metro - is completely backwards, given that almost every decision made in the last 15 years by our agency has punished areas with good land use and rewarded those with bad land use.
In 2015, I spent a lot of time and energy producing this presentation on how Rapid Bus punished good development and good zoning changes near the core. This still applies even today, and most of the changes in Connections 2025 are more of the same - punishing walkable areas of Hyde Park and NUNA by reducing transit options and rewarding far suburban fringes with better transit options.