Subject: RE: BIKE: More background on automobile addiction Date: 09/24 11:27 AM Received: 09/24 12:33 PM From: Roger Baker, rcbaker@mail.eden.com To: sustain-austin@lists.cc.utexas.edu austin-bikes@topica.com CC: larry.freilich@sfsierra.sierraclub.org At 08:43 AM 9/24/99 -0500, Harpley, Victor wrote: >Hello, > >I believe we are trapped in this system. Right now the way the economics of >the Build Road/Development/Build More Roads/Raise Taxes ad-nauseaum work, to >change it would entail a significant disruption in the flow of money and >power. If the people that are making all the money from this economic cycle >now control the system how do you replace them? As I said in a previous >post, if the developers can bus a load of supporters to a meeting why can't >we? Folks, Any attempt to move toward a saner pattern of growth which reduces short-run real estate profits will face lawsuits by the special interests who benefit from sprawl. Just in yesterday's Statesman, there was an article about how the real estate lobby is going to sue the feds, Fish and Wildlife, for restraining growth over the aquifer to protect the salamander. Powerful state politicians Rick Perry and David Dewhurst both have dogs in this same fight over SH 45 on the Aquifer. If these guys think nothing of fighting the federal government, what chance do the locals have? Only public opinion, which is why the Statesman is working so hard to portray those who challenge sprawl as no-growthers. The liberal environmentalists have been largely neutralized by the real estate lobby. The new threat to the growth-at-any-costers comes from suburban residents, upper middle class folks who can afford lawyers, and whose property values are being reduced by leapfrog development and Walmarts. Today there is an article about just these sorts of folks out in the Bee Caves area fighting traffic-promoting megadevelopments at 620 and 2244. It probably isn't correct to say that the Shady Hollow folks were manipulated by the developers directly to pack the transpo meetings. More like a symbiotic relationship in which the details and flow of money is hidden. What the people in Shady Hollow don't understand is that five years after the reliever road is built it will be filled with traffic and things will be worse than ever. Naturally CAMPO director, Aulick, was unable to say how much relief SH 45 would provide over the long run when asked at the meeting. But Aulick is the chief transportaion planner for the Austin area. If he can't say for sure that a new road over the Aquider will provide any long term relief to the folks in the area, then what are we doing building new roads until we're sure or at least have a sound idea of the cost-effectiveness of the cure over the long run. Unless the answer is really political? Nothing could better reveal the fact that CAMPO is really a public subsidy for private profit trying to hide behind a figleaf of traffic modeling. The politics is laundered through an incomprehensible computer model to cover its tracks and make it resemble scientific certainty. TxDOT and the land speculation beneficiaries are really in charge, and every once in a while they throw the biking community a crumb. But policies that worsen traffic congestion, and create new waves of pissed off commuters, are really concealed attacks on those who want bike and ped alternatives. Look at how the Statesman writes adoring articles about a little dab of compact city development in the central city, 100 units maybe, while ignoring the tremendous volume of new sprawl ringing the city in every direction as part of the current growth boom. Its meaningless, a drop in the bucket -- like praising an alcoholic for drinking a glass of water occasionally. And notice in today's paper that Houston has now approved light rail. In other words both Houston and Dallas are both ahead of Austin in taking steps to reverse their automobile addiction! Of course nothing you can do will reverse decades of bad policies and subdivision approvals conducive to congestion induced by sprawl. The congestion on US 183, MoPac and IH 35 will be there forever so long as we subsidize wars to maintain our supply of cheap oil, and thus make roadway capacity rather than the true economics of petroleum cost the limiting factor in trying to sustain trends which, like an addiction, are profitable but unsustainable. I've been through the Austin-area growth boom of the mid-1980's, and the real estate crowd holds all the winning cards, probably, until the current growth boom ends or the feds shut the game down. The good news if any is that traffic problems and labor shortages (caused in large part by the rising costs of housing caused by sprawl and a decline in mobility) are making the whole Austin area less desirable for the high tech industry. Bad growth policies cure themselves in the long run, by which time land developer profits will have been safely deposited in the Hip Pocket National Bank. This in no way should be interpreted as a prediction that it is futile to fight back. After all sanity will revail in the long run. It just takes a quantum leap toward a higher level of political organization to be effective when a majority of the Austin City Council, including Watson, vote to approve a new road over the aquifer without so much as bothering to ask how much good it will do in the long run (Spelman asked a wimpy question or two and seemed satisfied with vague answers from Aulick at the cAMPO meeting). It is clear that the City Council is terrified of the sprawl lobby or they would stand up for the interests of Austin in opposing sprawl through publicly funded subsidies for highways conducive to sprawl. Likewise, raising current water rates to assure a supply of water 50 years from now through the LCRA makes no sense if all the other details of what Austin will look like and what our quality of life will be like 50 years in the future are ignored. Anyone who suggests that we be consistant and plan for enough jails to last us 50 years into the future would get laughed to death, because jails don't subsidize real estate development. --Yours, Roger --------------------------------------------------- BIKING IN AUSTIN: http://michaelbluejay.com/bicycle _____________________________________________________ Move your list to Topica in September and win $5000! Check it out http://www.topica.com/promo