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Follow TURFComplete streets policies run amok in Austin
Agenda 21 'complete streets' policies are clearly anti-car and elevate pedestrian and bike travel over autos. While remaking Austin downtown streets as pedestrian friendly for the young and hip crowd, what about the elderly, families with small children, or simply anyone who prefers to travel by car? You're out of luck just like the business owners who need customers who drive cars, not just travel by foot or bike. Rep. Linda Harper-Brown and Sen. Rodney Ellis filed a bill to spread this policy statewide. It's anti-freedom and social engineering run amok!
Austin builds ‘great streets,’ but at what cost?
Wider, nicer sidewalks mean lost parking, fewer car lanes.
By Ben Wear
June 1, 2013
Austin American Statesman
People going to P.F. Chang’s downtown these days must really be hankering for some Chinese food.
The restaurant at East Second Street and San Jacinto Boulevard is obscured from two directions by concrete construction barriers, part of the city of Austin’s accelerating “great streets” program. On first glance, at least during the day, it’s not clear that the restaurant is open.
Even so, the negative effect on business has been minimal, P.F. Chang’s operating partner Joey Sharp says. And he predicts that what’s going on behind those barriers — turning East Second into a tree-lined pedestrian haven with wide sidewalks comparable to the several blocks of West Second a few blocks away — should more than pay off later.
“You know it’s going to be rough for awhile,” Sharp said. “But the outcome, based on what I’ve seen, will be worth it.”
City officials and great streets advocates are counting on that. Because the dolling up of the streetscape in Austin’s central business district has come at a cost not only in dollars, but also in lost parking spaces and lanes for vehicular traffic. The city, however, hasn’t kept track of any of those costs.
And while the city’s showcase great street — West Second — is bustling with diners, moviegoers and shoppers, the gussied-up streetscape on 10 blocks of Brazos Street hasn’t yet produced a similar uptick in foot traffic or commerce.
About a quarter of the block-faces — meaning one side of a single block — downtown now have, or soon will have, the 18-foot or wider, brick-and-concrete sidewalks, which under great streets guidelines have several trees per block, improved lighting, at least four benches and eight bike racks in each block and distinctive, sturdy trash containers on every corner.
Those sidewalks, by and large, replaced the 10-foot-wide concrete walkways that were the standard for downtown. That means streets formerly 60 feet curb to curb, typically with four lanes for cars and parallel parking on each side, have become 44-foot-wide, two- or three-lane streets, often with parking only on one side. How many parking spaces have been lost? How many blocks of car lanes have been eliminated? And what has been the effect on downtown traffic or visitors’ ability to find an on-street parking space? City officials say they don’t know.
Nor can officials say how much the city and its private development partners have spent on the sidewalk upgrades so far on 100 completed great streets block-faces and will spend on the 55 or so to come. The city has paid, or budgeted for future construction, more than $39 million for great streets projects on Second, Third, West Eighth, Brazos, Colorado and West Cesar Chavez streets.
But much of that money, city officials say, went for needed reconstruction of aging streets and replacement of decrepit water and wastewater lines that lay beneath them. And sidewalks along those streets generally weren’t in compliance with federal disability requirements and would have had to be replaced anyway, according to Humberto Rey, an urban designer with the city’s Planning and Development Review Department who is in charge of the great streets effort.
Beyond that, city officials say, rebuilding part of the street rather than adding eight feet of enhanced sidewalk (with the trees and other amenities) would have carried its own substantial cost.
City Public Works Department project manager Dennis Crabill, at the Statesman’s request, estimated that the cost of adding great streets’ wider sidewalks and other amenities is about $287,000 per block-face.
That number would vary, he said, depending on a number of factors, including whether a given block has an alley or driveways. And he said private developers adding a great streets profile as they build a new residential or office tower, such as the Frost Bank building on Congress Avenue or the recently completed Whitley on East Third, might see some savings not available to the city as it reworks only a street.
But based on Crabill’s average figure, the 154.5 block-faces in the current plan — about 55 percent built by the private sector, the rest by the city — would cost about $45 million in public and private dollars.
The city in some cases reimburses those downtown developers for installing great streets during construction of new office or residential buildings. Rey said that the city, using an account fed by parking meter revenue downtown, has paid some developers $18 for every square foot of great streets sidewalks.
For an 18-foot sidewalk about 200 feet long, that would amount to $65,000 for a single block-face.
The city is in the final stages of spending about $7.3 million on the seven blocks of Second Street that run from the Convention Center to San Antonio Street and includes the bustling Second Street retail district near Austin City Hall, a pioneer great streets section completed in 2005. That project, Rey said, arose not from a perceived need to restore the street but rather as an overt effort to create what the city’s Great Streets Master Plan calls a “pedestrian dominant” thoroughfare with a yawning 32-foot sidewalk on its north side.
That 2002 master plan by architectural firms Black + Vernooy and Kinney & Associates, was never adopted by the Austin City Council. But the council in 2000, in asking for such a plan, passed a resolution saying it would be a guiding document for downtown street design.
The city, the plan instructs, should “find a thousand ways to calm traffic movement in downtown through symbols of pedestrian dominance,” adding the mantra that “streets are for people.”
The traditional split of the city’s 80 feet of downtown right of way, 75 percent for cars and 25 percent for pedestrians, should be reconfigured on most streets to 55 percent for cars, 45 percent for foot traffic, the plan said.
“Driving to downtown is welcome. Driving through is not,” it said.
‘Great sidewalks’
Great streets critics, however, say the net effect of those lost lanes and parking spaces has been that driving to downtown is becoming a distasteful option as driving through downtown becomes more arduous. They say that while the Second Street district may be booming — boosted by moderate rents for shops, construction of a number of residence towers and a hotel nearby, as well as the opening of the ACL Live theater — the loss of parking in conjunction with great streets and other city policies isn’t good for business in downtown’s quieter sections.
“The term ‘great streets’ is a major misnomer,” said David Kruger of Kruger’s Diamond Jewelers, which has been in business at 720 Congress Ave. since 1939. “They ought to be calling it ‘great sidewalks.’”
Construction of the $2.2 million great streets project on West Eighth began a few months ago outside Kruger’s store. West Eighth Street for decades has had four travel lanes and parallel parking on both sides, spaces that Kruger’s customers need because of limited availability on Congress in front of the store.
Congress had its own great streets-like makeover in the 1980s, long before University of California-Berkeley professor Allan Jacobs popularized the concept with a 1995 book by that name. The avenue, which used to be lined with angled parking spaces from corner to corner, now has sidewalks as wide as 30 feet that took away what Kruger says was 60 percent of Congress’ parking.
Now, construction has temporarily eliminated all of the parking on West Eighth between Congress and Colorado. After that section of the project is done in a few months, one side will have continuous parallel parking, but the other side will have fewer spots. And there will be three car lanes, not four.
“You know, I have never heard of anyone complaining about the size of the sidewalks,” Kruger said, “but constantly hear about the lack of parking.”
Kruger says the construction, along with the already insufficient parking, has hurt his business.
“I’m not sure I can quantify it, because I don’t know about the people who don’t come in,” he said. “The theory of great streets is if you have wide sidewalks and two-way traffic, it’ll help retail. Well, Congress has had wide sidewalks and two-way traffic for thirty years, and there’s no retail.”
The 10 blocks of Congress do have some retail, including a few stores that have opened in the past couple of years. And several of the blocks are dominated by office buildings that were built long ago with no possibility for street-level shops or restaurants.
Up West Eighth, near Colorado Street, designer furniture store Scott + Cooner has seen a drastic falloff in traffic.
“It’s frustrating,” said saleswoman Wendy Rhode. “Honestly, no one is coming down here now. How can people even see us?”
Just wait, says Jeff Conarko, owner of Con’ Olio, a store at 215 Lavaca St. that sells olive oils and vinegars. Conarko said that the heavy foot traffic in the Second Street district has led to his business making a profit every month since opening there a little over a year ago.
Conarko said the high turnover of businesses in the district during the years immediately following the 2005 makeover convinced him and his wife, Tabatha, to open their first store four years ago in the Arboretum area instead.
“There just wasn’t much in terms of downtown living in the Second Street District, so businesses weren’t doing well,” Conarko said. “Now those places are at their occupancy limit. There is lots of traffic now. The population really caught up with the design in the last couple of years.”
Trade-offs
Mike Levy, the former Texas Monthly publisher, said the great streets makeover of Brazos Street serves as a nearly mute counterpoint to the bustle of West Second. That $13.4 million project from East Cesar Chavez to East 11th streets, completed in 2011, narrowed Brazos to two lanes (from three and four) and eliminated some parking spaces. So far it has sparked little or no retail development, and at lunchtime on a recent day the sidewalks were virtually empty.
The entertainment districts of Sixth Street and West Fourth Street, Levy points out, developed without the benefit of great streets sidewalks, and they continue to thrive.
“The rest of the city is going to be increasingly reluctant to come down and shop,” Levy said.
The Downtown Austin Alliance, which represents downtown property owners, from the beginning has supported great streets, longtime executive director Charles Betts said. The loss of vehicle lanes hasn’t been a problem in most cases, Betts said, because of historically light traffic on affected streets like Brazos, Colorado and Eighth.
“The challenge is getting in and out of downtown,” he said. “Once you get downtown, our grid system works pretty well. We actually have a number of streets that are underutilized.”
As for the lost parking, Betts said that is an acceptable sacrifice for economic and cultural vitality in Austin’s center. Besides, Betts said, downtown has plenty of excess parking capacity in garages. That parking, however, is generally more expensive than metered parking.
“You definitely lose some parking,” Betts said. “The trade-off is there are amenities, and it’s hard to put a value on amenities. … It makes downtown more inviting. We are competing with the Domain and Arboretum, areas like that that are attractive and comfortable. I think we are accomplishing that, and the poster child is West Second Street. People stroll down that street, and they enjoy being there.
“We want downtown to be a place where people want to be.”