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Originally Posted by We vs us
I'm glad these three are moving forward; density is for sure one of the ways we fight the housing crunch in Austin. And FWIW, I look forward to the Travises and the supertall getting approved as well.
That said: the city's got to get moving on a plan for Rainey. While the combustion engine may or may not be long for the civilized world, personal vehicles surely are here to stay. It's folly to ignore them as part of a balanced planning approach. We can argue about the mix -- what to emphasize, what to incentivize -- but neglecting the dominant mode altogether is just going to end in tears.
I'm pretty confident it can be done in ways that don't suck, we've just got to get to it.
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I think an easy fix is at least Thursday-Saturday to limit non-local cars from entering Rainey. Create a couple of rideshare drop-off points and call it a day. I also think geoblocking scooters from operating in entertainment districts that are heavily pedestrian at night seems a no brainer. They already did this at the lake, no reason they can't do it in Rainey as well.
In general Austin needs to come up with ride-share and scooter solutions long-term. They are useful and have their place but we really need to reconsider if its safe on the roadways and for pedestrians to basically allow chaos when it comes to these services.
It seems that downtown should have a handful of drop-off points (at least on weekends) that ride shares are allowed to operate in and you need to stumble your drunk self to one of those at the end of the evening.
I also think Scooters can't operate on congested sidewalks (SoCo at night, 6th, Rainey, East 6th). I mean, other larger cities have already tackled these issues, we should just copy them.