Thanks for clicking on it! Lol. Welcome.

Capital/Capitol gets me every time lol. -Louis

Good point! Thanks for watching.

It can start with a simple email to your elected reps/council people!

Thanks for sharing your experience as a paramedic! I agree on crossings, especially on poorly designed roundabouts, but it is something that can be worked on for sure. Thanks for watching! -Louis

I think that you can really supercharge a roundabout by adding cheap flashing pedestrian lights- they don’t require a power grid tie-in, as there’s many solar options available now, and it makes a very formal visual “I’m crossing now” statement to oncoming drivers. Roundabouts have a yield to pedestrians that drivers often fail to follow, so making that more explicit is a good idea to enforce legal driving behaviour.

Agreed! But people love to complain about change 😅 Once they use them they start to like the changes though! Thanks for watching!

I live near the Triangle and the bike-ability and transit is some of the best in Austin! -Louis

I am a resident in Carmel and while I am grateful for the roundabout, our city is facing an issue regarding the future of transportation. There’s been discussion back and forth on transit in Carmel for years. The city used to have an Indy Express bus which got discontinued in 2014. Then in 2016 there were initial plans for the red line to extend into Carmel but that didn’t go through. Carmel plans on operating its own bus system soon but now it’s also being killed off by the recently elected Mayor Sue Finkham. The population of Carmel is over 100K which is large. There’s also much more mixed use development within its city center than before and that is why Carmel needs a Bus system. I want to advocate for transit in carmel, however I do not know anyone in my city which supports transit

Thanks for sharing your experience! We'll have to look more into the transit side. Maybe a topic for a future episode. Thanks for watching!

Thanks for watching! We did a more recent video discussion the Rio Grande Plan among other SLC related items you might be interested in!

Agreed! Fingers crossed we get there... Thanks for watching!

Also, something this video doesn't touch on is the idea that urban sprawl is a threat rural lifestyles. I know there are many farmers and hunters in Florida who are upset with how much of the land they love gets destroyed for bland suburban housing developments. Hunters and farmers not only tend to be right leaning, but they also usually were raised in a car dependent, rural area. They will likely see transit as useless because from their perspective it always has been. But when you put it in the broader context of urban density protecting rural lifestyles, I think you can get a lot more people on your side.

Nah, cars are not freedom. They have massive negative externalities.

Due to the cost of owning a car alone, I feel heavily restricted. That's not even considering how unpleasant car dependent infrastructure is for living,which makes it even worse. In rural areas yes, cars are freedom. In cities they're steel cages of traffic hell

I've lived in places where I had to own a car. That is not freedom.

Buses are definitely part of the solution. I want rail everywhere too, and we'll start to get some rail here in Austin with Project Connect, but it won't go everywhere at least for a while. Until the rail can cover more ground, buses are the option. There are a few proposals at the moment to create more dedicated bus lanes throughout the city. A few are actually being installed right now along San Jacinto and Trinity for new "rapid" routes, but will have benefits for local routes as well that go through the area. In time, a more complete rail system in Austin, with commuter style service between Austin and San Antonio though should be the goal. And if the state can get on board, adding some high speed options between the TX Triangle cities, etc.... Thanks for watching. -Louis

@TransitTangents I partially understand your argument but Austin has 1 million people, and growing and every year we wait it costs more money. We are so far behind the ball. As an engineer the maintenance for buses and capacity constraints offset other business but rail is a long term strategy.

I have to disagree a little bit. There needs to be effort at getting some coalition of folks on the right on board with public transportation spending on some level, or else every time political office changes hands, funding is at risk, services are cut, maintenance gets backlogged, etc.... then when it switches back we play catch up, etc... etc.... Framing the conversations differently can make a big difference there and I think that Bill explains that pretty well here. In addition, I'll make the argument that roads are a large government expense that are a shared public good. Gas tax and car registrations don't even get close to covering the maintenance costs. Folks on the right generally support roads. At a certain point, everyone is going to realize that you won't be able build your way out of traffic, especially in cities. Getting behind these other options will eventually be the only thing that makes sense. If we can make that argument sooner rather than later, it's a win. Thanks for watching and I appreciate the perspective. -Louis

​@@TransitTangentsWell, you're wrong. Especially in the Trump era, there's no compromising with the right. Very few Republicans take transit and that's not going to change, so they won't support it. They will support new roads begrudgingly because they drive on them. But transit, nope. If Trump wins in the election in two days, especially if he gets a Republican majority in both Houses of Congress as well, expect Federal transit funding to drop to zero or nearly so for the next four years.

Yes! It is sooo much better now. If you are interested in a sneak peak, we rode it as part of last week's episode (Austin Using ONLY Transit). Thanks for watching! -Louis

Ok why not do your LRT lines elevated so they can run faster and more frequently? Building in the street would cripple the trains.

@@qjtvaddict Right now they're saying that they will have signal priority throughout, and separated space. Initially it was going to be underground downtown.... but inflation, budgets, etc... Obviously that would be better, but given the constraints at the moment and lack of support from state government thus far, you take what you can get and work on making things better over time. From what i understand it will likely be elevated through a few sections near Congress/Riverside, and down Riverside as it crossed I-35. We'll see though. Thanks for watching!

I think he just misspoke on light rail, they're located by MARTA stations though! We want to make it to Atlanta some point soon! Thanks for watching.

@@TransitTangents Not only that, but NCR ditched Gwinnett County, a suburb that voted down having MARTA expand there in 2021 to come to Midtown near North Ave. station...sweet!

Build more heavy rail it’s more effective

Love Marta, just as good as light rail and better in some ways.

@@cornelius738 Heavy rail is superior. It's just quite a bit more expensive to build.

We actually rode them on an episode a few weeks back! kzbin.info/www/bejne/iYbMfnaHipZqhJIsi=Kdq3dOF0bv5i5jdU

Good catch, minor mistake, but the point still stands 😅 Thanks for watching!

To be fair, this was at like 1pm on a weekday. There is a counter installed on that street now and it sees high hundreds per day in one direction from what I can remember. It is also no where close to one of the busier bike lanes or paths in the city, although numbers have gone up since they made it safer. Is it hot in the summer? Totally, but especially with e-bikes (Austin has a rebate program on them), its actually not too bad and has been growing in popularity anecdotally at least. Plenty of work to be done still though. Thanks for watching

The city is taking a lot of the right steps. A lot of zoning related changes over the last year, incentivizing transit oriented development along the light rail corridors now before construction even starts, major investments in bike infra with really good ebike rebate programs at the same time (anecdotally a lot more folks biking/e-biking over the last few years).We'll see.... -Louis

Yes the experience on the red line is great! Austin with a complete Project Connect will be pretty amazing!

that's his twitter handle

Very fair question. I feel like the term protected gets used very loosely (I'm guilty of it too). Currently the city would consider this to be protected. I fully recognize that this wouldn't stop a car from crashing through, but setups like this really do a lot to slow drivers down, and make the bike lanes more visible. Right now the strategy Austin is using is doing as much "quick build" type stuff like this as fast as possible in as many areas as possible, with the goal of then upgrading them to more permanent (and protected) solutions when larger road construction is required in the area to save on costs. In a budget constrained world, I actually support the approach. It's gotten us a lot more of these quick build setups all around the city. Great question and maybe a topic for a longer episode! I'll mark this one to be discussed in a quick comment response on Patreon as well. -Louis