There's a new development on West 6th Street downtown. A six-story hotel going by the name "Canopy By Hilton" is being built next to Star Bar, between Nueces and Rio Grande (details at Towers). Space being rather constrained next to the hotel site, the developers have rented space to stage demolition and construction on the street itself, temporarily narrowing 6th ...
downtown
Does transportation serve people or do people serve transportation?
No big city has solved either of two problems: making car traffic flow smoothly or making parking simple and cheap. The issue isn't that governments in every city are bad, though sometimes they are, or that traffic engineers didn't anticipate the future, though sometimes they didn't, or that drivers drive too aggressively, though sometimes they do. The issue is that these ...
Vote one more time on your favorite Congress Avenue
You readers responded very well to my call for new designs for Congress Avenue, and selected this place-oriented design by Mateo Barnstone: Now, the professionals have weighed in and come up with three options for streets, as well as three options for a design language. (Scroll down to the May 15 event.) All three feature protected bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and more ...
The one little rule that decides where Austin’s towers build parking
Not every tower in downtown Austin looks exactly the same, but there is one defining characteristic that describes almost all of them: parking. Most towers rest on top of what they call in the industry a parking plinth, the tower base where folks store their cars. (Plinth is a Swedish word meaning ugly thing.) Here's a typical example, the Seaholm Tower in southwest ...
Why do so many downtown buildings cut corners?
If you've walked around downtown Austin, something you've probably noticed is that a lot of buildings built recently and a lot of buildings under construction have cut corners. No, I don't mean they've used shoddy construction. I mean that, literally, they're shaped as a rectangle with a corner cut off. Sometimes there's just no building there; sometimes there's a much shorter ...
