Why the Westlake area shouldn’t resist public transportation
Austin is one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. Ask any of your parents and they can comment on the stark contrast between our city’s skyline now and fourteen years ago. With cities that have grown like ours, new public transportation has been implemented to help facilitate the boom of the population. Unfortunately, Austin really hasn’t done that yet, and it is near impossible to live in or around the city without a car. New Austinites are usually young single millennials who all have their own individual car that pollutes the environment and promotes ugly highways and traffic for our city. Luckily, the department of transportation has started planning “Project Connect”, Austin’s very own metro rail system. Austin actually already has a rail line connecting Leander to Downtown and helps connect commuters to their jobs in a fast, environmentally friendly way. As you can see in the map above, the rail lines would help connect almost all of Austin, helping people commute from the airport to downtown, South Congress to the UT Campus, Pleasant Valley to William Cannon and hundreds of other destinations.
Unfortunately, not all of Austin is willing to participate in this exciting new opportunity, since Westlake and Rollingwood are their own cities, they have rejected the future Project Metro. The Department of Transportation had planned to create a line going through Bee Cave which would connect the Westlake area to the rest of Austin. However the disgruntled citizens of the Westlake area decided they were too good to participate in helping Austin. Instead of helping to ease traffic and promote walkability, they protested and stopped the line from being built on Bee Cave yet continued to sit around complaining about the traffic and the influx of new Austinites. One of Westlake’s main reservations about the rail line was that they didn’t want homeless people or just people who did not fit their standards perusing around the Westlake area. What they don’t understand is that we already have a couple bus stops that bring in these people and it has not affected our lives at all. Groups like Not In My Backyard want to see solutions to Austin’s problems, but actively protest these solutions from being built in their neighborhoods. A similar situation happened in Palo Alto, where a proposed mass housing building was to be built, but the citizens of that neighborhood who theoretically wanted a solution to the homeless population protested because they didn’t want them in their neighborhood, and it was never built.
As Westlake decides to sit out of Project Connect, the rest of Austin will be a part of an exciting new development while we are left in the dust. Imagine a future where you could hop on a metro stop right outside of Randalls, and get all the way to the Airport without any of the hassle of parking, traffic or other car based issues. Westlake and Rollingwood should reconsider and let this rail line be built otherwise we can just expect all the problems we hate to persist.
In the meantime, we still have our bus system, Capmetro. While most of us have never ridden the bus outside of school, Capmetro works fine and is pretty useful if you don’t have a car, in fact there are three different bus stops down Walsh Tarlton, so if you ever feel the need to help the environment and not buy into our car-based society feel free to go to your local bus stop.