Austin feels like a dystopian city sometimes. Modern buildings, driverless cars, no police presence, and trash and homeless scattered all over the city.
@kai_xbt They want that because their chatbot is a loose cannon and has caused significant legal problems for them when people use it as a “therapist”.
Imagine being on City Council, driving down Cesar Chavez and thinking to yourself…
“This street is so safe, Everything looks fantastic, but we need to spend $1.2MM to rename it”.
This city government believes symbolism is governance.
Meanwhile taxpayers constantly get told “there’s no money, we need more from you!”
Why? Because of a thousand BS things like this. It’s time for a real change in City of Austin government.
The city of Austin estimates it could cost up to $1.2 million to rename Cesar Chavez Street.
The cost includes paying for new signs, and the public engagement process. It does not include helping businesses deal with the cost of the name change.
https://t.co/6CwXoBWn7n
If City Council spends more than 5 minutes thinking about this, then we need to vote every one of them out.
We have sky high property taxes, our streets are a disgrace, and we’re worried about changing the damn name of a street? And on top of that they’re willing to spend $1,200,000 of our money to do so?!
Priorities are completely ass backwards at City of Austin.
I subdivided 1 lot into 3 once in Georgian Acres (an underdeveloped area in Austin). It cost $150,000 and took a full year. About $80k+ was permitting & city fees. One was a “parkland” fee - essentially telling us we need to build a public park on our land (the entire lot was only .5 acre) or pay the city $23,000. Felt like extortion…and definitely doesn’t help with affordability.
I’ve been to historic meetings where the “historic commission” prevented a homeowner from tearing their old house down to build their dream home because they thought it was cool that two sisters built twin homes on two sides of town back in the day. The bar for “historic” seems to be completely arbitrary and restricts a lot of homeowners’ property rights and causes massive delays (which makes things more expensive and uncertain).
I could go on for days about how ridiculous and expensive Austin makes building & construction.
Thanks to Donald Trump, we now have two Democratic parties. With the defeat of @RepThomasMassie for being a principled fiscal conservative, the Republican Party basically exists in name only. We have two big-government political parties, each offering its own brand of socialism.
How much could we have saved by just making the toll roads that go around Austin free for tractor trailers? Solves most of the traffic problem. Doesn’t cost billions in dollars, and doesn’t cost billions in uncalculated lost man hours due to construction traffic.
We’ll never know
Toll roads are the cause of all of our traffic problems. Having a separate lane that people have to cross 4 otehr lanes to get on/get off causes all of our traffic. We shouldn’t have to pay twice to use our own roads.
And to those that say “well, 35 has traffic too!”. Yes - and that’s because there’s a split in both directions and entrances/exits RIGHT before the splits. People cross multiples lanes to get to the upper/lower. Not smart to have entrances onto the highway right before a split. The airport blvd entrance causes all of the morning traffic. Ban the mopac and 183 express lanes.