I’m reposting this from a post I made on the BIcycle Austin Forum.

I just heard a story on KUT that suggests the city plans to phase out parking meters in favor of multi-space kiosks. Under this scheme, motorists walk to a kiosk that serves several spaces on a block, the kiosk prints out a pass, and then the motorist walks back to her car to display the pass on her dash. It sounds like a hassle to me, but the story suggests drivers prefer it, perhaps because the machine accepts credit cards.

What does this have to do with cycling? Well, the parking meters are going away. I’ve read that cyclists in Washington and other jurisdictions have complained because they lose a lot of posts for locking their rides. Since bike parking is scant in several areas downtown, like Sixth Street, I wonder what impact this will have on cycling downtown.

Rather than stand in the way of progress, perhaps this is an opportunity to get more bike racks installed downtown. They have to do something with all those stump poles or holes in the ground, so why not install racks when the meters go out?

Does the city have a plan for replacing these bike parking spots when the meters come out?

The Downtown Austin Alliance has announced the winners of its bicycle rack competition. None of the winners were what I expected, steel tubes bent into kitschy shapes. Instead, the winners explore a variety of textures and materials, drawing inspiration from nature and cycling. You can see each of the winners in the pdf here, but I’m fond of Karen Armstrong’s Elephant Ears.

I’ve got a number of axes to grind with UT’s Parking and Transportation Services, and at the top of the list is how it gives short shrift to cycling as a transportation option, but pours money into private-automobile services. Today PTS sent out a survey to assess student transportation needs, and it has many flaws, including almost complete neglect of cyclist needs.

After an initial classification question, the second question asks, “What is your primary mode of transportation to campus?” and offers “drive,” “bus,” “walk,” “carpool,” and “vanpool” as explicit options. Surely cycling is a more popular way to get to campus than a vanpool, and I wasn’t even aware that Austin offered vanpool services. This presents a coding problem for PTS as well, since it will under-represent students who cycle, since a number of responses like, “bike,” “bicycle,” “cycling,” or, hell, “fahrrad,” would all mean the same thing, and I doubt PTS is going to invest time into coding these other responses.

Since I’ve got some graduate-level training in survey design, I thought I would point out some other flaws in this survey. Questions four and five ask the respondent what times he or she usually arrive and leave campus. The possible responses are structured in one-hour intervals, like “8am-9am.” This may make sense for people who have rigid report times, but broader intervals would make more sense for professors and grad students who have flexible grad students, and nearly all undergrads get to campus just in time for their first class. There are two problems here: it doesn’t address the needs of two large populations on campus, students and faculty, and I don’t see how this question can provide good data with such narrow intervals, unless they’re only interested in employees who need to be at their desk exactly at 8:30.

The survey is clearly aimed at motorists who operate private vehicles alone, which I think reflects a profound bias in PTS, and this bias needs to be addressed.

East Riverside is almost certainly the ugliest district in Austin. The closest competitor, I can think of, the Lamar/Rundberg area, gets a lot of bonus points from me since it has higher density development, and the traffic patterns are far more scrutable. The City has taken an interest in this seamy smear of eyesores and has a survey online to measure development preferences for the future. You can click here to take the Survey.

The major thing that sticks out to me about East Riverside is its profound unfriendliness to pedestrians and cyclists, and what sticks out about the survey is much the same. Nearly all of the examples lack bicycle lanes and racks, and many of the proposed parking solutions present substantial blind spots that make it easy for motorists to ignore and kill cyclists and pedestrians. I’m a little disappointed in the city for not offering more cycling-friendly options. Still, I think it’s a good thing the city is doing something to address this sprawl in the inner-city.

Earlier this afternoon, I paid a visit to Monkeywrench, and one of the collective members told me that The Man has shut down Goodflow Juice Co. The gossip is that some federal agency gave the company a deadline for pasteurizing its juice, and it was unable to shift production to a new facility before the deadline. I have not been able to find any corroboration about this from mainstream media sources, which is a bit disappointing, since it’s a local business loved by many Austinites. The plus side for me, however, was that Monkeywrench was the beneficiary of a large lot of unsalable juice, and I was treated to a delicious ginger lemonade.

I hope the Chronicle or The Austin Real-Estatesman will get on this story and sort it all out.

Update: UT student paper The Daily Texan has the scoop on the FDA’s closure of GoodFlow Juice Co.