In case anyone is wondering, I’m doing this documentation so I can look back at it later. I know it’s not the most fascinating thing ever.

Sidetrack On a side note I really need to harass the city about the state of the sidewalks between Westgate and Manchaca on Stassney. There are 5 buses in the area but heaven help you if you want to walk home. Where there is sidewalk it’s split and crumbling, and there are large stretches with no sidewalk at all. How do they get away with this? You start building a sidewalk and then decide you don’t feel like building one 4’x4’ square? It’s really that bad. It’s not just like some builders didn’t feel like connecting their sidewalk to another piece of sidewalk. It’s like the same builder didn’t feel like connecting their own sidewalk to itself. There’s also a really interesting piece right by a bus stop with no sidewalk where you have to go up a 45 degree incline (vertical and horizontal) while dodging a tree. I imagine it’s fun when there’s mud. I know there are a lot of mobility impaired people living in the area, I’m puzzled how they deal with this.

Ok, on to the pictures. They finished the plumbing at the same time. It’s really startling to have a home builder who can have 2 teams working on the house at once.

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Comments

M1EK (http://mdahmus.monkeysystems.com/blog/)

2007-09-25T19:29:41.000Z

Prior to about 1990, Austin was still run by good-old-boys not much differently than the rest of Texas, in which you’ll see that roads built in the same era rarely have sidewalks. The theory was that we could fix this by having developers put them in when they developed properties on the road (and that somehow we wouldn’t mind the gaps in the meantime). This has been abandoned - essentially all new arterial construction, at least by the city, since about 1990 has included sidewalks. The state is another beast entirely - they build sidewalks grudgingly if at all even today, even in corridors which are fully developed, and as if that latent hostility isn’t enough, they’ve often built their frontage roads in ways which preclude sidewalks from being built later.