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Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

> How long before all the Californians make Austin the exact same place they fled from?

That is a concern.

But part of SF's problems is structural: transportation and new construction are constrained by water. That is much less of a concern in Austin.

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Have you ever been to Austin? It has the worst transportation network in the entire state of Texas, and that's a really low bar. The bus network is mediocre at best, the rail system (actually only one line) is practically useless, and there's only two highways that are notoriously gridlocked at all hours, even in non rush-hour.

Yeah, but they just passed Project Connect so expect that to change quite a bit. https://www.capmetro.org/project-connect

I'm excited about Project Connect, but let's not kid ourselves: construction on the rail lines and highway improvements isn't even going to begin until 2024, with completion dates (barring no delays) in 2029, with most of the completion dates in the mid 2030s.

At Austin's current rate of growth, by the time Project Connect makes any material progress, it'll already be obsolete and overburdened.

The context of SF and Austin are obviously entirely different in terms of direction, momentum, it makes sense Austin wouldn't yet have a great public transportation system.

Austin TX wasn't rich 20 years ago, where was the money going to come from to build a nice transportation network? It's booming at present and will be very rich 20 years from now (most likely). It has a bad transportation network because it was underdeveloped for the prior decades as with much of Texas. The question going forward is what they'll do with their growth and rising affluence, how they'll utilize that (or not).

New construction in San Francisco (and basically everywhere else in the United States) is constrained primarily by policy. If it were legal to build more, then developers would surely build more.

Yes and no. For increasing density of existing areas, yes, that's basically a universal in the US, not a Republican-vs-Democrat thing, but in Texas cities you can (and do) keep going outward, so you can (and do) keep building single-family-homes. Can't do that within commuting distance of SF anymore.

Is public transit good in Austin?

Just get a big truck like everyone else and you’ll be fine.

Not really but a big transit bond just passed that intends to expand the light rail system, eventually linking the airport to downtown and downtown to more of the central area. There's going to be some sort of huge construction project on the interstate that bisects the town but the particulars have not yet been decided on that.

Will probably take 10+ years to build?

LOL no. SFMTA alone carries almost 10x as many weekday riders as Capitol Metro and that's not even counting BART, which is seems like you'd need to count BART to get to an equivalent service area population.

It’s brutal.

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