I tell my wife often that the clearest evidence she has of my undying love was that she convinced me to move to Austin. In August of 1999, I packed up and left a Fort Worth loft apartment in a building that was designated as a “historical landmark” and moved into a small wooden box off of First Street in South Austin. I lasted until May of 2000 (after the tech bubble burst and the entire city went to Hell in an email attachment) when we packed up our small family and drove back in the general direction of DFW.
In the almost ten months I lived in Austin, Texas, I made two critical observations about Austin traffic. First, everyone obeys speed limits. In the Metroplex, those familiar black-and-white signs posting the maximum speed at which you are allowed to travel appear to merely be suggestions. The other thing I noticed was that Austin hired only the most incompetent of city planners when it came to street layout. There is, literally, no good way to get from anywhere to anywhere in the city of Austin. Arlington was the only other place in the state I’d ever driven in which I felt like the traffic planners deserved the pillory.
No bad day I’d ever had in traffic in the Metroplex ever eclipsed trying to get out of Austin on a Friday afternoon. There is a theory that the spread of Christianity was in part facilitated by the existence of the Roman Empire’s modern system of roads that connected all the major provinces to its capital city and to one another. Had the Son of God been crucified in Austin, Christianity would’ve died in its cradle if it had depended on getting out of town on I-35.
So, it came as a complete shock to me when the voters of Austin chased thousands of jobs out of town by turning down Proposition 1, a ballot initiative that would have required employees of ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft to submit to fingerprinting as a part of their background check for employment. These were two companies with actual, real, innovative solutions to traffic problems in Austin and already running criminal history checks on its drivers.
Actually, it didn’t come as a shock to me. I remain completely unsurprised that the city fathers (or mothers, or gender-fluid parents…) of Austin would require something that every licensed driver in Texas has to do when they finally reach the counter of their local DPS station. The DPS just doesn’t take all ten anymore, only one. The party of science has no problem using that one fingerprint to unlock an iPhone, but now seems to be laboring under the delusion that taking all ten wards off evil spirits when you get behind the wheel.
I was an avid mountain biker in DFW and heard that Austin was the Mecca of cycling in Texas, which made it pretty much the only thing I looked forward to when moving there aside from being married to someone way hotter than me. I can say from personal experience I didn’t get to experience much of it because I considered getting around on a bicycle in Austin a somewhat playful form of suicide. The people who needed the full fingerprinting were the suburbanite moms sipping an $8 latte while driving their ecologically-friendly minibus filled with children (some of whom had to be ridesharing) to an outing at Zilker Park or the absolutely dreadful Austin Zoo. Seriously, the Austin Zoo has, like, dogs and cats and chickens.
Another thing that Proposition 1 prohibited was the practice of ridesharing drivers stopping in lanes of traffic to pick up their fare. This blissfully breezes past all the other completely ordinary reasons Austinites suddenly slam on their brakes and cause traffic accidents, like trying to avoid an endangered salamander, fumbling with a facial piercing while driving to their part time gig at the yoga studio, or the seven-headed peyote goblin telling them there was a fissure in the road that led directly to reincarnation as a bat under the Congress Street Bridge. That last one might lead to gainful employment for some, and we can’t have that.
A few years ago, I read an absolutely wonderful piece from Heather Wilhelm, a brilliant contributor to The Federalist and RealClearPolitics, describing the reactions of her peers when she attempted to determine their political loyalty by informing them she was moving to Texas. Many of them breathed a sigh of relief when she specified that she was moving to Austin, Texas and they replied “oh, Austin’s wonderful, it’s not like the rest of the state”. The implication being the rest of the state is some post-apocalyptic moonscape filled with shuffling zombies trudging their way through the plus-sized clothes racks of a WalMart.
In the spirit of that attitude, something else that didn’t surprise me this week was Chief Executive Magazine voting Texas the best state in America in which to do business for the twelfth year in a row. This is largely due to the pro-business policies of our state that the city of Austin has benefitted from but now seems perfectly willing to spurn. There is a reason the rest of Texas refers to Austin as “Leningrad-on-the-Lower-Colorado”. Austin seems fine with simply being the address that everyone else sends their tax money to or the place that state academic competency tests go to die. Notice that the rest of the state has no problem being known as the only place to add jobs during the Great Recession.
Austin will be forever known in Texas as the kid sister that cut her hair, came out of Brandeis with an ankle tattoo and a degree in gender studies, and generally exudes a faint odor of patchouli. She lucked into being the capital and is still dining out on the presence of a legislative body that the rest of the state thinks has been dipped in leprosy. Now she’s kicked out a boyfriend who had a job. Typical kid sister.
The Dented Vessel 