There are some fair knocks on Austin. The city is incapable of keeping its drinking water drinkable for more than a year straight. Instagram holds far too much sway over the actions of the people. The University of Texas fanbase was unfair to Shaka Smart, and the airport has direct flights to Honolulu and Amsterdam and I wanna say Norway but it doesn’t have more than one a day, tops, to Philadelphia or Tucson, two places my friends like to get married.
One unfair knock, though, is the knock that it isn’t walkable.
Austin is sprawling. This is true. Austin also does not have public transit, at least for those of us who are not either extremely patient or extremely desperate. Austin also has two big highways squeezing its center from either side, and crossing one on foot is a real pain in the ass while crossing the other on foot is something I’m not sure anyone’s ever done unless they’re into “exercise.”
But you can walk Austin.
Last weekend, my car died. They tell me it was the battery. I believe them, but I’m skeptical. I think what’s really happening is that battery problems must be more varied than I, narrow-minded man of the people, consider them to be, but what my suspicious instinct tells me is happening is that if I park in the wrong spot anytime in the next three years and shut off my car, it won’t start up again even with a brand-new battery. Anyway, when I finally got it towed on Tuesday, I was one mile from a good bar, three miles from home, and awkwardly walking away from a good-friend-but-not-a-close-friend’s apartment because I’d said goodbye to them before I thought to call an Uber.
I kept walking.
I ended up walking from Hyde Park to Haymaker (yes, I did it, I crossed I-35 at the 38.5th street bridge), and then from Haymaker almost all the way home. (My lovely evening was spoiled three blocks short when my wife, having forgotten her keys, pulled up honking and told me to get in, and what was I going to do, say, “No, I’m walking, go home and wait,” like this is 1985?) It was wonderful. I was cutting through parks, passing dilapidated houses, catching glimpses from little hilltops of the sun setting red over the skyline. The walk from Haymaker to almost-home was the best 40 minutes I’ve had since I mistakenly thought we’d figured out an advantage over the college basketball betting market and were about to win two thousand dollars over the course of a month. And while some of this is that the East Side is picturesque if you take the time to look at it, it’s not just the East Side. You can walk all the way from the South Lamar/Ben White Target to the Home Slice in the North Loop without passing through anything ugly. On the way, you get a great big bridge, the grounds of the state capitol, a university campus, and multiple quaint old neighborhoods, plus a shopping district, city streets, and more than one creek crossing. I don’t have a map here but it’s something like eight or nine miles of walkability, with more variety than even Manhattan. Add in the Greenbelt and you can get all the way to the stubble of Hill Country on foot with ease.
The problem with Austin and walking, then, is not that it isn’t walkable. Yes, there’s the sprawl issue, it’s sometimes hard to get to places on foot. It’s that it’s too easy to have a car, and too hard to not have a car, so you get used to using a car to get everywhere, and instead of doing the New York thing or the D.C. thing or the Chicago thing and taking public transit as the middle leg of a trip that involves forty minutes of walking, you call a Lyft. Also, it’s hot for a lot of the year. Really hot. Irresponsibly hot, frankly, why did all those people from Tennessee think it was a good idea to move down here.
So, now, disciples of the Crow, go out into the world, and the next time someone tells you Austin isn’t walkable, gently correct them. By walking. It is only with our feet that we can make the world spin.
