Continuing to build these high rise buildings without parking is going to destroy the city and just as important the business owners inside the city. I am all for Green living and supporting the cause but we are not in a day and time where this is possible given the huge limitations with rail options outside the city. Businesses rely on people coming into town and its going to be decades or longer before we see any appreciable additions to bring people in to support our local businesses. Its also just as likely that we will move towards other forms of personal transportation like electric cars which will still need space to park. The time to stop this is now before its too late.

We cannot stop growth, we cannot stop these developers from building out downtown and buying up land to do it. We can stop our city council and leadership from allowing them to build these huge buildings without parking or making the city buy expensive property to build parking structures. My wife and I don't come downtown often and our neighbors have the same opinion....hard to find parking, traffic and just plain painful. This hurts the city of Austin and especially the local businesses.

I propose that the city council address this problem by making all future buildings in Austin be build with a minimum of 50-100 public parking spaces depending on the size of the building. This will help with the parking congestion, allow our downtown businesses to thrive and get cars off the street and into underground parking with no cost to the city. This is easily affordable if its part of the planning process for all future buildings and should be included as part of any commercial or residential structure. This will help the parking issues downtown, it will help our local businesses with access to their business and it will help our city with additional tax revenue for our city.

Why on EARTH is the city not addressing this? We are decades away from real public transportation in the city and the businesses and the tax revenue for the city will suffer from this lack of planning.