The City of Austin’s Transportation Department is launching Walk + Bike Talks, a series of community conversations about pedestrian safety a

**From the City of Austin Mobility Talks website: As great as Austin is, we struggle with transportation and mobility. Whether you drive, walk, bike, or take transit, the City of Austin is working on ways to make getting around safer and easier. But it needs your help. From March 21 through May 8, the City of Austin is asking for your priorities online and in person to improve Austin's transportation network. City leaders will use this information for future decision-making o

Texas Monthly has a wonderful essay posted this week entitled "The City of the Eternal Boom" about the evolution of Austin, Texas from a sleepy little hippie mecca to the international arts and tech hub it is today. Kinney & Associates has been a part of the evolution of this town for nearly thirty years, with Girard Kinney, our founder and principal architect involved in the design of our city skyline for nearly fifty years. Here is a snippet from the Texas Montly article--w

Digital billboards may be coming to Austin. Over the next 120 days there will be a community conversation about a proposal to convert some of our existing billboards to digital---to utilize digital, changeable technology to allow advertisements to change every 8 seconds. That’s 450 advertising messages every hour and over 10,000 message changes on a single billboard face every day. To have a better understanding of what this would look like in Austin, particularly at night o

WATER AND WASTE WATER RULE CHANGES BACKGROUND: Earlier this year architects and others involved in planning and/or building home additions or detached dwellings learned that a policy change late last year was making projects cost a great deal more than had previously been the case. Up until the policy changes, the city had been performing upgrades in service lines falling in the street, had not been requiring up-sizing of lines to most projects, had not been requiring new tap

As Austinites, we are always in search of ways to make our city one of the best in the nation. This month the NACTO Designing Cities 2015 conference is hosting a series of talks and seminars with a variety of featured speakers from across the country. Organized by the Austin Transportaion Department, Better Streets Week is a part of the national transportation conference- hosted by the City of Austin, Oct. 28-31 - and is focused on "creating better city streets and mobility n

An attempt to amend the provisions of the City of Austin Land Development Code with respect to Accessory Dwelling Units has been in progress for most of this year. As of this writing, the City Council has passed, on second reading, an ordinance which: 1) Reduces building separation from 15 feet to 10 feet. 2) Allows an entrance within 10 feet of a property line. 3) Removes driveway placement requirement. 4) Reduces parking requirement from 2 to 1 off street space for all