The Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s next CEO and president, Randy Clarke, will take the transit agency’s reins on March 7. On Monday, Capital Metro’s board of directors unanimously approved the terms of Clarke’s five-year contract, a document Clarke was on hand to personally sign. “What really intrigues me about this position is Austin itself. This […]
Transportation
Posted inTransit
CTRMA board finalists talk up transit during Travis County interviews
The Travis County Commissioners Court will decide on Tuesday which two of six candidates it will appoint to the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority’s board of directors. The court interviewed the applicants during a special session on Thursday. Of the six, two are current incumbents. David Armbrust has held his seat since 2012, while Charles […]
Posted inTransit
Experience put Capital Metro CEO finalist over the top
The chair of the board at the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority said experience was the deciding factor when it came to selecting a lone finalist to take the executive reins. On Friday, after the board voted 7-0-1 to tap Randy Clarke to replace former CEO and President Linda Watson, Chair Wade Cooper said Clarke’s background […]
Posted inTransportation
Hyperloop shoots through UTC meeting
The Urban Transportation Commission went down the tubes Tuesday evening. At its first meeting of 2018, the commission took in a presentation from engineering firm AECOM on efforts to prepare for a future hyperloop system in Texas. “This is not something that’s coming in the next decade, or the next decade. This is something that’s […]
Posted inRoads
Austin’s new ‘speed cushions’ spark outcry
Susanne Paul worries that Jester Estates, the affluent Northwest Austin neighborhood where she’s lived for nearly 20 years, may be broken beyond repair. What was once an “extremely friendly” community is now fraught with political divisions that many of her neighbors believe may make it impossible to ever return to the “happy innocence of what […]
Posted inTransit
Capital Metro CEO finalists face the public
The auditions are over and now it’s time for the judges to determine who gets to be Austin’s next top transit executive. The final four candidates in the running for the open president/CEO job at the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority faced three separate rounds of interviews on Monday in front of the board of directors, […]
Posted inTransportation
CAMPO keeps Conley as chair
After legal counsel proposed a unique interpretation of Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization bylaws, CAMPO Transportation Policy Board members voted on Monday to keep Will Conley as chair but removed his ability to vote on policy issues. Although federal statute dictates that board members of powerful planning bodies such as CAMPO must be local elected […]
Posted inTransportation
CAMPO to consider innovative way to keep Conley as chair
A unique proposal is in the works to keep Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization board Chair Will Conley in his post despite his departure last year from the Hays County Commissioners Court. Federal statute dictates that board members of powerful transportation planning bodies such as CAMPO must be local elected officials, state officials or “officials […]
Posted inBicycles
City tentatively talks about dockless bike-sharing
The Austin Transportation Department is taking a studious approach to the dockless bike-sharing companies that have swooped into cities throughout the world in 2017. Active Transportation Program Manager Laura Dierenfield brought the Bicycle Advisory Council into the conversation on Wednesday night with a discussion that Dierenfield framed as part of an evaluation process aimed at […]
Posted inTransit
Capital Metro reveals final four in its CEO search
The path to replace outgoing Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority President and CEO Linda Watson will trace through a town hall meeting in early 2018. On Wednesday, the transit agency revealed the names of the four candidates still in the running for the position. It also announced a community confab scheduled for Jan. 8 at which […]
Posted inRoads
State officials steamroll toll lanes out of I-35 plans
The Texas Transportation Commission drove the Capital Express into a bar ditch on Thursday morning. Despite a full-court, bipartisan press from local political and business leaders, the commission voted unanimously to strip from the Texas Department of Transportation’s 10-year construction program the recently debuted plans for four tolled express lanes on Interstate 35 in Austin. […]
Posted inRoads
Traffic volumes increasing on MoPac
The MoPac Improvement Project, originally sold as a congestion relief initiative, has driven up the number of drivers on parts of the roadway, with some sections seeing an increase of nearly 30,000 vehicles per day. “The traffic has returned,” Jeff Dailey, deputy executive director of the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, told his board of […]