Here what Robert Rivard wrote in todays paper, Downtown Vision Falls Short:
Rebecca Ryan owns the stage. Smart, fit and attractive, funny and confident, she has a packed audience of Downtown Alliance members laughing, Twittering and nodding in agreement as she works her way through a captivating session imagining a truly great future city.
Ryan is a dynamo: the author of the praised book “Live First, Work Second,” an urban planning consultant and an expert observer of the next generation. Introduced by Mayor Julián Castro, she mesmerizes listeners with a clever mix of data, trends and one-liners.
As Castro noted, San Antonio is a growing place, and with San Diego, Calif., now in the rearview mirror, in terms of the nation's largest cities, Philadelphia will be the next city we pass.
Fine, Ryan notes, but young people don't necessarily want to live here. The challenge, she said, is to build a city that makes young people feel homesick, a place they ache for when gone rather than a city they can't wait to leave.
Ryan lives in Madison, Wis., which some compare culturally to Austin. The big screen above the stage fills with a city map showing Madison's comprehensive network of bike lanes, despite the city's long winters.
Then she turns to San Antonio's patchwork of bike lanes and says the map communicates one message to local cyclists: Don't even think about riding in this city.
I was as inspired as everyone else in the audience at the Westin Riverwalk Hotel on Thursday, but inspiration is one thing, reality another.
A Saturday cycling outing for some 20 members of the Third Street Grackles, the team I captain, ended in near-disaster for one rider. Lisa Marie Gomez was riding home north on Broadway around noon just south of Hildebrand when she collided with an oncoming taxi that turned into her lane, the driver apologizing that he didn't see her.
Fortunately, Gomez was uninjured, not the usual outcome in motor vehicle-bicycle mishaps.
While the mayor has been speaking passionately about the “Decade of Downtown” and others in the Downtown Alliance have joined him in supporting imaginative and ambitious plans for the future inner city, the sad truth is that the rhetoric is not being matched by action.
In the coming year, both Hildebrand and Mulberry avenues, both of which cross and connect the city's key north-south avenues — Broadway, McCullough and San Pedro — will be closed for long periods to undertake major drainage improvement projects.
The newly constructed streets will include some additional right of way, yet city engineers have no plans to add bike lanes to either Hildebrand or Mulberry, which bracket Brackenridge Park.
The resistance by city planners to embrace sensible planning and best practices is both arrogant and astonishing. And the city's top leadership is doing little or nothing about it.
As we report on Page 1A today, University of the Incarnate Word President Lou Agnese has been quietly working to expand the campus across Hildebrand into Brackenridge Park.
The street crossing from UIW to the park already is one of the most dangerous pedestrian crossings in the city core. Allowing new campus structures, parking lots and vehicle traffic to spill into the park will only make matters worse.
The city, like the taxi that collided with Gomez on Saturday, is actually making some very bad decisions that run counter to the mayor's progressive vision. The next generation will have to live with the consequences, or find somewhere else more appealing to call home.
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