Since I'm apparently "posting too fast", I'll just post my reply to the post below here.
US cities (including Austin) are not built to make this viable. I grew up in Russia which mirrors the European way of building things. Everything you need for your family is within walking distance, for what I hope are obvious reasons. The US is not built for this. If one's goal is to get rid of cars, you have to build cities with that in mind. This takes decades, which is why nobody seems interested in actually doing this. Instead we get this passive-aggressive "let's build less parking and roads" thing that you see in US urban centers. No attention whatsoever is paid to how the folks actually live, how they raise their kids, and so on. I'd also argue that, as we switch to electric (and eventually to nuclear power, since that seems inevitable if we actually want to solve the climate crisis rather than just make Al Gore filthy rich), cars will become less and less of a problem, and population will spread out rather than move into the cities. Cities are a bad deal as it is. Expensive real estate, congested roads, high crime.
Take a ton of people with CA urban ideology and plop them down in a random city in TX and "intentionally bad traffic because we expect everyone in the city to give up their cars" seems like a not unforseeable outcome.
Frankly this is why we leave major infrastructure planning up to the states so that the state can wring the best possible outcome out of an entire economic region without getting too bogged down by local politics. Left to their own devices cities would build shit infrastructure because they'd try to exclude the poors and other petty stuff like that.
Slow, low traffic car trips is the sign that the city wants people to not drive.
Moving to a non car centric city means you don't need a car for your trips. The lifestyle is to stop having a car, because it's unnecessary
Even in Manhattan, where transit is pretty decent, the only reason why transit is faster (sometimes) is because traffic is terrible all the time.
I expect more builders and handymen will move to Austin to take advantage of the booming job market.
Expensive high rises contribute as much to the housing supply as any other type of housing, and use far less land for it.
