“The whole emphasis of the plan is to get things connected and in close proximity to each other,” said Garner Stoll, assistant director of the city’s planning and development review department. “Some people can walk or use transit, but not everyone will have to take auto trips.”
If Austin develops in accordance with the plan, Stoll said the result would be a more affordable and livable city.
A new vision
Imagine Austin, or the comp plan, as it is widely referred to, maps out a departure from the current plan, Austin Tomorrow.
Adopted in 1979, Austin Tomorrow adheres to a more traditional view of how an ideal community should be laid out, with commercial and residential sectors separate—indicating most travel must be made by car.
Imagine Austin, however, has walkable urban hubs, referred to as “regional centers,” separated by low-density, single-family neighborhoods.
In Central Austin, the plan identifies two such centers: downtown and at the intersection of I-35 and Hwy. 290. City policy and planning strategies will help grow the centers by 25,000 to 45,000 people and 5,000 to 25,000 new jobs.
“For the regional centers, we have tried to identify areas with a lot of capacity, a lot of room,” said Greg Claxton, a senior planner with the city.
Each center is also situated at the intersection of major roads that will carry high-capacity transit buses or at planned or existing stops on the MetroRail Red Line and an urban rail system yet to be built.
Managing multiple plans
Austin Tomorrow, while visionary for its time, has lost relevance over the last three decades, Stoll said. A movement to update or create a new comprehensive plan got some traction in the late 1980s, though it failed to gain critical mass.
As a result, City Council launched a neighborhood-planning program that allowed residents, businesses and other stakeholders to create a formal document that would dictate future land use, desired zoning changes and aesthetic guidelines.
“Rather than trying to do a comprehensive plan, they thought they would attack the problem neighborhood by neighborhood, and eventually there would be plans for the whole city,” Stoll said.
That decision has led to concern over how Imagine Austin will coexist with the neighborhood plans, which have been adopted for approximately half of the neighborhoods in the city.
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