Public Notice: Zilker Park Vision Still Cloudy

A new land bridge spanning Barton Springs Road is the most dramatic concept floated among the three scenarios in the latest iteration of the Zilker Vision plan (Image via City of Austin / Design Workshop)

The city Parks and Recreation Depart­ment and lead consultants Design Work­shop presented the latest iteration of the Zilker Metropolitan Park Vision Plan Tuesday night, Feb. 15, to a Zoom crowd of a little over 100 – and if that seems like a small sample to be giving feedback on such an iconic piece of land in a city of over a million people, yes, that point was noted by several participants. But public outreach is hard in the best of times, and these are not they.

The main presenter was Claire Hempel of Design Workshop – who is also vice chair of the city Planning Commission and Paige Ellis' appointee – and the presentation itself was clear and jam-packed with ideas and options, presenting three very different concept plans, each containing features that can be mixed-and-matched to some extent, but essentially proposing three very different strategies for traffic flow and parking.

And therein lies the rub, I suppose, for those who would like to see a greener and specifically less auto-centric vision for the park. That vision is represented in the "Rewilding Zilker Park" plan produced back in September by the Save Our Springs Alliance and the Zilker Neighborhood Association; and as I noted last week, the rebuttal to that was expressed in a January letter from a group of organizations that use and support the park, stressing that "parking access is a top priority" for them, in order to support the current activities that they and others use the park for. So with that background, on to the three concepts presented Tuesday evening:

• Concept A: Stitch. This one features the single most dramatic feature presented in any of the plans: a land bridge connecting the two sides of the park – essentially a large man-made hill built over Barton Springs road, with the road tunneling through it, and a massive 1,700-car underground parking garage nearby. That enables the removal of most all of the current small lots scattered around the park and a number of roads as well; both concepts A and B would remove vehicular traffic from Lou Neff Road, (the circle drive around the Great Lawn), and reconfigure Stratford Drive to run along MoPac instead of through the park.

• Concept B: Edges. The central idea here is to have distributed arrival points on the edges of the park, possibly including a new pedestrian bridge across the lake to around Austin High. In this vision, the parking would be in three new 3- and 4-story parking garages: one on MoPac at the southwest edge of the park, one along the lake near the MoPac bridge (the former Butler landfill that's now a caliche service lot), and the third across Barton Creek near the Umlauf Museum. In this vision, Barton Springs Road would become more like a city street, with signalized bike/ped crossings and parallel parking.

• Concept C: Regenerate. Planners called this "the lightest touch" – it would leave vehicular traffic more or less as it is, with most all of the existing roads still open to cars, and parking still distributed around the park in small lots and along roads, including Barton Springs Road. There's not a lot of new infrastructure, aside from a new ped/bike bridge, and perhaps a new boat dock down by the Butler landfill.

Each of the plans has some common elements: notably an internal circulator system of shuttles and the rehabilitation of the landfill, along with more vegetation, more pedestrian and bike trails and road crossings, and various other amenities.

I reached out to some of the "Rewilding" folks for their hot takes on the morning after the meeting and heard pretty much the same criticisms that they've had all along: too auto-centric, especially for what is supposed to be a 50-year vision plan; no mention of climate effects among the goals or strategies; too much new construction; not enough detail on remediation and revegetation, especially along the shorelines; and aside from the internal circulators, very little reference to public transportation options. (To be fair, the planners did describe a couple of potential bus routes to Downtown, possibly along the lines of the old Dillo shuttle buses, but said they were relying on the Project Connect planning process to carry that ball.)

So, as with a lot of planning, an awful lot of it comes back to the automobile question – what an architect friend summed up as the perpetual bane of his profession: "Where are you going to put the corral for the sheet-metal horses?" Or in this case, "Are we still going to need corrals in 20 years, and can we get by without them right now?" In that regard, the three concepts all fall in the same range of total corral space, around the same amount that's available now. (Counting all the "informal parking, such as the Polo Field, currently utilized in the park," PARD estimates there are currently 2,450 parking spaces in the park. Concept A has a little fewer at 2,235, while B and C have a few more, at 2,715 and 2,580, respectively.) But whether that is the right amount of parking to be planning for in the first place is either a question for another day, or a question that's already been decided in favor of the status quo.

The next community meeting will be in June, and the planners anticipate final City Council approval late this year, which frankly seems awfully soon for a plan that's still in such a conceptual stage, with so many basic questions still in play. Then too, there do not appear to be any cost estimates involved yet. Concept A seemed to be the clear favorite among the small sample of about 100 who participated in the live polling during the meeting Tuesday, but whether it might be pricey to build a hill, or a 1,700-car parking garage under it, were not issues for the poll respondents to consider. But cost is clearly a factor, just like parking capacity, that's going to have to be factored into deciding between these different concepts, or between this and the Rewilding vision. Those questions are eventually going to wind up on City Council's doorstep, so it might be a good idea for them to define some of the major policy directions now, before the whole thing comes to them fully baked.

See the whole plan, including the recording and slides from the Tuesday meeting, at austintexas.gov/zilkervision.

RIP Lars Eighner, long-ago Chronicle contributor, author of the much-anthologized essay "On Dumpster Diving" and the acclaimed homelessness memoir Travels With Lizbeth (his dog, who preceded him in death). He died here in Austin on Dec. 23, though his obituary just made it into The New York Times this past Sunday.