but not for the environmental impact.

I’d guess there will be a lot of hand wringing over this years Austin City Limits, the bands, the venue, the environmental impact and of course the grass. I’d bet that right now, over at  C3 Presents , a member of staff will be working on a press release extolling the virtues of the recycling effort, etc. etc.

I only did ACL Friday this year, the music wasn’t really my “scene”. Anyway, to the point of my post. Saturday evening I found myself downtown for dinner at La Condesa on 2nd St. What stunned me was between 7:15pm and about 9pm, the sheer number of Cap Metro shuttle buses streaming past the restaurant completely empty.

Tonight I stopped off on the way home around 7:30pm and counted the empty buses on their way back to Republic park. Again, mostly for the 30-minutes I waited there were a dozen or more buses, travelling back completely empty. As far as I could see, none of these were Cap Metro’s fleet of Gas powered buses, they were the older stock diesel buses. On my way along Caesar Chavez doing the regulation 35MPH, I was overtaken by a bus doing at least 5MPH faster.

For a city that makes a big deal of it’s environmental efforts this needs addressing for next year. Sure, C3 contracts with Cap Metro to run a bus every so many minutes. At peak times, I’m sure that is not enough and a backlog of passengers builds-up. However, there has got to be a better way than shuttling back and forwards all these empty buses.

Next headline: Zilker Park becomes private entertainment complex, fenced off again for 2010!