Don't Rush Day

Austin gets a new holiday so that people will slow the hell down

Amplify Austin funraiser woman bike bicycle baloons South Congress Avenue

Austin, take your time on May 11.

If you live in Austin, you don't need to see the numbers to know that you spend too much time stuck in traffic. To help combat the city's atrocious congestion, Mayor Steve Adler has launched a new initiative called Austin Don't Rush, and you're going to want to participate.

On May 11, Austinites are encouraged to switch up their commutes to see how it will affect rush hour. You can change your work schedule, work from home, use a bike, or take city transit. In honor of this "holiday," Capital Metro will offer free rides.

The initiative is an experiment sparked by the success seen when Adler asked Austinites to work from home on March 11, the day President Obama rolled into town for a SXSW keynote speech. According to the mayor's statement, travel times during rush hour on MoPac that day decreased by 60 percent, while Highway 183 decreased by about 50 percent. Six major downtown streets experienced a 22 percent decrease in travel time too.

"Last time I asked you to work from home. This time I'm just saying, 'Austin don't rush,'" said Adler. "Figure out a different work schedule. Take the bus or the train. If you can, ride your bike into work. We did it for the president. We can do it for us. If each of us does a little, we can all do a lot."

Austin Don't Rush comes ahead of the final proposal for the Smart City Challenge. Austin is one of seven finalists competing for a $40 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to use towards new technologies, infrastructure, and initiatives to solve traffic issues. Boy, do we need it.

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More Foraging

Free 'food forest' in East Austin expands with thousands of new plants

Angelina Alanis at Festival Beach Food Forest

Photo courtesy of KVUE

Angelina Alanis gives a tour of the garden, which is open to anyone.

In East Austin, there is an edible forest garden called Festival Beach Food Forest where anyone can walk around and harvest free produce, nuts, medicinal plant leaves and herbs. And over the summer, it grew to several times its size.

The forest has fig trees, peach trees, grapevines, asparagus and more that's not in season right now. You can grab passionfruit and plants like yaupon holly, with leaves that can make a caffeinated tea, rosemary and lemon balm.

"[Lemon balm] is part of the mint family," said Angelina Alanis, communication and partnership coordinator for Festival Beach Food Forest. "It has a lemony taste but it's good for a nervous stomach. I'm prone to anxiety so I always grab a hunk."

The food forest is located right next to Interstate 35 and Lady Bird Lake on 29 Waller St., near a part of town that's known for being a food desert, lacking grocery stores.

"There's as much as a 20-year life expectancy difference between parts of East and West Austin, and a lot of that comes down to food access, health care access and also access to nature."

Alanis said for the past nine years, the volunteer-based grassroots project been helping with the issue and just recently expanded in the summer from two-thirds of an acre of city parkland to over 3.5 acres.

"We're going to have hundreds of new trees," said Alanis. "We've already planted 150 new trees in the area and then thousands of plants on the ground."

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They also plan to add a community kitchen and a pavilion to do things like cooking classes or informational sessions.

Read the full story at KVUE.com.

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