Yay! It's something

Though this isn't enough for my neighbors and though I still wish they wouldn't put in a Wal Mart I was pretty happy to read the following:

By Sarah Coppola
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, May 12, 2007

Wal-Mart will reduce the size of a store that is planned for North Austin, but not enough to satisfy a neighborhood group that opposes the project.
Lincoln Property Co. plans to redevelop Northcross Mall into a Wal-Mart Supercenter and other stores. Wal-Mart said Friday that it will build a 186,500-square-foot store, instead of a 219,000-square-foot one. It will also build a separate 5,500-square-foot garden center.

By reducing the size, Wal-Mart avoids a threshold that would have required it to use higher estimates to predict traffic created by the store. The more traffic the store creates, the more road improvements the developer would be required to pay for.

Recent traffic counts at other Central Texas Wal-Marts showed that those stores draw as many as 28,277 cars a day — almost three times the amount Lincoln has predicted for Northcross. Also, a 2006 journal article from the Institute of Transportation Engineers said that discount stores bigger than 200,000 square feet generate more traffic than previously thought.
Lincoln needs to submita new traffic analysis by mid-June before the city can approve Lincoln's site plan and the Wal-Mart can be built.

City leaders recently told Wal-Mart that if the store remained bigger than 200,000 square feet, Lincoln would have to use the recent traffic counts and higher estimates from the journal article as a guide, Council Member Brewster McCracken said.

Richard Suttle, a lawyer representing Wal-Mart, said the change would make the Northcross Wal-Mart the smallest in Central Texas.

During the protest there were 3000 people and not everyone came in a car. When it was over there was a traffic jam and it was a Saturday, 11ish. It's all just common sense:

The mall was built in 1975.
Estimates of the population in Austin while the mall was at it's prime
1970- 251,808
1980- 345,496

Today we have over 656,562 (this was the population count in 2000)

So when that mall was at max capacity and cars moving in and out of the area did it create congestion? I am sure it did for THOSE times. The area did not extend much further past Anderson Lane.

So imagine max capacity of the mall today as a Wal Mart-keep in mind the amount of cars and people that site will have will increase from the 1975 Northcross Mall model because parking garages and square footage are planned to increase. Burnet and Anderson Lane will remain the same, as will Northcross drive. Big mess.