You are hereUTC Meeting: Bike Plan Update and Golf Cart Cabs?
UTC Meeting: Bike Plan Update and Golf Cart Cabs?
Thanks to A2W for the reminder, this evening is a really big Urban Transportation Commission meeting for two reasons: first up is that it's the UTC's final look at the new Bike Plan Update before it goes before City Council for final approval.
The other reason has been causing quite a bit of hubbub in the local pedicabbing community. Chris Nielson, owner/operator of a lot of the golf carts you see trolling round the 6th St. area on drinking nights, is going to be petitioning the city to allow golf carts to legally operate as ground transportation vehicles, which would then enable him to begin taking money for giving people rides, something that his drivers have already been doing illegally. Not that I really care about the legality of things, but his side-stepping of the rules has been negatively impacting my pedicabbing friends who have jumped through all the city's hoops to attain their status legally, and that's not cool. If you want to know more backstory on all this, A2W wrote a great article on it a few weeks ago. Make sure to check the comments section for all the good juicy bits.
My opinion on the whole golf cart thing is that they may be "greener" than a regular cab, but I really don't care about all that, I just don't want to see a bunch of damn golf carts buzzing around downtown. Yes, I'm taking the intolerant stance. I'm all for weird bikes, trailers, trikes, pedicabs, but there's nothing weird about a golf cart. Realistically I expect the city to start the process because honestly, why not? They've done it for pedicabs, why wouldn't they do it for these things? I just won't be taking a ride on a golf cart, and will be looking for a friend on a pedicab to flag down when I need to haul ass from one side of 6th to the other and my bike's locked up somewhere in the middle.
The whole deal goes down at Austin City Hall (301 w. 2nd Street) from 6pm to 9pm. Anyone is welcome to attend, or even speak their peace if they sign up to do so.
Sounds like John McCain's stump speaches," My friend!" ... and just as distasteful.
Which is the reason all evidence of Capital Cruisers is now gone from the web! Early, ill-advised websites displayed a blatantly capitalistic attitude, with backgounds of dollar bills, gold bling-bling and pictures of rolls-royce-looking golf carts that he doesnt even own! Chris enjoys having photos of himself taken while he is shirtless, he is quite proud! lots of shots of holding drinks, mouths open , hand signals, you know, the standard material found on hcwdb.com . Then there were self-written accounts of him getting physical with a competing valet company, accounts of him spending the weekend in jail for getting a DUI, ...all of this, Chris finally realised, was damaging information to have out there for evertyone to see. Maybe he even though to himself that he should have never created such immature content in the first place...in any event, he's taken it down so no grown-ups will see it while he appeals to the city to let him drive his carts...
I appreciate your candor my friend. The city itself admits that I'm not breaking any laws. I'm not the @$$hole I'm made out to be. I don't know if we have met but how about giving me a chance to give my side of the story?
Seems that Capital Cruisers has erased itself from the web...I can't find a page for them anywhere and their myspace page is gone...
Don't forget google's cache --
http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:E5C7D7UETy8J:www.myspace.com/capcruz...
and http://archive.org/, though it doesn't seem to have it this time. (Perhaps myspace isn't worth archiving ...)
Hahaha that page is awesome...
"Capitol Cruisers's Interests:
General: Your money.
Music: Does the sound of paper folding count as music?
Movies: The surveillance camera footage when we drop $ off at the bank!
Television: See above.
Books: Bank statements
Heroes: Benjamin Franklin"
Pure class, all the way. I wonder why they took it down?
Great find. Any one know how to pull up his former capitol cruizers page, and the blog pages from his personal site?
-Ken Cameron
austinpedicab.org
Put the URLs that you know into google, see what it gives you. Or perhaps search for some key phrases that were on those pages?
Perhaps you can find the URLs in your browser history?
Click on `Cached' of what you find and hopefully you'll get what you want.
Or go to http://archive.org/ and put the URL in there.
And if you find something on Google's cache, be sure to save it to your local computer -- google could index that site again at any time, and then it would be gone. (The Internet Archive doesn't normally remove things like that, but saving a copy if it's good might not be a bad plan there either.)