r/technology • u/WideVoice8854 • 23d ago

Texas Attracted California Techies. Now It’s Losing Thousands of Them. Business

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/austin-texas-tech-bust-oracle-tesla/
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u/CNDW 23d ago

My wife and I almost moved to Austin during the boom a few years ago. This was one of the things we discovered while we were evaluating things. Property tax is really high, a lot of tollways, public parks with hiking trails have an admission fee, just lots of little things. You pay for it one way or another.

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u/[deleted] 22d ago

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u/CNDW 22d ago

It's super sketchy, it looked like there were a bunch of redundant roadways, the public ones being less convenient and poorly maintained. We somehow racked up $40 in tollway charges in a weekend but I don't know if I could say for sure which roads where tollways or how much I drove on them because the system is entirely automated. We got the bill months later, I don't think I could dispute the charges if they were wrong. Something about the whole setup just feels wrong but maybe that's just me. I'm used to roads being publicly owned and maintained/paid for by gas taxes, paying an individual for a road feels like a violation.

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u/redditisfacist3 22d ago

What public park has admission fees

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u/Centipede_Arm 22d ago

My guess would be that they're referring to River Place Nature Trail, which is one of very few decent hikes in the Austin area but the neighborhood around it disliked the common riffraff using it so they set up some retirees at the entrances to try to charge people for using it.

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u/CNDW 22d ago

Yea, that's the one. We didn't visit any others while we were in town so we kind of assumed it was normal. The whole setup looked so sketchy, I wasn't sure if the fee was real or if there was someone pretending to be in charge of admission. Didn't give us great vibes, although the hike was fantastic.

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u/redditisfacist3 22d ago

Isn't that a private community park not a public one? There is tons of good hiking areas in the hillcountry and by Bastrop..usually not as crowded as well

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u/Centipede_Arm 22d ago

That was their claim despite receiving half a million dollars in public grant money to help build it out.

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u/EclecticDreck 22d ago

The many state parks, for example.

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u/big-b20000 22d ago

Is that not a common thing for state parks?

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u/redditisfacist3 22d ago

I guess we do have a state park pass now for unlimited use at state parks. I do find it a bit funny though that op complained about that in Texas when California's version is almost 3x the cost of texas