The Board of Directors of San Antonio’s Inner City Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ) approved $694,002 to fund the Southtown Street Enhancement Project. According to the City of San Antonio’s website:
The project will include curb bulb-outs, making more permanent the existing parallel parking along S. Alamo Street and take the street down to one lane in each direction. The curb bulb-outs will provide several benefits to include narrowed street intersections for shorter pedestrian crossings that will naturally calm traffic speeds, and added sidewalk/curb area that will allow for larger street planting areas outside of the overhead lines.
In other words, the bulb-outs function much the way bumpers do in pinball machines, bouncing the cars of unsuspecting tourists and inattentive motorists (of which Southtown evidently has many) back into the roadway where they belong.
The success of the project can be measured by the lines of cars backed up on St. Mary’s and Alamo Streets trying to enter the Southtown business obviously benefiting the most from the installation of the bulb-outs in the King William neighborhood:
Update on January 6, 2011: Just noticed the bulb-outs on South Alamo Street are no longer naked. White lines also seem to help drivers keep from ramming into the concrete. This crepe myrtle blooming in the spring should be beautiful, but drivers exiting Turner will be unable to see if any vehicles are coming from the south…. Maybe the neighborhood needs a new body shop?
Postcards from Barton Springs 
The obvious sometimes eludes the experts, it would appear. We who merely have experience behind the steering wheel saw this problem from the start.
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