Austin mobility survey averse to road building
Unscientific Web poll’s responses push biking, walking, mass transit.
So, is spending $151.7 million installing almost 250 miles of Austin bike lanes and trails a community priority? Yes, at least to 218 Austinites.
Another 147 folks want to lower and cap Interstate 35 as it passes through downtown. And 125 want to make some traffic lanes across Austin off-limits to cars, instead reserving them for bus traffic, as is the case now with parts of Lavaca and Guadalupe streets downtown.
Those three projects rose to the top of a six-month, crowdsourcing search for Austin transportation ideas, a process its organizers dubbed MobilityATX, according to a 31-page report released Thursday by the report’s authors, alongside Austin Mayor Steve Adler and local transportation leaders. The list of 10 “most popular ideas” was heavy on alternative transportation projects — bike paths, sidewalks and transit — and light on expansion of capacity for car traffic.
In fact, only one traditional road project made the top 10 (the report said that more than 300 other ideas also received
votes): improvements to Anderson Mill Road in Northwest Austin, coming in tied for No. 4 with 122 advocates.
The report and the list are based on the preferences of 1,039 people who voted in an online forum; participants could support more than one idea. Adler and others emphasized that the findings do not carry the imprimatur of a poll or vote. Glasshouse Policy — a nonprofit that helped generate the opinions through a variety of means, compiled the results and produced the report using a combination of private money and in-kind contributions from the city and Capital Metro — did not do the sifting of respondents typical of opinion polling to make the results correspond to an area’s ideological, demographic and geographic characteristics.
“It is not a scientific survey,” Adler said in an interview. “This was self-selected.”
Still, Adler said, the gathering of ideas and opinions, primarily online, provides important information for the Austin City Council as it attempts to address the city’s torturous traffic. And he applauded Glasshouse and other MobilityATX participants for pioneering new ways to bring the public into policy debates.
Tom Visco, executive director of Glasshouse, said the survey should not be confused with a poll or referendum, and that the number of votes for any given idea is incidental.
“The order for us has nothing to do with it,” he said. Visco said the study cost about $30,000; Capital Metro chipped in $10,000 of that, spokeswoman Francine Pares said.
Council Member Ann Kitchen, who chairs the council’s Mobility Committee, called MobilityATX “an amazing effort” helpful to crafting policy.
“We will fold in these results as we take on our mobility challenges,” she said at a news conference unveiling the report. “This is all about providing options for people.”
Still, would a scientifically conducted poll of transportation preferences here produce a similar list of projects?
“Absolutely not,” Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty told the American-Statesman in an interview. “Now, would some of the things on that list be worth talking about in more detail? Probably. But some people would use that as a road map, and that would be the worst thing we could do.
“You have to work on road capacity and throughput at intersections, and you have to put a lot of money into it,” added Daugherty, who for 20 years has pushed for road expansion in Central Texas.
The people who responded to the MobilityATX survey, according to a sampling of 60 of them outlined in the report, bear little resemblance to Austin’s demographics.
About 85 percent of those participating were white, the report says, along with 7 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian and 2 percent black.
Austin, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2013 was 47.1 percent white, 36.5 percent Hispanic, 7 percent black and 6.8 percent Asian.
The survey also drew strong participation from residents in Central Austin’s District 9 (177 participants) and Northwest Austin’s District 6 (160 participants), with much lighter involvement from residents in Southeast Austin’s District 2 (22 participants) and North Austin’s District 4 (38 participants).