Without new roads, capacity, city’s solutions won’t do trick
Like you, I am deeply frustrated by traffic in Austin.
Having lived here since 1984 (with nine years in D.C. after college), I have experienced the congestion personally every day.
While people complained about traffic in 1980s, it wasn’t bad by today’s standards, where our city is among the five worst in the country for congestion.
MoPac’s managed lanes still haven’t been opened, so we will wait to reserve final judgment.
So what is the solution to Austin traffic?
Toll roads aren’t pragmatic for most Texans, and Texas 130, which connects Georgetown to South Austin, has been so unsuccessful that the road operator filed a bankruptcy reorganization plan this month to rid itself of the operation after just four years, still owing $1.6 billion.
In an ideal world, MoPac and Interstate 35 would be wider and have central lanes with no exits and we would have east-west roads in Central Austin without lights. But that would have required vision and leadership decades ago.
On Aug. 8 the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization board voted 17-1 to remove Lone Star Rail from its long-term “2040 Plan.”
As the Austin American-Statesman’s Ben Wear reported, Lone Star Rail “had focused on using an existing Union Pacific line before the company ended talks in February.” Wear also wrote, “Without the use of Union Pacific’s existing rail line for its Round Rock to San Antonio corridor, a passenger rail line in that stretch has no immediately obvious route.”
In the end, Union Pacific wasn’t willing to move its entire freight shipping to a line east of I-35, nor were they willing to ship freight only on overnight runs to free up the daytime hours for a passenger line. Since 2003, Lone Star Rail has spent more than $30 million studying how to create a 117-mile passenger line connecting Round Rock, Austin, San Marcos, New Braunfels and San Antonio.
In November 2014, Austin voters wisely and overwhelmingly rejected a billion-dollar urban rail proposal that would have built 9.5 miles of urban rail to connect Austin Community College’s Highland campus to East Riverside Drive. City officials arrogantly attempted to bribe voters with $400 million in road improvements in order to try to pass the rail bond, which would have reduced congestion by 2 percent two decades from now.
To make matters worse, Mayor Steve Adler and City Council Member Ann Kitchen partnered with taxi companies to aggressively push unnecessary regulations to shut down Uber and Lyft from operating in Austin, and a May 2015 citywide vote failed to overturn the regulation, forcing Uber and Lyft to take their transportation platform with over 10,000 active drivers out of Austin.
The full ramifications of that regulatory disaster have not yet been felt, as the city has not yet hosted a UT home football game or major events like Formula One, ACL Fest or South by Southwest. Hopefully, the state Legislature will pass statewide preemption in the 2017 session to create one statewide policy for companies like Uber and Lyft.
The failure to pass the urban rail bond has now brought Adler to propose another overly expensive transportation bond, which goes to the voters this November at an unbelievable price tag of $720 million.
That bond creates “smart corridors” on many of the city’s busiest roads (Burnet Road, Lamar Boulevard, Riverside Drive, Airport Lane, MLK Boulevard, Slaughter Lane and William Cannon Drive), synchronizes and adapts stoplights in real-time, and adds sidewalks, turn lanes and continuous movement intersections on Loop 360. But it also spends tens of millions of dollars on bike paths, urban trails and sidewalks.
Adler’s proposal would raise property taxes an average of $77 a year for the average homeowner while potentially making roads more efficient, but not by building new roads or adding new vehicular capacity.
Property taxes in Austin are already out of control, and our city leaders continue to propose expensive ways to improve traffic only marginally. Austinites would be willing to pay for significant infrastructure if it would truly help their commute.