No clear solutions to revamp of the Drag

Here we go again. Austin recently released its 81-page corridor study of Guadalupe Street near the University of Texas recommending (as a 2016 draft had presaged) that two of the street’s four lanes be reserved for buses and that parking along the Drag be deep-sixed to make room for an added bike lane and wider sidewalks.

The report also — in a surprise, because it didn’t seem to be within the report’s scope — advocated reducing West 24th Street from four to three lanes from Guadalupe to North Lamar Boulevard, replacing that lost lane with an eastbound bike lane.

Total project cost: $33.7 million, potentially to come from the “corridor” portion of the $720 million transportation bond Austin voters approved a year ago.

The debate in the article’s comment section and on social media — Gov. Greg Abbott even chimed in — immediately broke into refrains utterly familiar to anyone who has lived in Austin for a while: Motorists rapping Austin transportation policies as loony anti-car fantasia, and bike/transit supporters trashing gas-drunk Luddites who cling to their steering wheels like pacifiers.

Both sides are right. Both sides are wrong.

Here are some things I believe:

Reducing the number of lanes available to cars really does add to traffic congestion. The report, on page 52, says as much. The engineers’ A-F rating for all nine intersections on Guadalupe from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to West 29th Street would get worse under the proposed change, it says, with added rush-hour delays at each varying from a few seconds to half a minute or more.

Buses could move through the corridor faster than they do now with all the cars out of the right-hand lanes, as the report proposes.

Faster buses likely would mean more transit riders. Would it be an additional 218,000 boardings a year in the Guadalupe corridor, as the report suggests (based on a Capital Metro 2016 estimate)? The guesswork of the study’s authors is no doubt better than mine. But it’s still guesswork.

Capital Metro’s ridership (and, indeed, the boardings for transit agencies across the country) have been falling in the past few years due to low gas prices, ride-hailing services and skyrocketing property values in neighborhoods formerly peopled by regular transit users. And the agency’s ridership predictions have been notably unreliable and, usually, overly optimistic.

The UT area is pedestrianand-bike country, far more than the rest of the city. Anyone who attended the university (as I did, long ago) or and those lessness.

A resolution, proposed by City Council Member Ellen Troxclair, calls for creating a pilot program, Residents In Search of Empower- held