Stuck like Chuck in Austin traffic

As population in Central Texas continues to grow, our transportation infrastructure still lags behind
By Steve Habel

If you want a real driving treat, get up one Saturday or Sunday morning and head toward Downtown Austin on one of the myriad highways that have been developed to push the hoards of Central Texas-area traffic into the city from the suburbs.

On most weekend mornings, you will find yourself traveling the speed limit – or maybe even a little faster – as you will hit the normal weekday spots for traffic buildup and just fly on through.

An uncluttered highway system was in place when I first moved with my family to Austin in 1976, back in the time when Loop 1 started at Town Lake and ended at the six-lane, traffic-light-heavy Hwy 183. Now our leaders are simply trying to play catchup in a traffic environment that is already out of control and getting more so every day.

Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) calculates  travel delay (the amount of extra time spent traveling due to congestion) in Austin at an index of 1.22, meaning peak hour travel takes an average of 22 percent longer than free flow travel as of June 2004.

Today, Central Texas residents spend an additional 52 hours each year in their vehicles because of congestion on our jam-packed roadways. That extra time in our cars, trucks and SUVs costs each of the travelers about $1,000 during the year, which is a higher cost than those commuters in Seattle, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Denver, Phoenix and San Antonio – all cities much larger in square mile and in population that we are – endure.

We are stuck like Chuck in traffic, and the motors are all running.

Issues abound for Austin area traffic
Congestion is a complicated issue. The real point is not traffic or any mode preference (for example cars versus trains) because that is really a nonsensical dichotomy. The real issue is how difficult is it for a person to get from the place they are to where they need to go.

“The truth is that once an area has congestion it never goes away,” said Glenn Gadbois, the Texas Citizen Fund’s director of transportation programs. “It only gets worse, and at best the area can only manage the rate of congestion increases and the availability of options for avoiding it on some trips.”

According to Gadbois, Austin's problem is not so much rapid growth as the fact that most of its growth has been suburban sprawl. This situation produces too many trips to be accommodated by a highway network, but they do not produce enough trips to warrant efficient, effective mass transit service. “Unfortunately,” said University of Texas’ C. Kenneth Orski in a 1988 report on traffic and transit futures, “these are precisely the densities favored by the market forces in the suburbs.”

“Twenty years later we are concerned with the same problems,” Gadbois said. “Erosion of the tax base occurs as commercial and residential development moves from high revenue urban areas that cost more than they generate.”

“The way the region grows to accommodate the coming growth is critical,” said Adam Shaivitz, a spokesperson for Capital Metro. “While there is considerable promise in the redevelopment of the downtown area and new transit-oriented developments, continued sprawling and isolated land uses (only single-family homes, for example) will only exacerbate congestion and result in more automobile use. Thus efforts to ensure more compact, transit-friendly development will be a key part of Austin's long-term traffic management plan.”

Growth in vehicle miles traveled (which has exceeded population growth by a significant margin) and growth in transportation system capacity (transit service plus roadways) have resulted in a situation where more traffic congestion is almost inevitable. Funding challenges combined with the resistance of the community to certain transportation projects have also played a role.

Kerry Tate, president of TateAustin Public Relations and Public Affairs and past chair of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, says area leaders have struggled with many of the same traffic issues for decades.

“A true East/West access has been, and still remains and goes unaddressed, as one of Austin’s recurring nightmares,” Tate said. “Secondly, there are few arterials, which are the intermediate step between thoroughfares and neighborhood streets. In order to avoid congestion, this means that drivers cut through neighborhoods, creating a public safety and street maintenance issue for Austin and Travis County.”

Tate adds that the cost of road maintenance is a budget challenge for public officials and that political pressure for priority-setting makes it impossible to satisfy all interests.

“Candidly, there is not a vocal, organized support group for overall street maintenance,” Tate said. “Beyond repairing potholes on your own city street, maintenance is not a popular budget items that brings lobbyists to City Hall on Thursdays during budget season.”

One of the largest expense items in recent years has been the overhaul of underground water/wastewater – the replacement of old and decaying infrastructure and the additional new installations for underground utilities (i.e. fiber optics) to meet the technology demands for a wired city. Austin’s annexation during the past decade has increased the tax base, but has also broadened the geography for construction, repair and maintenance.

Some more daunting numbers
The newest group to take the reins on to solve Austin’s traffic dilemma is Take On Traffic (takeontraffic.com), a coalition of concerned citizens led by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce looking to promote a comprehensive traffic plan for Central Texas. That plan includes new roads, expanded roads, new toll roads, new rapid buses, new passenger rail and other modes of rapid transit.

Based on figures on the Take On Traffic website, Austin is currently ranked worst in traffic congestion among all mid-sized U.S. cities. Since 1992, the number of hours Central Texans spend sitting in traffic has more than doubled, and estimates predict 25,000 additional vehicles on our roads each year. That’s more than 500 a week, more than 70 a day.

Such congestion threatens our health and safety as Austin’s rate of traffic fatalities is 45 percent above the national average. Central Texas has nearly violated the federal air quality standard for ozone, and pollution from motor vehicles is the largest contributor to that situation.

“Funding sources are limited and cannot keep up with demand,” said Gary Farmer, chairman of Take On Traffic. “Capital Metro is projecting operating costs will surpass revenue within the next three years, and the gas tax has not been increased, not even for inflation, in more than 15 years. Cars and trucks are becoming more fuel efficient so that, even though more people are driving, the number of gallons sold and tax revenue have remained fairly flat.”

Still it costs more to maintain the state highway system annually than TXDOT receives from the state gas tax. In 2006, Congress rescinded a portion of transportation funding nationwide to help cover the costs of the war in Iraq and the Katrina recovery. This cost Texas $305 million. This year an additional $290 million was rescinded in March. Between January 2005 and January 2007, construction costs increased 62 percent, nearly twice the increase between 1997 and 2005.

“The current regional transportation plan includes a 3.5 cent gas tax increase and toll road revenues, but it isn’t enough to reduce congestion below today’s levels,” Farmer added. “The current regional transportation plan includes road projects, new lanes on existing roads, passenger rail, bus services and maintenance on existing roadways. The regional transportation plan calls for a gas tax increase and toll revenues from roads not yet approved. That equals $2.7 billion in unfunded revenue sources.

“To reduce congestion and more fully implement transit, we need an additional $10 billion,” Farmer continued.

Barriers to success are still in place
Gadbois said that there are several types of obstacles, but most telling is that even though transportation and congestion must be solved regionally, the area’s leaders have no tradition of working together on such a scale.

“There has been no political will to do the three things that must be done to grow in ways that transportation can work,” Gadbois said. “Those three are: a) that residential and commercial growth needs to be managed; b) they need to be focused into urbanized areas; and, c) that transportation has to evolve as density levels increase with higher and higher capacity technology used to circulate within an urbanized area and to connect between them. Additionally, parking needs to be managed to stop subsidizing car travel, but more importantly to place an appropriate premium on land used that promote denser and more productive uses of the land.”

There must be options. If there is a mode monopoly arrived through biased public policies and investments, then all growth patterns and behavior must conform, says Gadbois. There has been a lending bias toward single-lot residential (suburban-type development), a public infrastructure investment bias favoring road construction and maintenance at a rate of 10-to-1 over all other forms of transportation, and there are development code biases that make more traditional neighborhood and urban development much more difficult and expensive.

“There are recent attempts to realign these biases, looking for ways to use public investment as an incentive to revive more urbanized development, and to solve regional challenges,” Gadbois said. “Through the Envision Central Texas (ECT) planning process, the vast majority of 14,000 respondents indicated a preference for much more concentrated urbanized development. Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (all federal transportation money must be planned here) has begun looking at condensed growth scenario as a planning approach to accomplish ECT values.”

As with numerous other cities across the country, there is a growing recognition in the Austin area that there is no “silver bullet” in transportation, Shaivitz said. It takes a balanced, multimodal approach to provide the mobility that the community demands.

“Still we have not implemented the steps that we have known for years are really necessary,” Gadbois added.

Are we just trying to catch our tail?
So what is next as far as traffic planning goes? Is there really any cure or we running uphill against a fast escalator?

Shaivitz said that there is not a single solution to our traffic problems, but rather a variety of options that together create a comprehensive transportation plan.

“Our population is growing rapidly, so our transportation services must maintain a similar rate of growth,” Shaivitz added. “Working with our partners at the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO), the City of Austin, county governments and the Texas Department of Transportation, along with non-profit entities such as Envision Central Texas, a plan for regional growth is being developed for possible adoption by CAMPO to guide transportation investments through 2035.”

This type of coordinated land-use and transportation planning on a regional basis holds the most promise for dealing with the area's traffic dilemma on a systematic basis.

Gadbois does confirm that there is reason for hope.

“Transit and other options are more publicly popular than ever before even though it is still too expensive and doesn't work near well enough,” Gadbois said. “There are good starts to educating ourselves on the real costs and problems of the way we have been growing. With ECT and the CAMPO Activities Center growth concepts, there are even nascent attempt to reconnect the obvious that land use and transportation are two sides of the same coin.

“The new transportation funding sources are all more flexible than the constitutionally dedicate gas tax, thus – if we ever develop the political will to break the monopolistic investment in roads – then it is already much easier to change investment strategies,” he added.

There is increasing evidence that to be successful and competitive in an increasingly global economy, the Austin region must enhance its multimodal transportation system and ensure that future development is as transit, bicycle and pedestrian friendly as possible. With peer cities such as Denver, Salt Lake City and Portland all embarking on ambitious multimodal programs coordinated with land-use planning, Austin needs to keep pace or risk falling behind in the competition to attract talent that drives the local economy.