Travis County is developing its first countywide transportation plan to meet the needs of the region’s unincorporated areas—including Four Points and Hudson Bend—through 2045. Staff is seeking the community’s input to shape the future of its roadways before the county’s online survey ends Dec. 15.

History

In the past, the county has relied on the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization regional plan as an outline for its future projects.

Now, as CAMPO planning moves toward becoming a higher-level regional plan, the county needs more detail for its own transportation planning, with a focus on collector roads, bicycle/pedestrian routes, and a prioritized project list to guide future bond elections and funding, said Scheleen Walker, long-range planning manager for the Travis County Transportation and Natural Resources Department.

“[CAMPO] is a six-county region, and a lot of state and federal funding is going, and rightly so, to our major state highways—I-35, [RR] 620, [RR] 2222,” she said. “A lot of the state roadways are just sucking up all of that local money. For the first time, Travis County is wanting to look at our local roads and how they interact with the state highway system and also how they interact with all of the jurisdictions within our county—there’s 22 of them—to try to put together a local plan so we can plan for our local funding. When we go out for bonds, we can prioritize how we want to spend money.”

Public input

The Transportation and Natural Resources Department of Travis County’s Nov. 15 open house held at the Travis County West Service Center, 4501 N. RR 620, Austin, was the first of two public forums that solicited feedback from residents as to their most troubled areas of traffic and proposed solutions to ease congestion in the area.

Adrienne Lusk—a two-year resident of Hudson Bend—said her unincorporated area of Travis County did not get to vote Nov. 8 on city of Austin’s Proposition 1 to fund transportation projects.

“This [open house] is one of the only ways we have to express any ideas, opinions ... about transportation improvement projects,” she said. “People live out here because of the environment we have and the natural surroundings. Without smart, sustainable, thorough transportation; organization; and plans, we could lose a lot of those gemstones.

“Unincorporated Austin gets left out a lot. And that’s where a lot of the traffic is either being generated from or coming to or from.”

The plan will focus on transportation in the county as well as identify projects and guide investments in its unincorporated areas, which amount to about 63 percent of the county, Walker said.

Planners have sought public input since September from an online survey, community meetings and events as well as focus groups, she said.

As of Nov. 15, Travis County staff received 1,442 survey responses, TNR Planning Project Manager Charlie Watts said. According to the surveys, congestion remains the top concern for local residents, he said.

“There has to be some options for traffic,” Canyon Creek commuter Dave Marshall said. “Nobody gave much thought as to what the traffic patterns would be well into the future, especially when [cities] approved dense housing.”

The preliminary survey results state residents’ preferred solutions include improved traffic management and more transportation options, such as bicycle pathways or bus routes, Watts said.

Longtime Austinite Bill Wofford said it is hard for businesses to keep employees without local public transportation. 

“We don’t have a bus,” Wofford said of the Four Points area. “How do those $9 an hour people get to that H-E-B? Capital Metro has been collecting [tax] money for a long time. So it’s kind of like taxation without transportation.”

Watts said he has heard Marshall’s and Wofford’s concerns.

“There needs to be some way to get those people either to Lakeway, Bee Cave or be able to provide an area where they can live and work,” Watts said. “Those are things that we are looking at in the plan.”

Building on current programs

The program is a continuation of the county’s Land, Water & Transportation Plan approved by Travis County Commissioners Court in December 2014 that aims to provide a blueprint for the area’s infrastructure, conservation and transportation priorities going forward.

“In the LWTP, we identified the major state highway corridors that we know are in development,” Walker said. “Now, how are we really going to provide mobility services around those major transportation corridors?”

The new plan will also build on CAMPO’s 2040 Regional Transportation Plan adopted in May 2015.

Funding

“Funding for the [county wide transportation plan’s proposals] will generally be done through bonds,” said Walker, who is seeking to prioritize future county transportation projects.

She said the plan process will not be completed until mid-2018.

“The Commissioners Court is considering going out for a bond of some kind,” Walker said. “They have not at all decided what that would be in November of 2017. Those decisions won’t be made until the new Commissioners Court gets seated in January.”