Austinites are all too familiar with the effects of traffic congestion: Transportation is the No. 2 expense for most households, and an April Zandan Poll revealed it is residents’ No. 1 concern.
Among maintenance, insurance, gas and other vehicle costs, nonprofit organization AAA estimates drivers pay $7,579-$9,564 per year for a sedan and $9,046-$11,541 per year for an SUV.
Aside from ownership costs, traffic congestion adds an additional $1,159 in wasted fuel and time for the average Austin commuter, according to a study from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
The challenge city and other transportation leaders face is how to offer meaningful alternatives that would encourage people to give up their vehicles while still being affordable.
Many transportation agencies discuss public transit as one means to provide financial relief. A 31-day pass for Capital Metro costs $41.25 for local and MetroRapid bus service and $96.25 for all bus, rail and Express bus service.
“If we can have a mobility system that unleashes a person from their vehicle, then affordability is about being able to afford to live, so they may have more expendable funds if they could walk to work or walk to use transit,” Austin Transportation Department Director Rob Spillar said.
Traffic trade-offs
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the two largest household expenses are housing and transportation. As families move farther from a city to afford housing, the Center for Housing Policy found that they face trade-offs. For every $1 saved on housing costs, a family spends 77 cents in added transportation costs. When a person’s commute exceeds 12-15 miles, housing savings are wiped out by increased transportation costs.
An estimated 450,000 commuters use city roads daily, and 150,000 of them start their trips from outside the city limits, said Mayor Steve Adler on March 4 during the city’s Traffic Jam! event to educate residents about ongoing transportation planning efforts.
“This is a regional challenge, and we have to approach it on a regional basis,” he said.
The city’s $720 million mobility bond approved by voters last November provides funding for local and regional road projects as well as bicycle and pedestrian facilities.
The estimated cost impact of these projects is less than $5 per month for a taxpayer with a median-valued home of $250,000.
Adler said discussions about the city’s and Capital Metro’s long-range transportation plans and the CodeNEXT land development code rewrite process are important to have to solve traffic congestion regionally.
“Our Achilles’ heel in terms of being able to ultimately really do something about affordability, really being able to preserve what is special about this city comes down to this conversation,” he said.
Business impact
Besides affecting commuters financially, traffic congestion generates other challenges for business owners.
Rebecca Melançon, executive director of the Austin Independent Business Alliance, which represents more than 800 locally owned businesses, said the city would have less of a transportation problem if more people could afford to live near their workplaces and commute by via public transit, biking or walking.
“You have employees who live on the outer edges of Austin where it’s slightly cheaper to live, and then they have to get into work,” she said. “I think that for a business you’re looking at everybody deciding, ‘Does that [job] pay me enough to spend an hour in traffic?’”
Ride-hailing companies could fill some of the void for people who have no other transportation alternative than driving, she said, but is not cost-effective.
“What you end up with is leaving the poor and in many cases the not-so-poor standing on the street corner in the heat with no choice,” Melançon said. “Again, it’s an affordability issue.”
At a Feb. 9 Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce press conference on affordability, Kerbey Lane CEO Mason Ayer said affordability is the single biggest issue facing Austinites.
“I have seen my employees be pushed further out from Austin,” he said. “It’s hard for them to live near their jobs. That makes it hard to operate [as] a local business.”
Increasing traffic congestion led Marianna Felsman—president of heating, air conditioning and ventilation company BlueAir on McNeil Drive—to change how she does business.
“Labor is the most expensive part of any job, and when you have people sitting in traffic, you’re losing money,” she said.
Several years ago when Felsman said she noticed traffic getting worse, she reduced her service area from all of Austin to focus on just Northwest Austin and southern Williamson County. Now she said she is looking to move her office farther north where she would have more space to stage equipment needed for service calls and avoid unnecessary trips.
Multimodal approach
Building or expanding roads is a common approach to aiding traffic congestion, but in Austin, the city does not have the right of way to do this, Spillar said.
“That means we have to make the most efficient use of the space we have,” he said. “A regular bus takes up the space of maybe three cars end to end, but a bus can carry 40 people. How do we start giving transit priority [to buses] through signals and very congested corridors or schedule and price transit so we make better use of it?”
The city is working on creating its first long-range transportation plan since 1995, and the plan will head to City Council for approval in early 2018. That plan will identify the next set of projects that could be funded through a transportation bond. The potential improvements could include increased road capacity but also recommended bicycle, sidewalk and transit network improvements, said Annick Beaudet, manager of the Austin Transportation Department’s Systems Development Division.
For the past decade, she said the city has taken a multimodal approach to transportation planning by addressing safety and mobility of all modes of transportation.
“[The city] is investing in choices and making sure we can have viable transit, viable bikeway networks, viable walking conditions so that everybody doesn’t have to own a car,” Beaudet said. “That helps a lot with affordability.”
The city is also focusing on managing demand to reduce congestion by encouraging carpooling, using transit, telecommuting or shifting work schedules to avoid driving during peak hours.
Austin resident Bill Oakey, a former member of the city’s electric utility commission, pens the blog Austin Affordability. One of his suggestions to alleviating traffic is creating a decentralized transit program that would dispatch cars, vans and buses to all neighborhoods in Austin and transport commuters to their workplaces.
“It would be institutionalized and set up so Cap Metro or some other entity would operate it and rely on major employers to cooperate with the manager to set up the routes based on where the demand is,” he said.
Although Capital Metro does offer a vanpool program, Oakey said it is not used enough. His plan would engage major employers and planners to craft a network from scratch.
In March, Capital Metro’s board approved the agency’s Connections 2025 service plan update that outlines proposed changes to the agency’s bus system. Before implementing any changes from that plan, Oakey said the agency needs to take a more comprehensive regional look at transit.
“The only way we’re ever going to get out of this traffic nightmare and transportation dilemma is some kind of mass transit that gets us away from one person per vehicle,” Oakey said.
Austinites are all too familiar with the effects of traffic congestion: Transportation is the No. 2 expense for most households, and an April Zandan Poll revealed it is residents’ No. 1 concern.
Among maintenance, insurance, gas and other vehicle costs, nonprofit organization AAA estimates drivers pay $7,579-$9,564 per year for a sedan and $9,046-$11,541 per year for an SUV.
Aside from ownership costs, traffic congestion adds an additional $1,159 in wasted fuel and time for the average Austin commuter, according to a study from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
The challenge city and other transportation leaders face is how to offer meaningful alternatives that would encourage people to give up their vehicles while still being affordable.
Many transportation agencies discuss public transit as one means to provide financial relief. A 31-day pass for Capital Metro costs $41.25 for local and MetroRapid bus service and $96.25 for all bus, rail and Express bus service.
“If we can have a mobility system that unleashes a person from their vehicle, then affordability is about being able to afford to live, so they may have more expendable funds if they could walk to work or walk to use transit,” Austin Transportation Department Director Rob Spillar said.
