Austinites are all too familiar with the effects of traffic congestion: It is the No. 2 expense for most households, and an April Zandan Poll revealed it is residents’ No. 1 concern.
Between maintenance, insurance, gas and other vehicle costs, nonprofit organization AAA estimates people pay about $8,558 for a sedan per year at 15,000 miles annually and $10,255 per year for an SUV at 15,000 miles annually.
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 the 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 bus service and $96.25 for 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,” said Rob Spillar, director of the Austin Transportation Department.
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 of Housing and Policy found that they face trade-offs. For every $1 saved on housing costs, the 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 planning efforts.
“This is a regional challenge, and we have to approach it on a regional basis.”
The city’s $720 million mobility bond approved by voters last November provides funding for roads projects as well as bicycle and pedestrian facilities. Some projects included in the bond are regional, such as adding overpasses and underpasses to intersections on Loop 360.
Adler said discussions about the city’s and Capital Metro’s long-range transportation plans as well as 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 pay me enough to spend an hour in traffic?’”
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.”
Melançon said if the city is going to encourage people to travel using other modes besides driving, those people need reasonable alternatives. She said Capital Metro’s bus system needs improvement to offer more routes to key destinations that do not involve walking several blocks to and from a bus stop.
“I know it doesn’t sound like much to walk three blocks, but if it’s 100 degrees or more, and you’re going to meet with someone, you arrive there looking like you just ran 10 blocks,” she said. “That’s as unprofessional a presentation you can make.”
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.”
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 plan since 1995, and the plan will head to City Council for approval in 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.
In recent years, the city has taken a multimodal approach to transportation planning by addressing safety and mobility of all modes transportation, said Annick Beaudet, manager of the Austin Transportation Department’s Systems Development Division.
“[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,” she said. “That helps a lot with affordability. That’s the trend of where we’re headed in transportation’s part in addressing 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 to craft a network from scratch.
In March, Capital Metro’s board approved its 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 to transit.
