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Austin, Texas is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, and that dynamic can be felt with every restaurant opening, every bidding war, every traffic jam.
With this in mind, Austin residents voted to raise property taxes last year to fund Project Connect, a $ 7.1 billion network of light rail and express buses through the city. “We have to acknowledge that major transport investments in our past have contributed more to deepening inequality, separating rather than connecting, displacing rather than benefiting,” said Mayor Steve Adler in his state of the art address last summer and advocated the mass referendum. “We have to learn from this painful past and make sure we don’t repeat these injustices.”
No other city has tackled a project of this magnitude in a way that learns from past mistakes and makes genuinely sensible investments to produce equitable results. #ProjectConnect #ATXSOTC
– Mayor Adler | To be vaccinated! (@ BürgermeisterAdler) August 5, 2020
Adler could well have alluded to Interstate 35, the north-south freeway that runs through downtown Austin. Built on tree-lined East Avenue and opened in 1962, the street separated East Austin from downtown Black and Mexican-Americans. As with urban regeneration projects in other American cities, the street’s destructive legacy has recently been rethought from a racial perspective.
But unlike similar projects in Syracuse and New Haven, the question in Austin is not how to demolish the highway, but how to expand it. These cities don’t grow; Austin is. Just as the Texan capital begins its generations of transit investments, the state plans to spend nearly $ 5 billion to expand 8 miles of I-35 through downtown to a whopping 20 lanes. Four new “managed lanes” (for vehicles with high traffic or other restricted uses) will connect the main lanes and front streets, expand the width of the motorway in places to almost 200 meters and delete almost 150 properties.
With their latticework of ramps, bypasses, and overpasses, the blueprints have the appearance of one of those historical timelines showing warlike empires dividing and connecting in endless permutations. It is evidence for America’s highway designers that this tangle, difficult to trace with a finger, will one day be passable at 70 mph.
Now everything is clear?
TxDOT
If you think this neighborhood-eating freeway expansion sounds a bit incongruous for a proudly progressive city in 2021, you’re right. As in Houston, which was temporarily pardoned by a similar project, Austin’s local politicians are almost always dissatisfied with the plans of the Texas Department of Transportation, or TxDOT for short.
Unfortunately for these lawmakers, I-35 is not just a downtown hub; the road runs from Laredo, Texas to Duluth, Minnesota, and Austin doesn’t have an interstate ring road like the one that surrounds DC or Boston. TxDOT is focused on keeping this traffic going and serving fast growing suburbs in the north and south of the city.
Last month the Mayor and almost all of Austin City Council signed a letter to the Department of Transportation’s I-35 team with a few requests: Change the design to narrow the right of way. Build more intersections. Turn front streets into pleasant local streets. Design, finance, and build freeway decks – hanging parks over the street – to join the districts that were separated in 1962. And postpone the project until Austin can complete its transit lines.
“We have to do something about that. It’s deadly, it’s dirty, it divides our community, ”said Natasha Harper-Madison, a city council member who condemned the plan. “I-35 is the poster child for our in-car congestion problems, and their solution is to just make them bigger. They tell us the lifespan is 75 years. That means 2100. When I think of 2100, I don’t see a sprawling Houston, but a city that helps people get around without cars. “
There are alternative proposals, such as the one developed by the Urban Land Institute on the initiative of the city center. This design suggests a narrower driveway, cantilevered front streets, freeway decks to support green areas and new apartments next to them. A similar freeway cap, Klyde Warren Park, opened to a great roar in Dallas in 2012.
A local group called Reconnect Austin plans to completely bury the freeway and build a shallow boulevard in the style of Boston’s Big Dig and divert intercity traffic onto State Highway 130, a road built east of Austin for that purpose two decades ago. Give the city’s transit network a chance to distinguish itself before undermining it with a brand new (free) freeway.
For its part, the Texas Department of Transportation is making some dire predictions about what’s next for Austin without a newer, larger freeway. The downtown section of I-35 is already the most congested section of road in Texas, according to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. By 2035, the 30-mile commute from downtown Austin to Round Rock will take two and a half hours. By 2045, traffic will increase by almost 50 percent to more than 300,000 vehicles per day.
If you follow the modern freeway revolts, you know that this is the part of history where anti-freeway advocates talk about induced demand – the idea that wider freeways not only make room for traffic, they create it. Motorway traffic does not increase by 50 percent unless TxDOT builds another freeway on top of the freeway. And no one is ever going to spend two and a half hours a day driving from Round Rock – new patterns of development and transportation would take shape long before traffic reaches that level of congestion. That state road planners assume this type of traffic with or without a developed I-35 is ridiculous.
A good example of this tendency is TxDOT’s analysis of this street unearthed by Austin journalist Jack Craver. In 2002, to drum up support for the same expansion project, TxDOT predicted traffic over Lady Bird Lake will increase to 330,000 vehicles per day … by 2020. In 2014, the agency said 300,000 vehicles would cross by 2035. In 2016, TxDOT forecast VMT in Austin to grow 50 percent by 2040. Now the magic number of 300,000 is expected to arrive in 2045.
In reality, the average daily traffic across the lake in the city center is almost as high as it was in 2000, despite one million new arrivals in the region.
Freeway planners could argue that this static traffic on the deserted interstate highway in a booming region shows that crowded infrastructure is limiting people’s travel needs, despite falsifying the numbers a few times. Possibly.
The Austin suburbs will grow because the freeways get bigger, because the Austin suburbs will grow …
But TxDOT also missed the target with the major motorway expansion in the region. In 2003, with the looming carpocalypse on I-35, the state began a public-private partnership to build a bypass west of Austin, State Highway 130, to ease the congestion of the interstate. They forecast that the segment parallel to the city center would have 11,900 vehicles per day by 2015 and 18,900 vehicles by 2025. In fact, the SH 130 saw only 10,300 vehicles in this segment in 2019. The forecasts for the northern part of the new road near Round Rock were evenly more out. On the southern section, the traffic on the I-35 passing point was so low that the toll road operator filed for bankruptcy in 2016.
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What’s going on here? Some highway builders use traffic modeling software that tells them what they want to hear. But they also rely on population projections that assume the highway has been widened, said Jay Blazek Crossley, the director of Farm & City, a local land use nonprofit. “It’s a circular logic,” he argued. The Austin suburbs will grow as the freeways get bigger. And the freeways have to get bigger because the Austin suburbs are going to grow …
Why didn’t these self-referential estimates fill vast streets like the SH 130 to the brim? In part because the local Metropolitan Planning Organization was just wrong: They assumed that the northern suburbs would grow faster than they did, and that Austin would grow slower than they did. Similar assumptions are built into the models that green light the wider Interstate 35.
Perhaps they are right this time around, and an upgraded Interstate 35 will finally be able to handle 300,000 vehicles a day by the middle of the century. Or maybe not, and an upgraded Interstate 35 will ease traffic. Anyway, it’ll be hard to imagine what it would have run through downtown in an Austin without a 20-lane freeway. Nobody plans it.
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https://slate.com/business/2021/10/austin-texas-interstate-35-expansion-20-lanes.html
