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Austin traffic isn't the worst there is on an absolute scale. But it's frustrating because it's so much worse than it should be for a city of this size. The pe
by adrianmonk 8y ago
Austin traffic isn't the worst there is on an absolute scale. But it's frustrating because it's so much worse than it should be for a city of this size.
The people in charge of it seem to be kind of checked out and ineffectual. They don't always even try to solve problems, and when they do, they do stuff that doesn't seem to be thought out very well.
A well-known example is I-35. It is a huge pain point and has been for decades. A few years back, they started talking about doing something to solve that, and rather than trying to improve I-35 itself, the idea of building a parallel toll road really far outside of town was pitched as the solution. The toll road (SH 130) was built, but surprise, nobody wants to drive on a road in the middle of nowhere. The toll road was used so little it went through bankruptcy, but more importantly, all this didn't help fix I-35.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y agoWill be interesting to see if Austin takes the typical Texas laissez faire attitude toward parking and lets developers build whatever they want and let the negative spillovers of traffic get worse and worse, or if they go the Los Angeles route and require absurd amounts of parking to artificially inflate the price of land as much as possible.
- mattdeboard 8y agoSpoiler alert: they build parking everywhere downtown
- timerol 8y agoThey've already gone "the Los Angeles route". Austin requires a parking spot per 275 sq ft of office space[1]. Given that most parking lots or garages take 300-350 sq ft per space, that's a bigger garage than the office. They did eliminate parking requirements in the Central Business District, though[2]. [1] http://www.gatewayplanning.com/uploads/COA_Airport_Blvd/background%20information/zoning/park_require.doc http://www.gatewayplanning.com/uploads/COA_Airport_Blvd/back... [2] https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2019/02/2019-could-be-the-year-to-end-city-parking-minimums/ https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2019/02/2019-could-be-...
- noirbot 8y agoYea, in absolute terms, Austin traffic isn't bad. I moved to Austin from Atlanta, and Atlanta has massive commutes and traffic. That said, for a while, my commute in Austin was ~3 miles. It took about 7 minutes on the weekends, and took between 30 and 45 minutes in average 8 AM morning traffic. (Loop 360, for the curious.) Austin traffic is just amazingly severe for short periods - you'll see trips go to 2-4x the time regularly, and a trivial event in downtown is enough to cause a 2-3x increase in traffic. Even on the worst day, you're usually not looking at more than 45 mins in absolute time, but it's nearly mandatory to check Google Maps before you go anywhere, because there's a 40% chance it's going to take 45 mins to get somewhere you can usually get to in 5-10 mins.
- debug-desperado 8y agoI find myself staying late at work (mostly doing self study or hacker news reading if I'm lazy) because Mopac commute times become totally reasonable somewhere between 6:00 & 7:00 pm. Like for every 90-120 seconds I stay in the office my commute time drops by like 60 seconds.
- itronitron 8y agosimilar experience to noirbot, outside of rush 'hours' my commute would be 25 minutes, during rush hour it would usually be 75 to 90 minutes.
- criddell 8y agoI've found Austin traffic to be bad, but very predictable. Stay off the roads during morning and afternoon rush and it's fine. Outside of those of those times, you can get just about anywhere in the city in 30-45 minutes.