MucinTx: Let's loosen up that congestion

Austin, Texas has been one of the fastest growing cities in the US for some time now, ranking 2nd on Forbe’s list of fastest growing cities of 2015. With a growing city comes traffic issues until the state decides to do something expensive such as build a new highway or a metro system, but government of Texas, I’ll do you one better. Texas should reduce the price for commercial vehicles to ride on the toll road SH130 for Austin. 

When looking at the traffic trends for Austin, we see that the rush hour times are growing to inconvenient times for commuters. A drive that can take 20 minutes is stretched to over an hour if caught in traffic at the wrong time. Rush hour also lasts enormous amounts of time, ranging from 6a to 11a in the mornings and 3p to 7p in the evenings. Of course it can be expected that in any major city the downtown area will be congested at all times, but that congestion is stretching northern and southern of downtown and it doesn’t seem like it is getting better any time soon. 

Being a commuter to The University of Texas at Austin and having an internship in North Austin while living in South Austin, I’ve had to deal with the horrific traffic times myself consistently for a year now. There is no dodging traffic for anyone that needs to go to school or work at a specific time, and it will always be a drag to go home when it is over. One day at about 4p in my boredom in traffic, I counted how many vehicles with 4 axles or more (according to TxTag’s website) that I came across in the 20 minutes it took me to get out of traffic. I counted 67 vehicles going only the oncoming direction in traffic. With this figure and a few estimations, we round that to 60 vehicles for benefit of the doubt, assume commercial vehicle traffic is similar to that for 18 hours a day and dead for the other 6 hours, that’s 583,200 vehicles in a quarter of a year on I-35, almost twice as much as TxTag counted in Q1 of 2015. 

If Texas could do this, there would be no need for the highway renovations or train constructions. If Texas could also afford to have them travel on SH130 free of charge, this would be the best option, but it is understandable that Texas’ government gets a good amount of money from vehicles that take the toll roads and may not want to lose this revenue. With this solution, Texas can continue to save money for long term road construction rather than completing small renovations that will only last for a short while.