_______________Austin Rail Now

Suburban highways, freeways, and tollways like Loop 1 (MoPac) have driven suburban sprawl, forcing dependency on personal motor vehicles for nearly all local transportation. CAMPO’s planning continues to be focused mainly on promoting suburban growth through further roadway expansion. Photo: CTRMA.

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By Roger Baker

Roger Baker is a longtime Austin transportation, energy, and urban issues researcher and community activist. The following commentary has been adapted and slightly edited from his comments recently posted by E-mail to multiple recipients.

On February 9th, CAMPO (the federally sanctioned Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization) held its monthly meeting, as usual to discuss regional planning policies. Although these tend to resemble (and to some extent overlap with) the City of Austin’s own planning issues, CAMPO’s anti-environmental, pro-sprawl policy governs state policy and the disposition of federal money, and thus tends to overrule Austin’s policies. So Austinites involved in local urban planning and transportation issues should take some interest.

Following is a link to the CAMPO agenda. I’d recommend reviewing Items 6A and 6B in particular, which discuss the new long-range 2040 CAMPO plan. When approved in May, this will lock-in regional funding and construction priorities policy for this new $32 billion 2040 plan:

http://www.campotexas.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/TPB-Agenda-February-9-2015.pdf

This CAMPO plan currently in the works, and nearing approval as our top regional infrastructure policy, seeks to double the Central Texas population to about 4 million, while putting most of the future population increase In Hays and Williamson Counties. This amounts to a prescription for intense and auto-addictive suburban sprawl development far into the future.

If you feed the projected sprawl-related commuter demand into CAMPO’s secretive travel demand model, you get nightmare-ish congestion throughout the region in 2040, as CAMPO has had to admit. I wrote about that here (my apologies for the misspelling of “congestion”):

http://changeaustin.org/2014/11/campos-congetion-nightmare/

This nightmare presents CAMPO with a political problem — trying to explain how it makes sense to spend $32 billion in fanciful future money only to see congestion get much worse than now, and what happens to congestion without this optimistic funding.

The CAMPO politics of planning policy assumes that the special interests tied to land development proceed as usual. The whole effort amounts to damage control. Congestion is treated like a dragon to be slayed mostly by roads, a process unconstrained by rational land use planning.

One response to CAMPO’s political problem of horrible modeled congestion is to use various behavior change assumptions to make future travel demand disappear, effectively by edict, by a united proclamation of the travel modelers and politicians.

The CAMPO planners have now managed to generate enough driver trip demand assumptions that they make more than 50% of the total Austin’s travel demand disappear as if by magic. This process is called Transportation Systems Management, which makes Austin’s future congestion picture, if still bad, look a lot better, despite CAMPO’s huge predicted level of sprawl development ringing Austin.

According to agenda Item 6A in the agenda linked above:

Staff is developing an analysis section similar to the analysis conducted by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce for their 2013 Mobility Report. This analysis will quantify the estimated congestion reduction benefit achieved by implementing 2040 Plan projects as well as additional travel demand management (telework, peak-shift and mode-shift) and transportation system management (operational improvements) strategies. Staff is also preparing a qualitative analysis of the CAMPO activity centers as a land use strategy.

And according to Item 6B:

PURPOSE AND EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

CAMPO staff and modeling consultants are developing a needs analysis for the draft CAMPO 2040 Plan which is similar to the analysis conducted by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute for the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce 2013 Mobility Report. The analysis will quantify the estimated congestion reduction benefit achieved by implementing 2040 Plan projects as well as additional travel demand management (telework, peak-shift and mode-shift) and transportation system management (operational improvements) strategies. Staff and consultants developed assumptions regarding the implementation rates of the strategies so that the analysis will reflect reasonable results. Staff is requesting that the TAC review and provide input on the assumptions.

However, you won’t find this miracle of congestion reduction anticipation spelled out in CAMPO’s agenda. You would have to know just where to look. Here is where you can go to find the details:

http://www.campotexas.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/TAC-Presentation-January-2015.pdf

Scroll down to slide #29 where the future improvements contributing to future traffic flow are quantified in a tiny blurry side box as follows:

Assumed capacity impacts of Transportation System Management measures. Table: CAMPO Technical Advisory Committee.

Grand total = 51.15% (assumed) total future trip demand reduction!

You can see these assumed policies/impacts also by going to the end of section 4B “Assumptions for Needs Analysis”, or scrolling down to page 55 of this other PDF file, and finding the list of policies in a box:

http://www.campotexas.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/TAC-Agenda-January-28-2015.pdf

Also see the same info at my Google link here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9kg5NdhKh8RSGhvVjg3aTBRb28/view

All this begs the question of why, assuming these congestion reduction policies can really work as claimed, CAMPO doesn’t put the highest policy priority on reducing our traffic demand 50% in these various ways immediately, instead of waiting any longer.

Are there really examples of this much telecommuting-led travel demand reduction on this scale, or this much voluntary peak travel time shifting? Are there local engineering reports to add credibility to the claimed travel reductions from the various suggested signal policies? How credible is CAMPO’s claim of over 50% demand reduction? If we do this stuff, will we still need rail that bad, or is it already assumed in the “Intermodal Transportation Projects” share of demand reduction?

Bottom line:

Business as usual. Sprawl land developers make no sacrifices, while taxpayers and drivers do all the heavy lifting and funding, and supposedly change their behavior enough to make more than half the projected travel demand go away. ■

Barton Creek Resort development near Loop 360. This kind of lower-density suburban development, facilitated by publicly funded highway expansion, and widespread throughout the Austin region, is virtually impossible to serve effectively and affordably by mass transit — and this leads to near-total dependency on personal motor vehicles for mobility. Photo: Mopacs, via Skyscraperpage.