AUSTIN | Transportation Updates

[Novacek]

Originally Posted by smallfrie

I think the true shock people will experience will be 10 to 15 years from now when the light rail portion of the now-dead Project Connect accepts its first paying customer and the people see a few rail cars passing down the street every now and then on a couple of sets of narrow little tracks and they will say, in shock, "We waited 10 to 15 years and paid 10 billion dollars - for this?"

And by "every now and then" you mean every 5 minutes.

And by "10B", you mean 5B (half of that local money).

[Novacek]

Originally Posted by wwmiv

They don’t ALL do. Many infrastructure projects do, and much of what we vote for never happens. Where does that money go? Why are things so expensive?

My personal thoughts include a LOT of factors, but the number of men I see just standing around doing nothing on construction sites routinely tells me overstaffing and corruption within the ranks of state-preferred contractors is likely a large part of the problem. They are essentially raping the state for money. It’s a friggin racket. Something will break, politically, at the federal
level over the next decade ish both on transit and the cost of building infrastructure (inc. rail) here versus literally everywhere else. It isn’t just our design standards, which are not fundamentally more rigorous than Europe, nor the context of topography or urban geography (both have their easy and difficult areas). The materials costs don’t fundamentally differ, but the friggin costs differ tremendously. At what point do people wake up and realize a group of bad faith actors have gamed the system for their personal profit?

I say wait. Starting from a clean slate whenever shit finally starts getting done at the federal level will be better than having to fix an already existing awful starter system.

… just like its easier to demolish a tear down and build three new homes on the lot than to try and rehab the existing home while also adding additional units on the lot. All we will be doing is increasing our costs needlessly down the road.

Secondly:

Does the fact that some things we vote on never come to fruition at all (let alone the many delayed and over-budget projects by obscene amounts) not suggest to anyone else that our local government and our elected officials are grossly incompetent? Any one of these things could explain the pattern, but ALL of them are awful:

1. Leaders aren’t savvy enough to know when they are being had, misled, and used for excess profit, inflated construction costs and timelines, etc. (elect leaders who know when they are being manipulated and aren’t just patsies).

2. Leaders are in on the game and get kickbacks from developers in the form of campaign contributions. (pass campaign finance reform and beef up public ethics).

3. Leaders do not have enough technical knowledge themselves or are not hiring advisers and city staff who do have enough technical knowledge to parse the details of costs and timelines so that they can effectively negotiate to something reasonable. (elect wiser leaders who know the value of technical knowledge on staff)

4. Leaders don’t care.

Is there some innocuous innocent reason waiting out there for me to see? Enlighten me.

So your plan is to not build any transit until costs magically get cut to 1/10 of what they are now (to what they are in Europe)?

But instead you want to build a huge amount of new highways.? Even though you admit that highway infrastructure spending has the same cost problems?

[freerover]

Originally Posted by Novacek

So your plan is to not build any transit until costs magically get cut to 1/10 of what they are now (to what they are in Europe)?

But instead you want to build a huge amount of new highways.? Even though you admit that highway infrastructure spending has the same cost problems?

If only people in Austin would have been doing that exact same thing for the last 100 years. What a novel approach.


Probably my favorite thing about this is no one was seriously talking about tunneling downtown until early 2020, maybe late 2019. Sure, there were reddit posts through out the years about an Austin subway but there were no serious discussions about how we needed tunnels. Now, if you don't have a tunnel then there is no point to transit? Like... have y'all ever been to another city? Like seriously, do y'all think all mass transit everywhere is in tunnels? Yeah, it would have been cool but there are successful transit lines all over the world that run at grade. the key is dedicated ROW.

[drummer]

^ Or above grade. CVC aside, it's not always pretty, but it's functional.

[atxsnail]

Originally Posted by drummer

^ Or above grade. CVC aside, it's not always pretty, but it's functional.

Honestly this would have been the best approach. If we had sane state partners we probably could have funded this and gone with automated/elevated rail a la Vancouver Skytrain or Montreal REM. S-tier levels of service and great protection against service cuts due to labor shortages or inflation.

[freerover]

Originally Posted by atxsnail

Honestly this would have been the best approach. If we had sane state partners we probably could have funded this and gone with automated/elevated rail a la Vancouver Skytrain or Montreal REM. S-tier levels of service and great protection against service cuts due to labor shortages or inflation.

The problem is the more elevated track, the shorter the track is going to be and you have to get at least from downtown to the proposed maintenance center on yellow jacket. You also have the political fallout of having even less range than the proposed initial section further limiting parts of the city from the transit system. Elevated grade is great but we need a viable coverage area for this thing when it launches.

[atxsnail]

Originally Posted by freerover

The problem is the more elevated track, the shorter the track is going to be and you have to get at least from downtown to the proposed maintenance center on yellow jacket. You also have the political fallout of having even less range than the proposed initial section further limiting parts of the city from the transit system. Elevated grade is great but we need a viable coverage area for this thing when it launches.

Agreed, but that's kind of what I was hinting at about the state partners thing. If we had state funding to add on top of local and federal then we could have considered an elevated line with a longer initial route. I say this all the time but it sucks that the state takes such an adversarial position with its star cities on something that should be non-partisan like transit. Even asking for a CVC waiver for the stupid underground sight line issue was a nonstarter.

Even extreme right wing governments across the world still fund transit because it's a smart investment. Culture wars are the dumbest

[Echostatic]

Crossposting from the AARoads forum. This is for the US 290 freeway extension from the end of the Oak Hill Parkway construction to downtown Dripping Springs.

60% design schematics have been released. The highway will be 3x3 with a substantial frontage road for its entire length. There will be intersections with Circle Drive/Fitzhugh Road, Nutty Brown Road, Belterra Drive, Sawyer Ranch Road, Trautwein Road, Headwaters Boulevard, and Village Grove Parkway. The freeway will end at Lone Peak Way.

https://ftp.txdot.gov/pub/txdot/get-involved/aus/us-290-from-oak-hill-to-dripping-springs/011624-schematic.pdf

This looks to be easily the second most substantial highway project in Austin's history, behind only the upcoming I-35 works Downtown for Capital Express Central. This is over 11 miles of 3x3 highway. An estimated cost is no longer listed but I would expect it approaches $2 billion.

I won't post the entire schematics here, but here are the intersections and other highlights:

Intersection with Circle Drive and South View Road (western project limits and end of Oak Hill Parkway construction):


Intersection with Circle Drive, Fitzhugh Road, and Spring Valley Road:


Intersection with Nutty Brown Road and Oak Branch Drive:


Highway section through the Belterra Village shopping center:


Intersection with Belterra Drive and Heritage Oaks Drive:


Intersection with Sawyer Ranch Road and Polo Club Drive:


Intersection with Trautwein Road:


Intersection with Headwaters Boulevard and Hays Country Acres Road:


Intersection with Village Grove Parkway (end of frontage roads and last controlled access intersection):


Arterial section through Downtown Dripping Springs:

I was going to attend TxDOT's public meeting today, but it was cancelled due to weather. I'm sure they were glad to have an excuse to trim out public input.

[wwmiv]

1. This is badly needed.

2. They’ll need to add a third lane in each direction between 1826 and South View Road to make 3x3 work. Surprised they didn’t plan for this when designing the Oak Hill Parkway.

3. I’m also shocked that they are not including a Dripping Springs bypass loop as part of the design, given that the state has prioritized small town freeway bypasses over the last two decades. Is there a separate project for that?

4. Surprised they haven't gotten pushback about the lack of bridge at Ledge Stone/Hargraves into Belterra Village. As the only major retail destination in the area, you'd think there would be access from both sides. That Belterra/Heritage Oaks turnaround is going to be BUSY from anyone coming to Belterra Village from the east AND the 2,000+ people who live in Ledge Stone north of 290 that you're forcing to use this specific route into the city AND to their shopping destination. The only way in and out of that neighborhood is Ledge Stone. IMHO, it's a bad choice. The Heritage Oaks/Belterra intersection is going to end up underdesigned and overused. I suppose they may be trying to cut down on people cutting through the shopping center from the south to make it to the intersection, but that's ridiculous: anyone from the south has two better paths to choose from: Nutty Brown or Belterra and even Belterra Village Way would be a better choice than Hargraves to access 290.

Last Edit:

I navigated to the other forum to see some of the comments, and am glad to see I am not the only one who thinks some of what I wrote above:

My observations
While the project limits have been extended to be west of RM 12 in Dripping Springs, the freeway stops on the east side of Dripping Springs, and the proposed facility in Dripping Springs is just a plain six-lane street, and has three traffic signals shown. The signalized intersections look underdesigned to me, for example I would expect the left turn from westbound 290 to southbound RM 12 to have two lanes (but it has only one). The lack of a freeway or bypass in Dripping Springs is a disappointment and is sure to be a problem point, probably immediately after the project is built.
The right-of-way width has been reduced from the originally proposed 400-foot-wide corridor (122m) to a typical 321 feet (98m) shown in the presentation. However, it appears to be mostly between 300 and 321 feet, including one section west of Trautwein road which is shown as 240 feet and has zero space between the main lanes and frontage roads.
Due to the narrow right-of-way, there is a center barrier with no median and minimal space between the main lanes and frontage roads, which will make it difficult or impossible to add lanes in the future. Of course, Austin has never planned for future growth, so this is not unexpected.
The narrow corridor leaves little or no space for landscaping
The east end of the project has a 2.6-mile-long section with no crossings. (Spring Valley to West View)
The freeway design is very basic and routine. All intersections except one are standard overpasses (main lanes on top), and there is one underpass with the main lanes on bottom.
Echostatic speculated a cost of $2 billion, but I think that is too high. This is all plain-jane basic freeway, nothing fancy, so I'm thinking more like between $1 and $1.5 billion

In spite of the disappointing design features, I still hope to see this proceed. After all this is Austin where it is difficult to build anything, and you need to take what you can get. Planning for this corridor is decades late, so we can expect the planning failure to have some consequences.

(bold is my own emphasis)

https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index....482#msg2899482

[drummer]

I agree that this is badly needed. And I'm likewise surprised that they're not designing for a future bypass around "downtown" Dripping Springs.

[Echostatic]

I think they've decided that the political cost of a Dripping Springs bypass (and the requisite land acquisition) would draw unwanted attention to this project. And it wouldn't be cheap either. Frankly if Downtown Dripping ever needs more than a 3x3 arterial, Austin has simply sprawled too much. It's THIRTEEN MILES from the Y.

[LightChop]

Originally Posted by Echostatic

I think they've decided that the political cost of a Dripping Springs bypass (and the requisite land acquisition) would draw unwanted attention to this project. And it wouldn't be cheap either. Frankly if Downtown Dripping ever needs more than a 3x3 arterial, Austin has simply sprawled too much. It's THIRTEEN MILES from the Y.

As soon as it’s completed it’ll need a 3x3. This opens up Henly, Blanco, and Johnson City to further development. It also creates more incentive to use 281/290 as an alternative corridor to I-35.

The idea of plowing a 6 lane surface arterial is nonsense as well. People already speed through here and this will make it worse. Blanco is just down the road and they’re getting a bypass.

[WestAustinite]

Originally Posted by Echostatic

I think they've decided that the political cost of a Dripping Springs bypass (and the requisite land acquisition) would draw unwanted attention to this project. And it wouldn't be cheap either. Frankly if Downtown Dripping ever needs more than a 3x3 arterial, Austin has simply sprawled too much. It's THIRTEEN MILES from the Y.

Well, Katy is 30 miles from downtown Houston and DS is only 24 from downtown Austin. But agree with your point and hope DS does not become the next Katy.

[H2O]

This is just gross. I used to love driving out to the Hill Country via 290. Once you were past the Y at Oak Hill it felt like another world. All the development in recent years has ruined the views and character. This will turn it into placeless sprawl no different than US 183 N. This 'improvement' will only encourage the sprawl all the way to Fredericksburg and beyond.

[LightChop]

Induced demand will certainly be a factor so I understand the anti-sprawl crowd.

Here’s the flip side. The city of Bulverde voted twice against widening SH-46 in the mid 2000’s to discourage growth. Well the people came anyways and now it’s a brutally overwhelmed two lane road that is FINALLY getting a proper widening about 20 years too late.

[StoOgE]

So I should buy a shitload of land in Henly/Blanco/Johnson City and just wait for those to turn into suburban sprawl.

Oh fuck, my family owns a bunch of land in Henly - good job getting cut out of the will dad.

[Lobotomizer]

Originally Posted by LightChop

Induced demand will certainly be a factor so I understand the anti-sprawl crowd.

Here’s the flip side. The city of Bulverde voted twice to widen SH-46 in the mid 2000’s to discourage growth. Well the people came anyways and now it’s a brutally overwhelmed two lane road that is FINALLY getting a proper widening about 20 years too late.

Sounds like Austin's gameplan for 290. Waiting decades to finally build Oak Hill Parkway did not prevent the growth west of Austin from occuring, just as waiting to improve I-35 did not prevent growth north and south of Austin.

Induced demand is a load of b.s.

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by Lobotomizer

Sounds like Austin's gameplan for 290. Waiting decades to finally build Oak Hill Parkway did not prevent the growth west of Austin from occuring, just as waiting to improve I-35 did not prevent growth north and south of Austin.

Induced demand is a load of b.s.

It is a complicated and mostly misunderstood statistical dynamic. It mostly doesn’t have a massive real world effect and leftists constantly use it as a go to buzzphrase without actually understanding how it works at all.

[LightChop]

Originally Posted by Lobotomizer

Sounds like Austin's gameplan for 290.

Speaking of which.. Is the new ROW going to really demolish the brand new P. Terry’s and basically every new construction north of the highway west of Nutty Brown? Am I reading the schematics right?

[Echostatic]

Originally Posted by LightChop

Speaking of which.. Is the new ROW going to really demolish the brand new P. Terry’s and basically every new construction north of the highway west of Nutty Brown? Am I reading the schematics right?

With these schematics yes. I expect that won't be the final design, they only have to compress the ROW by a few feet to save millions in acquisition costs.