Commuting Construction and closures Roads: Texas Department of Transportation Texas Transportation Institute
by Patrick
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Worst traffic road conditions in Texas
Officials have released a list of the 100 worst traffic conditions in Texas.
Dallas motorists suffer the most highly congested road conditions in Texas, says a recent report from the Texas Department of Transportation.
The state’s top three bottlenecks are all located in Dallas County, according to the 100 Most Congested Roadway Segments in Texas. But while Dallas has the hottest spots, Harris County actually has more of them. The Houston area has 31 on the worst road conditions traffic list while Dallas has 21.
Road conditions for Fort Worth are next in line for headaches, with 15 tight spots, followed by San Antonio with 11 and Austin with 10.
Here are the top 10 most congested roads and their respective counties:
Commuting Gas taxes Oil and gas prices Passenger rail Roads Transit: congress
by Patrick
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What’s ahead for gas prices, taxes and roads
You’ll likely pay more than $3 a gallon for gas next spring.
But you’ll probably keep paying the same 18 cents per gallon federal gas tax — which has lost more than a third of its purchasing power since it was last raised in 1993.
The roads you drive on will get worse. Transit will face ongoing challenges.
That’s what appears in the fog ahead as Republicans take back the U.S. House amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Feeding voter sentiments are widespread fears about rampant spending and taxing.
Incoming Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica of Florida told reporters last week that the gas tax will go nowhere — which mirror’s President Obama’s position — and that he wants to reconsider recent high-speed rail grants.
But Mica also said he’ll grab hold of a stalled $500 billion six-year transportation reauthorization bill, now a year overdue, and work to push it through. The bill is twice as much as the 2005 law and twice as much as what the gas tax will bring in.
Even so, the massive bill still falls some $150 billion short of just being able to maintain what we have, indicates a report headed by two former U.S. transportation secretaries. And that’s just the federal gap — states and local entities have holes too.
We are facing an “elegant degradation” of our transportation system, the report warns. It will be slow, sure and very costly.
SOURCES:
- Federal gas-price predictions
- St. Augustine Record report
- Reuters report
- New York Times report
- Well Within Reach report
OTHER STUDIES:
Commuting Passenger rail Roads Safety Toll roads Travel: Interstate 35
by Patrick
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Big plans for Texas’ worst highway (including tolls and rail)
Planners and pundits have long decried Interstate 35 as Texas’ worst highway.
Notorious traffic backups and numerous crashes on I-35, especially on the stretch from San Antonio to Austin, have spawned big-ticket projects such as the SH 130 tollway and Lone Star commuter rail. Putting two and two together from such thinking eventually led to the now supposedly defunct Trans Texas Corridor.
But more big plans are in the making.
Four committees, each looking at a segment of I-35, are holding public meetings this month to wrap up draft plans on what to do with the highway, its feeders and parallel roads. Billions of dollars worth of projects are eyed, including this for South and Central Texas:
- Convert one I-35 lane each way into toll/carpool lanes from Buda to Georgetown
- Remove tolls and widen SH 130 to six lanes from Seguin to Georgetown
- Build high-speed passenger rail from San Antonio to Dallas
- Build passenger rail from San Antonio to Laredo
- Widen I-35 from San Antonio to Laredo
Live longer by driving less (or at least slower)
San Antonio traffic jam photo from viainfo.net.
A recent study laid out what I found to be an amazing stat.
For every hour driving, U.S. life expectancy decreases by 20 minutes, suggests analysis in a University of Toronto study. The shorter life spans are due to crashes.
An hour a day is about the average two-way San Antonio commute. So the typical driver here loses four days a year, about half a year over a 40-year career. The payoff is a year and a half slogging through traffic to make the bucks.
The finding that drivers lose a minute of life for every three minutes on the road wasn’t even the main point of the study. Authors wanted to consider the risks of driving faster to reduce travel times. They determined that time saved by speeding is far outweighed by shortened lives due to higher chances of crashing.
The conclusion: Americans drive a little too fast and can live longer by driving slower.
Commuting Parking Passenger rail Railroads Transit Travel
by Hugh
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Passenger rail in Asutin and San Antonio
Larry Walsh and the Austin MetroRail
My friend, Larry Walsh, and I finally found the time last Tuesday, July 27, to make a visit to Austin’s new commuter rail line, Capital MetroRail. This is what is hoped to be the first thirty miles of a city wide system. This first section runs from the city center at 4th and Trinity to Leander, a commuter colony way to the north of Austin itself. more »
Bicycling to downtown San Antonio on a summer day
Augusta Street bridge, San Antonio
My wife and I spent some five hours out and about on our bikes yesterday, heading downtown from our house near Red McCombs Ford outside Loop 410 to the King William district. Altogether it came to a trip of 22.35 miles, mostly along San Antonio’s old main thoroughfares, San Pedro Avenue and Fredericksburg Road. We set of around 8:00 AM, when it was only 80 degrees and got back just before 1:00 PM, when it was well over 90. more »
See how San Antonio plans to make its buses perform like light rail
Can buses look and operate more like light rail?
VIA Metropolitan Transit officials think so. And now the public can peek under the hood of a plan to spend $57 million to speed up bus travel and make trips more comfortable along Fredericksburg Road.
The agency will hold three public meetings over two weeks to explain the latest on an environmental study:
Monday, May 24
6 p.m.
Jefferson High School cafeteria
723 Donaldson
Thursday, May 27
1:30 p.m.
Norris Conference Center
Wonderland of the Americas Mall
4522 Fredericksburg Road, Suite A100
Thursday, May 27
6 p.m.
Norris Conference Center
Wonderland of the Americas Mall
4522 Fredericksburg Road, Suite A100
The study says buses could scoot along 30 percent faster on nine miles between downtown and the Medical Center, two prime job centers anchoring one of VIA’s busiest routes. More than a fourth of the area’s 79,000 residents depend on transit.
The cost for bus rapid transit, as it’s called, includes traffic signal controls to give buses more green time, faster ticketing, sidewalk-level boarding, two roomy transit centers and eight enhanced stations. The hope is that developers will create walkable, mixed-used hubs around the stops.
The cost does not include dedicated bus lanes on part of the route, as proposed in previous plans that put the tab at around $100 million.
Construction is supposed to start this year, with service starting in late 2012.
LINKS:
One in four commuters are part of this growing national trend
One in four big-city commuters walk to work, ride bicycles, use transit or at least share car rides with other workers, a new study says. A good number even stay home to work.
In other words, 24 percent of Americans in the 100 largest metro areas don’t drive solo to work, according to ”The State of Metropolitan America,” a report released this week by the Brookings Institution.
And though a whopping three-fourths still drive alone, that portion has been shrinking, says the report’s 12-page commuting chapter.
From 2000 to 2008:
TRANSIT RIDERSHIP: went up for the first time in 40 years, reaching 5 percent in 2008, though that’s still shy of 5.1 percent from 1990.
DRIVING SOLO: slid down slightly, mostly in 2007 to 2008, the first year of the Great Recession and a time of shockingly high gas prices. Austin led the nation’s biggest cities with a 3.6 percent drop.
CARPOOLING: dropped to 11 percent, less than the 12 percent from 1970.
TWO-WHEELING: by bicycle and motorcycle rose slightly, to 1.7 percent.
WALKING: declined to 2.8 percent, down from 7.4 percent in 1970.
TELECOMMUTING: jumped to 4.1 percent.
The report breaks down the trends by demographics and geography and mentions some other notable Texas numbers:
El Paso is third in the U.S. for a 3.2 percent increase in solo driving and second for a 5.2 percent decrease in carpooling; McAllen ranks in the top five for both the percentage of commuters who carpool and those who quit carpooling; and Houston is fifth for loss of transit share.
LINKS:
Every driver commits at least some of these six sins
Does talking to a passenger distract your driving?
Yes, it does, according to safety officials. And that’s just one of a half dozen habits that distract motorists.
Drivers are considered distracted when they:
- Talk to passengers
- Smoke
- Eat
- Fiddle with dashboard controls
- Reach for something
- Talk or text on a cell phone
OK, so some of these, especially the last one, aren’t surprises. And it’s the last one that Oprah Winfrey is targeting with her “No Phone Zone” Day, which is tomorrow.
Agencies across the nation, including the Texas Department of Transportation, have joined Oprah’s campaign. Tomorrow, electronic highway signs will flash, “Make Your Vehicle a No Phone Zone,” or “Drive Now. Text or Talk Later.”
Motorists using hand-held devices are four times more likely to be in a crash, TxDOT says. All distractions caused 103,526 accidents and 524 deaths in Texas in 2008.
Nationwide, distractions led to 5,870 deaths and 515,000 injuries, statistics show.
Young people are especially vulnerable. Almost half of teens use phones while driving, a Texas Transportation Institute study found.
More information:
Commuting Construction and closures Toll roads Transit: Loop 1604
by Patrick
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What’s in store for your Loop 1604 commute?
People mill about at a meeting earlier tonight for Loop 1604
Here’s the gist of what’s being laid out, in a series of public meetings wrapping up tonight, for Loop 1604′s future.
The problem, officials say, is that traffic demand in 25 years will be twice as much as what can fit on the highway today. The lanes can currently handle about 80,000 vehicles a day, but demand is 110,000 now and will surge to 155,000 by 2035.
An environmental study is sizing up impacts of three basic strategies:
Buses and passenger rail. At best, this can meet 15 percent of demand when you consider that top-notch transit cities such as San Francisco, Washington and Boston snare about that much of the trips in those cities.
Managing and improving traffic flows. This is done with engineering, like the super street idea, and behavior incentives that range from carpooling to staggered work hours and telecommuting. California enacted laws requiring large employers to use such commuting strategies but cut traffic just 3 percent.
Adding four lanes to the highway. Since each lane can handle about 20,000 vehicles a day, that would do the trick.
So you can see where the math leads.
However, a dozen various community criteria will also drive decisions, and that produces a little more mix into the approaches.
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