Old West Austin Fights the Cut-Through Menace

Photo By John Anderson

Mornings and afternoons in Paige Pape's neighborhood used to be pretty much like the rest of the day: quiet and peaceful. Now they're considered peak traffic hours in the Old West Austin neighborhood south of Enfield Road and west of Lamar – two major roadways that are undergoing simultaneous construction projects.

Drivers trying to negotiate the rush-hour bottlenecks have created cut-through traffic hazards in the surrounding neighborhoods. Pape, who serves as traffic coordinator for the Old West Austin Neighborhood Association, says that while city officials are sympathetic, little is being done to stem the flow of speeding cars on narrow streets lined with cars parked legally on either side. "What's frustrating is the lack of response and the lack of preparedness from the city," she said.

City engineers overseeing the road construction say they have taken steps to alleviate the cut-through problem, but there is only so much that can be done. "We've done a lot of [police] traffic patrols during both morning and evening traffic," said Mike Curtis, the city Public Works Department's project manager for the Lamar and Enfield roadwork. But, Pape argues, two patrol officers can't catch every speeder, and police are reluctant to issue citations for going two or three miles over the speed limit. A speed trailer – the electronic sign that tells you how fast you're going – was also set up in the neighborhood, which Pape says helped slow traffic, but since the city owns just two, the trailers can only spend so much time in each neighborhood.

The road projects have turned pedestrian and dog-friendly intersections like Ninth and Blanco into crossroads of peril, neighbors say. Until a couple of months ago, a dog could chase a squirrel across the street and back with nary a scratch. Since then, four dogs have been hit. The report on a neighborhood listserv reads like a casualty list from a war zone: Ninth and Shelley – dog hit and killed; 12th and Elm – dog "hit and literally sent flying across the street (miraculously not seriously injured)." Another, a Great Pyrenees with a new litter of puppies, was hit and killed at West Lynn and 11th. A fourth dog was added to the list of fatalities about a week ago, after it cut loose from its owner and darted into the street.

"I'm just holding my breath until somebody's child gets killed," said neighbor Deborah Wallace. "This neighborhood simply wasn't designed for this type of traffic." She questioned why the city provided temporary barricades to discourage cut-through traffic in the neighborhoods north of Enfield, but not for those on the south side. Garry Silagi, the city's traffic control supervisor, said the road closures are not as effective as they look. "We put them there to fake out drivers, but once they figure out that the road really isn't closed, they just drive on through," he said. Then, he added, it becomes a dicey matter of enforcement: How do you prevent some but not all cars from driving on city streets?

But Curtis predicts at least half of the traffic problem will disappear once Enfield, currently reduced to a one-way headache, returns to a two-way street in early June, and the whole prject should be completed by mid- to late July. He said the Enfield project was prolonged by bad weather and the unexpected discovery of old utility lines. That may reduce the cut-through problem from the north, but it still leaves the intrusion of drivers avoiding Lamar, where crews are replacing ancient sewer and water lines, rebuilding the street, and building new sidewalks from Town Lake to 24th. The project started in mid-March and is expected to take about 16 months, but Curtis says the work is already 30 days ahead of schedule.

That's little consolation for Old West Austin residents. Pape says she'll next appeal to the pro-neighborhood sensibilities of the City Council. "If they can't guarantee pedestrian safety in Downtown neighborhoods," she said, "then their whole concept of having a Downtown corridor is going to fail."