On Monday night, something will happen that should be critical and momentous. A new, official, long-range transportation plan for Metro Austin! Wow! That’s our No. 1 issue! That’s a big deal! Or is it?
Well, so far, not really. The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO)’s long-awaited and somewhat-delayed adoption of its 2025 plan has so far remained parked at background-noise level. And when the CAMPO board finally votes on June 12 to make it legal, thousands of Austinites will fail to notice it and then go on complaining about the traffic.
Largely, this is because of our rapidly growing fatigue with the transportation debate, what with all the hours spent on SH-yawn-130 and light-rail-snore-transit. As far as the CAMPO plan is concerned, those issues are largely decided. The planning body — which is governed by a 21-member board of city, county, and state officials — is required by federal law to have a 25-year long-range plan that it updates every five years. The previous version of what was then called the Austin Metro Area Transportation Plan, adopted in 1994, already included 54 miles of light rail (all Cap Metro is doing now is deciding how and where to start) and something resembling SH 130 to the east, and the draft 2025 plan does the same. (It also includes our portion of the proposed Austin-San Antonio commuter rail line.)
The new plan — which is supposed to be the final arbiter of all transportation spending in the CAMPO study area — only adds a few projects that have raised people’s hackles. One big one is the widening of South First Street from four to six lanes (with a median), which would knock out a substantial number of residences and businesses in South Central Austin. Another is the widening of RM 2222 between MoPac and Loop 360, which would likewise knock out homes in the Cliffs Over Lake Austin subdivision.
The plan also calls for both the extension of MoPac all the way to San Marcos and the completion of the SH 45 outer loop, as a toll road, across Hays County from FM 1826 to U.S. 183. (While the northern leg of SH 45, running across Williamson County, is pretty much a done deal, the southern stretch is novel enough to prompt a puzzled written comment from the Federal Highway Administration, which is supposed to know about such things.) These southern projects, along with the existing arguments over Hays County’s own road-expansion plans and their environmental impact, are probably the most divisive, as opposed to simply unpopular, items that the CAMPO board will have to weigh on Monday night.
Aside from these hot spots, most of the written and public-hearing comment CAMPO has received on its plan has been sung from familiar pages in the hymnal. There’s the build-no-new-roads position, the build-all-of-them-now position, and the ever-popular build-all-of-them-except-the-one-in-my-back-yard position. Not that these positions are to be dismissed out of hand. For example, it is worth asking, as the Sierra Club has done, how CAMPO can justify spending $3.9 billion on new roads over a time frame when world oil production is expected, by some observers, to decline by 40%. Or why, in America’s most wired mid-sized city, telecommuting does not have a bigger place in our overall transportation strategy.
That $3.9 billion figure is important, because one of the reasons people are not quite taking this planning process seriously is that money to make these projects happen is scarce. The CAMPO plan is required by federal law to “indicate resources from public and private sources that are reasonably expected to be made available to carry out the plan.” Yet the financial-analysis component of the plan says that “the region’s transportation needs cannot be met if only traditional funding sources are available.” We will only be able to build these roads and rail projects if we come up with new ways to pay for them. That won’t be decided Monday night, of course, but when and if local and state officials get it together to come up with real answers, then a truly momentous vote will be in the offing.
This article appears in June 9 • 2000.