Western Trails is an average, middle-class neighborhood. Kids play football on
rolling green yards and parents plant begonias to decorate the curbs. Squeezed
between US290, Ben White Boulevard, and Manchaca Road, Western Trails is also
ideally situated for commuter shortcuts when traffic backs up on those major
thoroughfares. Parked cars are sideswiped, fences knocked down, pets run over,
even cars crashing through living room windows: The residents of this south
Austin neighborhood have seen it all. Police have clocked cut-through traffic
at speeds of up to 64 mph. Cut-through traffic has been a longtime problem in Austin. The city made a few
efforts in the late 1980s to slow down drivers, but these were abandoned in the
face of loud complaints from motorists. Now, with the rapid increase in
suburban growth of the past few years, the situation has begun reaching crisis
proportions in areas like Western Trails, and the city is, once again, tackling
the issue. This time, four Austin neighborhoods – Roundup Trail, Travis
Heights, Crestview, and Oak Park – tried speed humps.
Speed humps, according to Joan Hudson, coordinator for the city’s
Neighborhood Traffic Safety Program, rise to a three-inch height over a
12-foot width, and are spaced between 200 to 700 feet apart, with three or four
humps to a street. Designed to jolt motorists going faster than 20 mph, they
have successfully slowed motorists in Dallas for years. In a recent Austin
study, average speeds were reduced by between five and 15 mph in those four
neighborhoods, with little effects on traffic volume, according to findings
released May 15 by the Urban Transportation Commission. Calling the pilot
project a success, the city’s Transportation Department has recommended that
the program be expanded to other neighborhoods. The city council has already
approved $100,000 for speed humps this year, and will decide on future funding
in July or August (see box).
Speed humps are the latest in a series of solutions recommended under the
city’s Neighborhood Traffic Management Program, created in 1986. At that time,
staff from the city’s Department of Public Works and Transportation (DPWT) put
together a booklet demonstrating techniques that can be used to divert or slow
cut-through traffic, and picked the north central Crestview neighborhood to
demonstrate.
Crestview, bounded by Koenig Lane, Bur-net, Anderson, and North Lamar, has
long suffered from speeding shortcut seekers. DPWT staff developed a plan for a
series of diagonal diverters, which would have converted the grid pattern of
selected neighborhood streets into a system of loops, thereby reducing the high
speeds encouraged by straight-ahead, gun-barrel street design. The extra turns
force drivers to slow down. With the support of the Crestview Neighborhood
Association, the DPWT took its plan to the Urban Transportation Commission to
ask for a 60-day trial run.
It was not to be. More than 100 Crestview residents attended the meeting, many
opposing the diverter plan. Fire Department officials testified that the
diverters would slow their response time, raising fears among elderly residents
that ambulances could also be delayed. Other residents complained that the
diverters would make it harder for them to get to their homes. In the end, the
Urban Transportation Commission refused the trial run.
But a few years later, when construction on Ben White led to increasing
traffic in the Western Trails neighborhood, the DPWT decided to try again. This
time, workers erected a temporary diverter on Packsaddle Pass, blocking
motorists from using the street as a thoroughfare between Ben White and Jones
Road. The results were dramatic: traffic dropped from 6,300 to 1,400 cars per
day. But again, halfway through the 60-day trial period, building opposition
from the motorists who lost their shortcut pressured the Urban Transportation
Commission into pulling out the diverter.
Traditional traffic planning in the U.S. usually serves to
increase
traffic flow and speed, rather than
to calm things down. When a city widens
the streets, it means that more cars can drive on it faster. Things like the
synchronization of traffic lights,
intersection realignment, and wider turn
space promote high speeds, turning the road into dangerous barriers for
cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists entering from side streets.
Compounding any Texas city’s traffic problem is the bureaucracy involved in
setting up stop signs and lowering speed limits. To put in a stop sign, state
law requires that a city perform studies demonstrating that traffic coming from
all directions at an intersection is sufficient to warrant a stop sign. Speed
limits are set in a similar manner, based on studies documenting the average
speed most people drive on a particular stretch of road.
Austin faces two other major obstacles to calming traffic. First, the city has
extended freeways out to far-flung suburban developments, which dump large
amounts of commuter traffic on the inner city. When motorists exit from the
frantic driving of high-speed freeways, they have difficulty making the
transition to the lower speeds of congested arterials, and they search for
unimpeded shortcuts through the neighborhoods. Second, as is true nearly
everywhere in the U.S., people are so attached to driving they are practically
superglued to the steering wheel.
But there are solutions (see box below). Traffic calming has a long history in
northern Europe, especially in Holland and Germany, where increasing numbers of
towns are adopting neighborhood-wide 18 mph speed limits, and creating
residential areas where cars are expected to share the streets with casual
strollers, children at play, trees, and park benches.
A few American cities, such as Seattle, Portland, and Boulder, are trying some
of the European techniques in their own residential areas, but in Texas the
idea of putting restrictions on motorists’ dominance of any streets has
traditionally seemed as high-falutin’ and un-American as “Pierre Water.”
Samileh Mozafari, who heads Austin’s Neighborhood Traffic Management Program,
says that any local attempt to limit access is likely to bring out scores of
Austin motorists arguing that since they pay their taxes, they have the right
to travel wherever they want on a public street. “They can’t see the difference
between an arterial, which is supposed to carry traffic from one point to
another,” she says, “and a neighborhood street which is supposed to just
provide access for the people in the neighborhood.”
In Austin, to start with, Urban Transportation Commission chair Larry Anderson
believes that new suburban developments should be required to undergo analyses
of their traffic impacts on the inner city, just as traffic impact analyses are
currently required for inner city commercial projects. Mozafari says that the
city, using projects like the speed hump program, is willing to begin calming
neighborhoods that can reach a strong consensus. In some cases, however,
neighborhoods may have to raise their own funding.
A possible source is the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency
Act (ISTEA) which, through the Austin Transportation Study, disburses an annual
$7.8 million to the city. ISTEA, approved by Congress in 1991 as a way of
solving some of the nation’s transit problems, includes provisions for
encouraging mass transit, biking, walking, and car pooling.
Ultimately, however, one of the most important steps is a change in attitude –
on the part of both the motorists who will have to share the road, and the
officials who have to reverse the current city transportation policy
encouraging wide, straight, often one-way arterials designed to speed traffic
flow through neighborhoods, rather than slowing it down to co-exist with them.
This article appears in June 9 • 1995 and June 9 • 1995 (Cover).