Image: Austin Transportation and Public Works
After a history of serious car crashes and a particularly dramatic accident in 2022 injuring 10 people, the yearlong safety pilot implemented on Barton Springs Road by the City of Austin’s Transportation and Public Works Department was a welcome intervention on one of the city’s most popular streets for pedestrians and cyclists at the gateway to Zilker Park — by reducing the road to one car lane in each direction between Azie Morton Road and South Lamar Boulevard, increasing the physical protection of bike lanes through the region, and adding a few other pedestrian-friendly improvements, the project aimed to create a safer stretch of road without significantly harming the flow of traffic. And you know what? It’s already working.
Image: Austin Transportation and Public Works
We could have told you this months ago, based on our own experiences with traveling on Barton Springs Road after the installation of the pilot improvements — along with the general fact that “road diet” projects, like ’em or not, tend to work as advertised. But to really rub everyone’s noses in it, we’re excited to see the release of a mid-pilot report from the Transportation and Public Works Department, not only spelling out the benefits of these infrastructure changes but illuminating the public feedback demonstrating growing support for the changes now we’ve all seen them in action.
Image: Austin Transportation and Public Works
Data analysis using traditional tube counters and Dynamic Speed Display Devices shows a significant reduction of 64-73% in high-risk speeding (representing more than 470 fewer people driving 10 mph over the speed limit each day) compared to pre-pilot data. Median speeds are 1-4 mph lower than pre-pilot project implementation. While it is still early, there have been two crashes with a crash report during the first six months of the pilot (which were due to an illegally parked vehicle and an impaired driver, neither with serious injuries), while pre-pilot analysis would have predicted six crashes with a full crash report.
Travel times through the pilot area are very similar today compared to the same timeframe from one year ago, ranging from 2.8 minutes to 3.5 minutes to travel across the project limits. Three of the six travel periods studied on Barton Springs Road show a reduction of travel times, one is the same compared to the before period, and the remaining westbound and eastbound morning peak travel period saw an increase of only 4-8 seconds. As predicted from pre-project modeling, queue lengths at signalized intersections have slightly increased and the vast majority of drivers are getting through the signalized intersections during the same traffic signal cycle as before.
This study also worked to deflect an obvious vector of criticism by studying alternative routes after the installation of the pilot changes, to see if traffic was increasing on other nearby streets in response to the lane reductions. The result? Not so much:
Additionally, the City studied alternative routes to Barton Springs during the same period to see if delays along those routes may have increased due to traffic potentially re-routing to Cesar Chavez or West Fifth and West Sixth streets between Mopac and South Lamar Boulevard. All of the corridors showed a travel time improvement for each peak period. These findings suggest that this project has not adversely affected 5 motor vehicle travel times in a significant manner along the project corridor or the nearest adjacent alternative west-east routes into downtown.
The pilot still has spring and summer to get through, but c’mon, we’ve seen enough — the project works, the road is safer for everyone, and traffic didn’t get worse. What are we supposed to do with this information? Well, we could start by trying this exact approach all over the place, using the Barton Springs project’s success as precedent.
Perhaps the best and most amusing result from the pilot so far is how many people express outright surprise that the changes didn’t cause more traffic. We told you guys!!! Image: Austin Transportation and Public Works
You could just throw a couple of darts at the city’s Vision Zero map of high-injury roadways to find your candidates, but sitting smack at the top of our personal list is South First Street, a corridor with lots of wonderful shops and restaurants that remains thoroughly unpleasant to navigate outside of a car. We could start by installing Barton Springs-style improvements along the stretch between Gibson and Oltorf Streets, which recorded five serious injuries and one death in the last four years — we’d want to see protected bike lanes and a reduction of vehicle lanes from two to one in each direction. Would we get the same results as the Barton Springs pilot? “Gee,” he said to himself out loud, “I dunno…”
Leave a Reply