I'm feeling more like an Austin Traffic Complainer with each passing day (Spring: house, neighborhood)

[Aquitaine]

Originally Posted by atxcio

I read threads like this with the hope that maybe people actually are fed up with traffic and will leave (or at least growth will slow down), but it never happens. I guess it's just empty complaining. Has there ever been a city in the US that has seen a decline because traffic got too bad?

It depends on what 'a decline' is.

People respond to incentives. If you're living somewhere that is prohibitively expensive, or you're spending lots of time energy on (some problem) that Texas hasn't got, Texas looks pretty good.

But if you came to Austin 20 years ago because you liked the area, the size of the city, and the general feel, those incentives have changed or gone away - replaced by other incentives, but those don't apply to everyone. Often left out of the '100-150 people moving here a day' statistic is the 60 people a day leaving.

Nobody complaining in this thread is wrong about anything they're complaining about. But we aren't all the same, and certainly businesses aren't all the same. My business doesn't care about property taxes at all because we have no property and won't ever have any; we care about responsiveness and ease of compliance. I can't begin to tell you what that means to me, but it doesn't amount to a hill of beans for most people who just want a job and a place to live.

The explosion in population and cost in Austin will drive people out to 'the next Austin,' wherever that is. Austin won't be ruined because of it; it will just be more expensive and crowded, and eventually, slowly, the city and state government will catch up to some of the problems and probably blow a lot of money doing a mediocre job of fixing them.

It is not hard to imagine that some people who moved here 5-10 years ago would not make the same choice today, given the traffic situation: spending more time in your car to get to your (more expensive) home. It's all math in the end, whether or not we choose to think about it that way. In those same 5-10 years, if you had been complaining about traffic and high costs, and you suddenly got a job offer to go to a place more in line with what you wanted, it's easy to imagine that you'd go; make the traffic and cost of living higher still and maybe you'd proactively seek a job there. Multiply by several thousand and you have the ebb and flow of population movement. Looking at how people vote with their feet is by far more informative than anybody's opinion on the subject (particularly mine!). I don't have historical numbers on how many people leave Austin per day other than the current 60 or so from NPR last week, but I'd bet that it much lower 5-10 years ago. Those people are 'the decline' even if we're still seeing a net gain.

[MoNative34]

Originally Posted by Aquitaine

It is not hard to imagine that some people who moved here 5-10 years ago would not make the same choice today, given the traffic situation: spending more time in your car to get to your (more expensive) home. It's all math in the end, whether or not we choose to think about it that way.

That's a good point about mathematics. I moved there for a job opportunity several years ago that allowed me some time to decide if I wanted to relocate there permanently. As much as I liked the things to do and the people, it was the math that made me decide not to make it a permanent thing. I lived just a few minutes from work, so the commute wasn't bad, but going anywhere outside the neighborhood after work was out of the question. And yeah, the costs... Not just the cost of a home, but the rapid rise of property taxes. My taxes on my home in the midwest increased 20%, but that was over a 15 year time span. My landlord's increased at that rate in a year.

Even though I enjoyed the city, I left and it was the math.

[Uncle Willis]

Originally Posted by NoBull

Oh, how I pine for the days when Austin was just a sleepy college town. If only we could turn back the clock by 30 years or even 20 years. Heck, I'd be happy with 15 years turned back. I see so many out of state license plates, I just have to roll my eyes. I don't get it. How can so many people talk up a city so much and so many people believe the hype? I'm just waiting for the next "It" city so the Austin hype can finally move away with it. Until then, they'll keep on coming and clogging up our roads. Until then, keep your cool on the road as it's only going to get worse before it gets better.

Man, it used to take me 10 minutes to get from the office at 11th & Red River to my rented condo just behind Reagan High School off of 290 and 183. (1987). We had it so good. 25 min to get from my apartment near Arboretum (Jollyville Rd) to the same office.

[austin-steve]

Originally Posted by Aquitaine

It depends on what 'a decline' is.

...

The explosion in population and cost in Austin will drive people out to 'the next Austin,' wherever that is. Austin won't be ruined because of it; it will just be more expensive and crowded, and eventually, slowly, the city and state government will catch up to some of the problems and probably blow a lot of money doing a mediocre job of fixing them.

...
It's all math in the end, whether or not we choose to think about it that way....

Agree with your post, except that it's more than math. I can afford to stay here forever, as can a lot of people who are 20+ years in, or freshly arriving with high income.

But instead of looking forward to retirement in Austin, I constantly think of where I'm going to escape to next. Like any relationship, that's not a healthy mindset for long term "staying together". And the Number 1 complaint is the absurd BS that navigating from place to place has become. Other complaints are not deal breakers. But my mobility and sanity is.

The "decline" will be the draining away of people with roots in Austin who no longer wish to remain. Of course, that "decline" may by another person's version of "rise" of Austin to an "International" or "World" city, or one of those other BS terms used to describe Austin's post-adolescence era.

Steve

[Aquitaine]

Agree with your post, except that it's more than math. I can afford to stay here forever,

I'm sorry, I didn't mean just 'income math' but rather life calculus. Time as well as money.

My in-laws retired here from Southern California but I don't think I would retire here even removing the cost and tax situation from the equation. That's a good 30-35 years from now, but if my priorities changed from 'earning and creating' to 'living and traveling' Austin would probably not even be in the top 10 for me.

[robertsacamano]

I have many friends from graduate school at UT who were forced to leave because they could find better jobs elsewhere. Many dream of returning some day and some are trying to find jobs in Austin so that they can. I try to explain that things have changed and that, because of traffic, they will not be as happy here as they think they will be. They refuse to believe me. In their mind, they're seeing the Austin of 15-20 years ago.

[ScoPro]

Originally Posted by 10scoachrick

Well, north north Austin and Cedar Park have their bottlenecks; but nothing like the horror stories I hear from 'down South'. It's a big reason we live up here. Toll 45, 183A, Ronald Reagan, even as bad as 1431 CAN be, there is no real gridlock up here. Hang in there!!!

That's right - and when bottlenecks develop with the hypergrowth up here, the Wilco/city planners don't sit around on their thumbs for years funding "studies" before even thinking about starting road improvements.

The only bad exception to that is the lack of an overpass at the RR crossing on 620 by Chisholm Trail.

[ScoPro]

Originally Posted by robertsacamano

I have many friends from graduate school at UT who were forced to leave because they could find better jobs elsewhere. Many dream of returning some day and some are trying to find jobs in Austin so that they can. I try to explain that things have changed and that, because of traffic, they will not be as happy here as they think they will be. They refuse to believe me. In their mind, they're seeing the Austin of 15-20 years ago.

Hey, maybe I should explain what the Austin of 55 years ago was like.

[austin-steve]

I really think what Austin roads lack more than anything is what in business we call "uniformity of operation". It's so disjointed, largely owed to the stupid hamhanded way bike lanes are shoehorned onto existing streets, decreasing total lanes availble, but also lack of uniformity in onramps/exits, turnarounds, etc.

For example, many "under the bridge" u-turnarounds offer a dedicated lane to keep moving into on the other side when you get there. Yet many drivers stop and treat it like a yield. Then you toot your horn to "nudge" them into looking ahead instead of over their right shoulder backward, and you get the finger.

Same with many right surface exits, like eastbound 290 frontage at Mopac. You have your own lane - keep going. But since it's not that way everywhere, drivers are just constantly confused and they stop and back an entire line of traffic up behind them as they are not even aware they have a dedicated lane. And forget about the shorter but still useful "acceleration" lanes (gun it & merge) that people don't know how to execute. All this slows the general "flow", and exasperates the problem all over Austin proper.

Add in constant construction, road/lane closures, poor design and capacity overload, and it's just a log jam of unmitigated proportions.

{still ranting}
For christ sake, you can't even drive in one lane straight on Moapc at night in the rain without the painted over old lanes displaying more prominently than the newest version of the current "lane", and next thing you know you're running another driver out of her lane and she's honking. Which is what happened to me southbound Mopac last month one night.

I'm no fan of California, but driving there is a much more uniform experience with cloverleaf interchanges and common practices/design that apply through the cities and the entire state, for the most part, excluding the "guts" of certain cities like SF.

Steve

[orngkat]

[quote]In town, the biggest slowdown is the almost assured probability of people running red lights.
Just a few weeks ago, DH was t-boned on Burnet Rd when the driver just ran right through the red light. She said she had just moved here and didn't see it