Austin, Texas: 4th Worst U.S. City For Traffic Congestion (Houston: college, live)

[ATX Homeboy]

Wow, this is brand new information!

[sxrckr]

It's bad.

[txstate]

One Interstate one million people.

[JLB001]

I hated traffic in Austin when I lived there. I will take Houston traffic any day. At least we have back roads and side roads to jump off on as alternate routes. In Austin...You are just downright stuck. I'm not sure which I disliked more...I35 and the elevated portions or Mopac. blah.

[majicdonjuan]

Originally Posted by JLB001

I hated traffic in Austin when I lived there. I will take Houston traffic any day. At least we have back roads and side roads to jump off on as alternate routes. In Austin...You are just downright stuck. I'm not sure which I disliked more...I35 and the elevated portions or Mopac. blah.

Same here. When I lived in Austin it was a huge pain to move around and drive much of the day compared to Houston and DFW. I couldn't stand it.

Then I moved to the DC area where... wait a minute....

[doss1]

Austin traffic was the single reason why I chose not to relocate there.

[qwertyasdf]

What's nice about driving on Mopac is there are no semi's to make it seem near as hectic as 35.

Austin is slow about getting new roads built. It seems like it took forever to complete the intersection of 35 and the Ben White/290 freeway. Close to ten years, it seems like.

There has been talk for the past 20 years of building the 290 freeway beyond Wm Cannon and Oak Hill to where it hooks up with 35, near Buda. It's ridiculously slow getting new roads built in this town.

We also need a good east-west freeway. There was talk of turning 2222/Koening Lane into a crosstown freeway but the people who live in that area were firmly against that idea and they have enough clout in Austin to keep it from happening.

To the credit of Austin, even with the congested traffic, Austin is a pretty easy town to get around in, and the drivers are very courteous.

Most of the time, outside of rush hour, you can be at the opposite end of town in 20 to 30 minutes. During rush hour, anywhere from an hour to 90 minutes

[doctorjef]

After an almost 10 year absence from Austin, I had to make a business trip there this past October. I was expecting traffic congestion to be totally out of control, but my spouse and I used the same strategies to get around town that we had employed during our last several years of living there, ending in 2004, and we really didn't find things terribly difficult. However, avoiding bad traffic in Austin requires a fine tuned mix of timing, living and working on the same side of Lady Bird Lake (formerly Town Lake), and ability to avoid Loop 1/MoPac, I35, Loop 360, and 183 during peak traffic times. Not everyone is able to do this, of course. During our last dozen years living in Austin I was in full-time private, solo practice, and was thus able to rent office space within a close distance to where we lived. We lived, and I worked, in South Central Austin and I was 5 to 10 minutes from work. I made very deliberate decisions during that time about where I rented office space and where we bought a home when we sold one place and bought another at one point. Because of my situation, I was also able to control my work hours such that I could time out-of-office commutes for on-site consulting work in order to avoid traffic when driving between South Austin and far North Austin/Williamson County and other remote locales. This required some self-discipline and was also facilitated by the nature of what I was doing. Further, since I could control my hours at the office, we were able to go out for dinner early and hence avoid the traffic getting across Town Lake, whether via Lamar or MoPac. When we visited Austin in Oct 2013, we maintained a similar time consciousness about when to drive around town, go to dinner, get back out to the airport, etc.

I suppose this might all seem quite smug, and again I realise that many people wouldn't be able to make these strategies work as well for them or perhaps to even use them at all. I just want to point out that there are ways of avoiding the Austin traffic up to 90% of the time.

[AguaDulce]

new poll says Austin doesn't even break the top twenty.

Revealed: The cities with the worst traffic in North America (and most of them are even MORE clogged than last year) | Mail Online

[An0nym0us88]

Originally Posted by AguaDulce

new poll says Austin doesn't even break the top twenty.

Revealed: The cities with the worst traffic in North America (and most of them are even MORE clogged than last year) | Mail Online

That list is bogus!