Travis County sets aggressive goal to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2050

One of the policy areas that the county has most influence over is roadway safety. Past city limits, the Travis County Commissioners Court is responsible – along with the Texas Department of Transportation, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization and other regional authorities – for managing the increased traffic that comes along with booming growth. And as traffic increases, so do injuries and fatalities. In order to tackle that issue, the Commissioners Court voted unanimously last week to set a goal of reducing traffic fatalities by 50 percent by 2035 and completely eliminating them by 2050. After incorporating safety recommendations from the community, the court will adopt its final safety action plan in May.

In order to receive grant funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s SS4A program, municipalities must commit to aggressive goals like these. Travis County’s action plan rolls into the bigger CAMPO six-county action plan, which includes Bastrop, Burnet, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties. Commissioners were originally presented with two options: either establishing a target date for achieving zero fatalities and serious injuries, or establishing a significant percent reduction by a target date, with an eventual, dateless goal of zero. Instead, the county committed to a goal of zero by 2050, mirroring CAMPO’s ambitious plan. 

Now that the goal has been set, county staff will come back to the court in May with project recommendations based on community feedback from a survey that ended this month and a comprehensive analysis of crash data across the county from 2019 through 2023. Staff will collaborate with nine municipalities across the county, Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, TxDOT, the county sheriff’s office, emergency management office and Del Valle ISD on where safety improvements would be most effective.

More than 1,200 respondents to the survey from all across the county dropped pins on a map where they’d seen a safety issue, coalescing around certain roads that had multiple comments: FM 1431, RM 620, Line Creek Road in Volente, plus Brodie Lane, Springdale Road, Cameron Road and RM 2222 closer to Austin. Survey respondents suggested widening roadways and installing medians to slow down traffic. Redesigning dangerous curves with added turn lanes, improving road maintenance and drainage, and enhancing signage and lighting were next on the list. Enhancing emergency response and traffic enforcement and adding protected bike lanes were also mentioned. 

However, engineering and construction improvements may not solve what the survey indicated is the biggest contributor to dangerous roads: “What we heard in terms of top safety concerns were speeding, road rage or reckless driving, and distracted driving and other behavior challenges,” explained Dan Malson, consultant project manager for the Safe Streets action plan. “So that is really informing the discussion that we have, (that) a lot of the challenges are not so much dangerous portions of roads, but driver behavior. (We’re) trying to build roadway safety culture within Travis County.”

When commissioners were presented with a possible goal of 100 percent elimination of traffic fatalities by 2050, Cindy McDonald, county executive for transportation and natural resources, warned, “I think 100 percent is admirable. I think it’s going to be very difficult if you cannot change driver behavior.”

However, Commissioner Ann Howard pushed for the aggressive goal, saying, “This is an area that the county has to continue to lead the community on and keep up with the growth and the use of our road system. It’s aspirational, but it can help lead us and guide us in our budgeting and our partnerships and our grant searches. We also saw an appetite for larger investment in roads in the 2023 bond passage, with a bigger margin than ever before. That gives me some confidence that the public would support not only our aspirational goal, but investments towards achieving that goal.”

Commissioner Jeff Travillion expressed concern about setting such an ambitious goal without a process in place to reach it yet – or the funding to do it, which is already on shaky ground because of the Trump administration’s threat of a federal funding freeze. However, Malson explained that the goal will kick-start a pilot that can include checkpoints along the way to assess how well the project is working.

“The idea is that you’re able to take a look at the crashes before for several years, and then once the project’s implemented, take a look at the crashes for several years after and quantify that reduction,” he said.

Malson mentioned the city of Austin’s pilot left turn program, in which it changes some left turns from flashing yellow to green only, in order to measure how many crashes resulted from poor driver decision-making. 

“That’s a type of approach that you might take with some of these projects, to start tracking once they move towards implementation,” Malson said. “The results from those studies can inform where we are on track to meet that goal; which types of projects should we be investing in in the future; which types don’t seem to be working right now.”

Photo made available through a Creative Commons license.

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