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AUSTIN, Texas (FOX 7 Austin) - The City of Austin is hoping to improve traffic flow in the Guadalupe Street corridor in a major way.
Guadalupe Street is one of the busiest travel corridors in Austin and, with ever growing demand, traffic there has only gotten worse.
“You have like 50,000 students who have to come here and a whole lot of people who want to get downtown that come through the street,” said Marlon Bailey, a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin.
The Guadalupe Corridor Mobility Plan aims to reduce some of the strain put on the section of road between Martin Luther King Boulevard and West 29th Street using money from the 2016 mobility bond.
“The goal of the Corridor Mobility Project is to improve transportation for all modes of travel, whether you drive, walk, bike or take transit,” said Mandy McClendon with the City of Austin Corridor Program Office.
Some of the main goals include updating intersections, adding a continuous ADA compliant sidewalk and a continuous protected bike lane.
“Just having that barrier between bikes and cars would be very helpful,” said UT student Taylor Prassel.
In order to do that, some parking along the street would be removed.
“Conceptually, we know that some of the parking needs to be modified, but we still need to put a finer point on some of the improvements and understand where that will occur,” McClendon said. "And we will certainly be reaching out and working with property owners if that's the case."
The city said while some business owners aren't happy about that idea, parallel parkers are slowing down traffic and causing safety hazards for buses. The City of Austin Corridor Program Office said the design is not set in stone.
“People parking causes a lot of traffic to build up behind the buses and everything, just because people are trying to parallel park,” said Prassel.
The city said providing a bus-only lane would save Cap Metro drivers about three minutes per trip and attract more riders in the future. That fits with the city's goal of increasing the use of alternate modes transportation instead of relying on cars.
“It does leave room for a bike lane or a bus lane, but then, if it's just a bike lane and a bus lane, that doesn't really help more cars go through,” Bailey said.
City staff are still holding meetings to discuss planned construction with the public. However, they will have to start making some concrete decisions soon since the project has a planned completion date of 2024.