HUTTO – Citing the fact that many residents come from areas with more restrictive speed limits, Mayor Mike Snyder spoke to Texas Department of Transportation representatives about lowering speed limits on State Highway 79. He suggested new residents used to slower speeds may misjudge how fast traffic is coming at them, leading to crashes.
“I know it’s heresy out here, but it seems like if you guys as a department really want zero people to die on roads it wouldn’t hurt to drop the speed limit down,” the mayor said. “Something to think about is speed kills.”
Snyder was referring to TxDOT’s “Road to Zero” initiative that aims to eliminate roadside fatalities by 2050. The commission set an interim goal of cutting fatal crashes in half by 2035 and saving about 1,800 lives annually.
Representatives from TxDOT visited Hutto City Council to discuss traffic flow and safety on March 23.
Brenda Guerra, Austin district director of transportation operations, told the council that the department is focused on engineering solutions, education programs and traffic enforcement to meet the “Road to Zero” goals.
“One statistic I wanted to bring to your attention would be the increase in distracted driving that has been up 116%,” she said. “We are seeing an increase in speeding and also intoxicated driving. We have also seen statistics related to child passenger fatalities and injuries, bicyclists, motorcyclists and mature drivers.”
Nader Ayoub, a traffic engineer and consultant for TxDOT, explained that the trains going through Hutto can disrupt traffic signal synchronization for up to 15 minutes per train, causing blockages that can increase the risk of crashes.
“In a 12-hour period, you have 15 trains on the average daily,” Ayoub said. “And every time a train goes through, the traffic signal gets preempted by federal law. The signal doesn’t get to work at peak efficiency. You have on the average two trains between 5 to 6 p.m., and those two trains disrupt our operations from 25 to 30 minutes.”
Ayoub said that the five traffic lights along 79 through Hutto are all synchronized so that, theoretically, once a driver gets a green light all the subsequent lights should also be timed to be green as the driver approaches. The trains disrupt synchronization as the system works first to clear the backed up cars at the train intersections.
The synchronization must be updated every few years as traffic patterns change. Hutto’s system was last calibrated in 2021.
“There has been an increase of about 23% to 25% of travel time November 2020 to March 2023, so traffic has changed,” Ayoub said. “The Hutto corridor is one of the more congested ones in the area, and is on the schedule to be calibrated again.”
Ayoub said reliability of travel time, recognizing congestion points, average vehicle speed along segments of the road, and prioritizing roadways based on time of day are all part of the complex modeling process that turns traffic data into a smooth-running, optimized traffic
flow.
“It’s easy to get good progression on 79 if we didn’t care about the cross streets, but the residents wouldn’t be at all happy. So, its a balancing act. We try to make sure that all approaches are handled fairly,” he said.
Collecting accurate data is probably the most important aspect of traffic engineering, according to Ayoub.
“You decide how to prioritize where you spend your time. You find the worst case part of the system. Identify where and when the backups occur. If we can figure out how to spread out that peak traffic a little bit we could probably reduce that by half.”
