By Andy Sevilla.
Driving from Hays County to Austin can prove to be a lengthy undertaking, full of constant breaking, crawling traffic and at times, even coming to a complete stop on the highway – seemingly repurposing a major U.S. interstate into a long and narrow parking lot.
As Central Texas’ population continues exploding, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO) is in the development stages of its 2040 Plan steered at addressing future mobility concerns for its six-county region.
CAMPO – which serves Bastrop, Burnet, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson counties – is the agency that approves the use of federal transportation funds in Central Texas. The planning organization presently boasts a regional population of about 1.8 million and expects that number to more than double – to 4.1 million people – by 2040.
Hays County’s population alone could reach 628,309 by 2040 according to the State Data Center 1.0 projection, which assumes the county will continue to grow at the rate it did in the post-2000 decade. That growth would mark a 400 percent increase from the county’s 2010 U.S. Census population count of 157,107.
Current CAMPO Region Population: 1,759,039 | Estimated 2040 CAMPO Region Population: 4,120,322 |
By County: Bastrop:74,171 | By County: Bastrop:200,583 |
The Texas Water Development Board has projected Hays County’s population at 369,860 by 2040, and the State Data Center 0.5 projection – which assumes net migration at one-half of those between 2000 and 2010 – puts the county’s 2040 population at 369,861.
Central Texas has for years been rumored one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, and certainly the state. By factoring in Hays County’s 2040 projected growth and augmenting that figure with the projected growth of the remaining five counties in CAMPO’s region, one can quickly deduce that unless a comprehensive transportation plan is implemented, traffic snarls will become more frequent and a lot longer.
To that end of improving drive times, road conditions and offering alternative travel options in the CAMPO region, the organization is conceiving its federally required long-range transportation plan – the 2040 Plan. According to the timeline, the plan should be approved by May 2015 and the planning organization is asking for the public’s input in determining the plan’s direction.
“Development of the 2040 Plan is essential to ensuring that regionally significant improvement projects are identified, prioritized, and moved forward for application of federal and local funding,” according to CAMPO’s Fall 2013 Fact Sheet. “The regional approach provides the opportunity to address shared needs, goals, solutions, and most importantly a shared vision for our transportation system.”
CAMPO is presently collecting information and public input on general transportation needs in the region and on the measures that will be used to evaluate alternative scenarios to address those needs.
“The truth is we have grown, people want to live here, and people that come here, they want to stay here,” Texas Sen. Kirk Watson said in a CAMPO online video. “We are way behind where we need to be, but we’re doing some great things. We just have to keep up that momentum.”
CAMPO is in the process of creating a vision and a set of goals for the 2040 Plan. Some information the Transportation Policy Board will consider when deciding the plan’s direction is the more than 1,900 responses to a survey CAMPO opened to the public for more than two months to gauge the effectiveness of the vision and goals of the previous plan.
According to the survey results, 60 percent of the respondents felt the vision from the 2035 Plan was “very appropriate,” according to the CAMPO Connection document. The top three goals in the 2035 Plan that respondents felt were most appropriate included, system preservation, connectivity and the economy. The 2035 Plan counted on a 3.25 million population for its then-five county area.
CAMPO area residents interested in participating in the process of creating the vision and set of goals for the 2040 Plan are invited to set up a “Mobile Meeting,” participate in the idea sharing site or by sending comments to the organization directly.
Packages of materials, called Mobile Meetings, were created to facilitate the dissemination of the plan’s information, generate ideas and receive feedback by a CAMPO representative or public volunteer at community groups that are already meeting.
CAMPO also launched an idea-sharing site, www.campo.mindmixer.com, which allows interaction in an online dialog. Site visitors will be able to use maps to illustrate transportation needs and preferences, and take part in community discussions in real time.
“To ensure members of the community are involved in the Plan, CAMPO is taking a dynamic approach of using a mixture of innovative and traditional tools to make participation easier and outreach broader,” according to CAMPO’s Fact Sheet.
CAMPO’s Transportation Policy Board is scheduled to meet at 6 p.m. Nov. 18 at the Joe C. Thompson Conference Center at the UT campus in Austin.
