281 Super Street - the After Study!
The US 281 EIS Team thought this article, which was originally published by the Alamo RMA on the mysanantonio.com blog, would be of interest to you:
Part of the US 281 Super Street process was an analysis before the project was undertaken, to gather "real world" statistics about travel time, travel speed and traffic volume on US 281, and an "after study" to determine if the Super Street was functioning as planned, based on all the modeling done prior to construction starting.
We have all experienced the good (and the not so good) of the first Super Street in Texas, and if you look at our Facebook page that was up during construction - the reviews seemed to be mixed. The 281 Super Street is loved when traffic is flowing, but when there was a problem with a traffic signal - everything came to a screeching halt - no pun intended.
But aside from the personal stories about the Super Street on 281 to know how the road is working we needed hard numbers - what the travel speeds had become in the morning and evening rush hour, and how many people were actually using the roadway on a daily basis.
And like the saying goes - timing is everything - this is especially true when doing traffic volume collection. You don't want to have counts done while school is out of session or right before or after a holiday - and you only really want to collect traffic volume and speed data on Tuesday-Thursday as Mondays and Fridays can be typical in being atypical days for people, at least according to the engineers.
So what did we find when all of the above was taken into account? How is the 281 Super Street really working?
From a travel time standpoint, in the morning we met the goal for the project, which was to reduce travel time from Bulverde Road to Loop 1604 to under 20 minutes. In the evening, where the goal was to reduce the travel time to close to 12 minutes, we are at almost 13 minutes - which is still faster than what we were experiencing before the Super Street was put into place.
But why didn't we hit the evening travel time goal? Well, part of the reason for that is that more people are actually using US 281 today than we saw a year ago.
With between a 5% to 10% increase in traffic in one year, according to the engineers, we are seeing latent demand come back to US 281 - that is, people who were using other routes to avoid the traffic on US 281, are now returning and using US 281 as the drive has become easier.
So in a nutshell, the 281 Super Street is performing as hoped - now that's not to say it hasn't had some hiccups along the way - and there still could be rough patches ahead. As more people return to the US 281 corridor, the travel times may slowly start to creep back up, and the travel speeds may start to decrease again. Hopefully, that is a few years away, and the 281 Super Street continues to help address the congestion in this area until the long-term solution can be environmentally cleared.
The 281 Super Street is not the end all and be all solution for US 281 - that is still being evaluated under the ongoing US 281 Environmental Impact Statement - and you can find more out about that study - and the alternatives under consideration by visiting our website at www.411on281.com/US281EIS.
And for those who drive the US 281 Super Street on a daily basis, thank you for your patience as we built this project. We look forward to bringing more relief to this corridor, and other corridors in our community in the near future.
