Traffic is the way of life in the suburbs of Austin. I’ve tried hacking downtown bus shuttles and an extremely limited train service. The default becomes my car or Uber.

There are few mass transit stations across the suburbs of Austin. It costs 10-20 bucks via Uber to get to a train station or an express bus station from the suburbs. The trains and express buses run infrequently from 6am to 7pm. Unlike most other urban metros, train stations do not reach major airports in Texas. It will cost you 30 to 60 bucks each way on Uber to catch a flight.

It’s as if a fictional character such as Boss Hogg from the TV series The Dukes of Hazzard planned out Texas to enrich himself as a county commissioner and refused to upgrade dirt roads. Suburbia has been captured by NIMBY (Not-in-my-backyard) leaders. They do compromise at the sight of the mighty dollar, especially when a large corporation offers to bring thousands of jobs to their community. What they fail to see is the lack of transportation solutions impacting a corporation’s ability to recruit workers, especially those who prefer city life. Walnut Creek (CA), Ashburn (VA), and Bellevue (WA) are nice suburbs which employ workers across mass-transit and rail-friendly regions. Miami manages to get workers from over 100 miles away thanks to Brightline. The remote suburbs of Austin are competing with these areas for jobs.

The NIMBY approach reduces economic growth in the suburbs of Texas.

Texas and America deserve something better than congested highways and Amtrak. Texas is decades behind Europe and Asia in developing high speed rail. There’s a successful public-private partnership happening in Florida with the Brightline high speed rail expanding its corridor outside Orlando and Miami. I’m rooting for Brightline to make it to Texas. For the environmentally conscious, EV owners are ok in most parts of Texas with the new supercharging stations.

If high speed trains like Brightline never make it to Texas, I’m ok with another solution. I believe in Elon Musk’s nutty vision of robo-taxis eventually taking over the transportation system with self-driving cars. I’ve tried Tesla’s competitor and it was really cool. Even Boss Hogg might oblige to the driverless taxi experience if he were reincarnated into a new version of The Dukes of Hazzard. The suburbs would become more connected to cities if the transportation experience became more frictionless. Let’s get rid of the dirt roads for a future with Robo-Taxis. 🙂