Most of this is due to extremely poor street and highway planning, as well as construction that has lagged far behind population growth since at least the 1980's. Austin's streets were adequate for when it was a small town of about 100,000 until about that point (I was born here, and I'm still used to thinking of Austin as a small town), and when I was first learning to drive, the whole driving culture here was completely different from what it is now, and collisions were so rare they almost always got some sort of mention in the news.

The problem now is that we now have almost 8-10 times as many people trying to use the same streets and highways, for the most part, and a lot of those people are relative newcomers from other areas of the country, so there's a lot more diversity and variation in driving styles, and some of the "imported" driving behaviors are a dangerous combination of aggressive, impatient, and inattentive that is bad enough in an environment of perfectly designed streets, highways, and intersections. When you combine that with death-trap intersections like the northbound "ramp" from the 183/Lamar intersection onto North Lamar that merges right at a T intersection with Powell Lane (whose brilliant idea that was, I'll never know), it's no wonder we have a bad reputation for unsafe traffic. And it would be appallingly expensive to re-engineer it all to a consistent standard and fix 20+ years of band-aid fixes and haphazard designs and various engineers' pet schemes that are incompatible with each other, even if we didn't have to keep upgrading highways far beyond their original planned capacity.

Most of this will settle down as soon as the city stops growing at the insane rate it currently is. But that's going to be a while, apparently we're a popular place to live these days. (Ask anyone who has any notion of buying a house here that's actually *in* Austin, let alone actually close to the center of town.)

Yeah. This is one of the most oddly-designed cities I've ever set a foot in.

I routinely find myself going, "Hey, holy crap! Where did that lane full of cars come from that wasn't there ten seconds ago?" or "Uh, shouldn't there have been a sign mentioning that all the lanes of the frontage road shunt straight onto the Interstate here (a scooter-driving friend found herself very abruptly on the highway for that reason)?"

I've gotten used to some of the worst ones because I drive them often, but I'm still kind of apprehensive when I drive somewhere new in town. Last weekend I spent fifteen minutes trying to get to an apartment complex at 183 and 35 because the road wasn't marked, none of the nearby streets went through, and the exit options were to either get off five streets before the turn or ten feet after it...I had to drive around in almost a spiral, getting closer and closer, because even retracing my steps was too confusing and poorly signed. I'm sure that a good half the people whipping across my lane of traffic to an exit are acting in the desperation that the exit will vanish, Brigadoon-like into the mists for another hundred years, if they don't get to it on this go-round instead of coming back for it.

Oh, I'm with you on that one. I think any major reconfiguration of Austin's major roadways would throw the city into absolute misery and chaos. Like SXSW that never goes away.

Man I agree. Every time I try to go to a 'new' place I haven't been before I get so frustrated. Maps don't even help when the streets don't have signs, or the same street has three different names, or it suddenly turns into a one-way street, or doesn't intersect a cross-street. Plus the roads are bumpy as hell and some of the elevation changes are rather abrupt.

Those 5-way intersections are awesome!

Fire the "we can make Austin grow the way we want it to" city managers of the early 80's, and sit the rest of the council down and tell them that the city is going to grow to the size of San Antonio or Houston over the next few decades, and they can either get in on the ground floor and put a comprehensive traffic and growth plan in place then and there, or spend those decades playing an endless game of catch-up.

(The city really did have this insane idea that it could limit growth and force new construction to be done in the areas it wanted it to be in, and keep it out of other areas, and still seems to be desperately holding onto that idea even now. So instead of actually managing the city with growth in mind, they've more or less been in a state of denial about the demands that growth is placing on the city, so we fall farther and farther behind on basic infrastructure that's been needing to be upgraded for longer than most people have been living here.)

It really didn't help when large numbers of people displaced by Katrina (and, to a lesser extent, Rita) moved into east and central Texas and ended up staying here. The traffic in Austin got noticeably worse during and after the Katrina evacuation .. and just failed to get better again afterward, because a lot of people moved here from there and stayed. That growth spike in particular really destabilized a lot of things around here.

lol i'd say the same for houston. but maybe that's just cause i'm used to it.

Did you let that happen just to make a point? :)

That happened to me on Easter Sunday, and to my co-worker last week.