• February 9, 2023
• Infrastructure

Recent federal funding opportunities such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and American Rescue Plan Act provided a path for cities and municipalities to swiftly implement infrastructural upgrades that had been planned over the past several years. As local governments continue outlining future development goals and organizing these through the creation of long-term strategic plans, they can identify ways these opportunities can immediately plug into their proposed approaches and solutions for innovation and growth. Embedding smart technology through sensors and artificial intelligence provides a way to digitally track upgrades, increase communication between departments, and ensure supervision of ground conditions for real-time adjustments.

Austin, Texas has seen an immense population boom in recent years, expanding to over 1 million residents in 2023 with a growth rate of over 4 percent in the past three years. For the past decade, it has consistently ranked as the fastest-growing city by population in the entire United States. Part of the city’s challenge in accommodating so many new individuals is providing efficient and innovative methods of transiting the city’s 300 mile span. Through a combination of artificial intelligence, novel sensory technology, and strategic implementation of available federal funding opportunities, local innovation and mobility officers are hoping to both immediately improve the ways citizens experience commuting on a daily level and rethink transitory infrastructure on a major scale. The city of Austin provides an example of how to combine a strategic framework with innovative technology and available funding opportunities for other mobility departments hoping to modernize.

The Austin city council adopted the Austin Strategic Mobility Plan (ASMP) in 2019 as part of the city’s greater Imagine Austin Comprehensive Plan so that transportation planners, innovation officers, sustainability managers, and various other departments could combine efforts for a unified and tactical approach towards network development and growth. At its core, the ASMP offers a “comprehensive multimodal transportation plan for the future of [Austin’s] transportation network” through a three pronged approach of safety, accessibility, and inclusivity. Most recently, the City Council passed an amendment in 2022 to encompass a more rigorous approach towards improving infrastructure in relation to climate resiliency, prioritizing roadways as alternative forms of civic engagement through pedestrian adaptability, and increasing collaboration with officials and bureaus within the local and regional context during extreme weather events. 

Austin’s Chief Innovation Officer Christopher Stewart and interim Chief Innovation Officer Daniel Culotta, combined with Austin Transportation Department’s Associate Director of Smart Mobility Jason JonMichael most recently implemented the ASMP as a framework to better understand transportation corridors and increase the efficiency of daily connections. Through a combination of artificial intelligence and smart sensors, transportation engineers have the opportunity to improve light signal transitions and time them with traffic bottlenecks in order to facilitate smoother ground conditions. One of the key concerns the ASMP was designed to address is managing congestion by managing demand. In order to do so effectively, a transportation demand management strategy is being implemented to swiftly reduce impact and traffic within Austin’s transportation network, rather than other more costly and laborious methods like constructing new highway lanes.

Through the implementation of smart sensors and artificial intelligence at heavy-traffic intersections, creating a digital platform for real-time supervision and augmentation, transportation engineers and traffic center controllers can work collaboratively and immediately based on the data stream they are receiving. Having the capacity to reroute vehicles to less congested roadways and anticipate upcoming conditions allows them to alleviate daily stress on the local transportation network. These novel intelligent infrastructure solutions are due in large part to the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which provided cities with the opportunity to direct major funding towards modernization efforts. With these federal funds now available, Austin’s innovation and transportation officers sought to quickly direct these towards immediate solutions within its mobility network as well as invest them in longer term transportation efforts.

The Austin Strategic Mobility Plan emerged out of a need for a comprehensive document which could allow the city’s various departments and offices to tackle the pressing concern of collaborative transportation planning in a time of immense growth and guaranteed continuous expansion. The city plans to focus both on transportation methods at the individual level and as a multimodal system in order to manage congestion and begin to strategically approach environmental sustainability and infrastructural resiliency. The long term goal is that only 50 percent of trips will be taken by car with 50 percent by all other forms of transit by 2039, compared to the current situation with 74 percent of trips taken by car and 26 percent by other modes. Given the flexibility yet structure provided by this strategic plan, innovative network technology put into place at the city level, and current availability of federal funds for infrastructure upgrades, Austin serves as an example for other cities seeking to critically rethink their approach to transitory infrastructure.