On January 19, 2018, shortly before 10 a.m., Robin Lafleur exited Texas Highway 290 at South First Street, as she did every morning on her way to work at Austin Habitat for Humanity. It was a cold, cloudy morning but Lafleur was in a good mood. She finally felt settled in her new home, which she’d bought less than a year before in Cedar Park, a suburb northwest of Austin. It was a Friday and she had happy hour plans with friends after work, so she was wearing one of her favorite outfits—maroon jeggings and a new mauve sweater with matching boots.
She doesn’t remember much about what happened next. As she merged onto the frontage road, a car stopped abruptly in front of her. She slammed into it. When she woke up, she was in a hospital gown at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center—nurses had cut her clothes off her body to take a CT scan. The concussion she suffered kept her out of work for more than three months. “I was told that to heal, I needed to sit in a quiet room and let the time go by,” she says. “It was horrific because the days went by so slowly.”
Before she moved, Lafleur had been renting an apartment less than 10 minutes from her office, but she wanted to own a home in the city where she grew up. She soon realized her nonprofit salary wouldn’t get her very far. If you can’t afford to buy in Austin, Lafleur says, “You’re left up a creek without a paddle. Or you use that paddle and you travel to Cedar Park.”
As the price of housing in Austin has skyrocketed, low- and middle-income people like Lafleur have left the city in droves, seeking cheaper housing in the suburbs strung along Interstate 35—Round Rock and Pflugerville to the north, Buda and Kyle to the south, all of which have at least doubled or tripled in population since 2000. After she closed on her house, Lafleur joined the thousands of other people who crowd I-35 every day to get home, sitting in traffic for nearly 90 minutes to travel 25 miles. “At this point, driving on 35, which I still do every day, it’s a very, very stressful and anxiety-causing event,” she says.
The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) wants to fix Lafleur’s commute. In early 2020, after nearly three decades of planning, discussion, and community input, the Texas Transportation Commission, which oversees TxDOT, voted to allocate $7.5 billion to the I-35 Capital Express Project, which includes plans to expand an 8-mile segment of I-35 through central Austin.
The stretch of I-35 that passes through downtown Austin is both the most congested stretch of highway in the state and the most dangerous roadway in the city—1 in 4 traffic fatalities in Austin occur on the highway or its frontage roads. The goal of the expansion, says Susan Fraser, the program manager for the I-35 project, is to make the highway safer and more efficient for the more than 200,000 vehicles that use it every day. TxDOT plans to do that by adding managed lanes, restricted
