CAMPO is seeking community input to alleviate congestion and enhance safety on Parmer Lane, a vital and increasingly crowded corridor in North Austin.

WILLIAMSON COUNTY, Texas — The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO) heard input on how to improve Parmer Lane from North Austin to Cedar Park on Wednesday. 

The open house meeting is one of many steps toward paving a safer and smoother drive for the hundreds of thousands of motorists traveling the corridor. 

Michael Lopez is one of those motorists who frequently accesses the road.

“I’ve lived here for uh 15 years. I’ve worked in this area for 13 years,” Michael Lopez said as he was pumping gas on the corner of Parmer and State Highway 45. “It can get pretty crowded, and I’ve seen it just grow and grow over the years.”

CAMPO has been tracking that yearslong growth with the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). Studies conducted between 2018 and 2022 for the stretch between MoPac in Austin and Whitestone Boulevard in Cedar Park show: 

An increase in traffic, with even more traffic expected by 2025 as the population grows and more commuters are expected to travel to offices nearby.A significant amount of crashes over the years and at various intersections along the corrido, with six being fatal. 

“TxDOT and CAMPO are working together to ask the community what their needs and what their concerns are,” Doise Miers, the community outreach manager for CAMPO, said. 

Among the concerns for John Prather, who travels along Parmer Lane to get to Brushy Creek Lake Park, are traffic lights and lanes.

“The light over here by Brushy Creek will back up pretty far, and you’ll be kind of stuck and people come past you on the right side,” Prather said. “That’s not really a lane right there.”

For Lopez, it is the rush hour traffic.

“There are sometimes a few days where I have to take the toll roads to come around just to get ahead of it,” Lopez said. 

It will be years before ground is broken on any project, or even for funding to become available, but CAMPO has some ideas on what it wants to do. That includes improving traffic light signal timing and adding lanes. 

“There’s always been some sort of construction,” Prather said. “It seems like a job that’s never finished.”

Lopez said he hopes the road changes only get nicer in the years and decades to come.

“It’s got all the places that I need, and I continue to drive this,” Lopez said. “I can easily go 183 or or Mopac, but I’d go Parmer just because it’s a nice ride overall.”