County Sees Upswing in Vehicle Registrations
There are 300,000 new cars on the road since 2002, according to Travis County tax officials. Photo courtesy Flickr.com/photos/kirkhAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The City of Austin says vehicle registrations are surging, with the number of cars registered in Travis County jumping by nearly half in the last decade. This 47 percent increase between 2002 and 2012 sounds pretty dramatic. That’s 300,000 new cars on the road, from 645,000 to 945,000. To try and make sense of these numbers, KUT’s Wells Dunbar spoke with Ben Wear of the Austin American-Statesman.
Wear:
If you look at the numbers that the city put out which come from the county, which keeps track of registered vehicles, they sort of jump up and down from year to year. I guess the best thing I can say is there’s some sort of discrepancy there.
What the city puts out there is that the road network is essentially built out and therefore, we need to go to alternative forms of transportation whether that’s urban rail, bicycle lanes [and] making it a more walkable community. But there are things that can be done with the road network.
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