Joseph Lawler, concluding his piece in The New Atlantis on the tradeoffs Austin faces in accommodating growth in the coming years:

Texans plan their daily commutes around what is feasible. And they rent or buy where it makes sense. There are plenty of people who would move further out and brave the traffic on an expanded I-35 if it meant a bigger and nicer house. On the other hand, many of the same people would move into a duplex near downtown and skip out on the commute altogether if that option were available and affordable.

For the most part, though, they will simply do their best given the set of constraints they find imposed on them. Texans, generally speaking, are not invested in the politics of transportation and urban planning.

Maybe they should be. Maybe they should be asked to be. In the coming years, Austin is going to add hundreds of thousands of residents. No one ever voted to have them shunted into exurbs in the Hill Country and proceed to clog up highways, but that is what is set to happen. If the people of Austin instead want them to settle in a pattern that more resembles Venice or even just Seattle, they’ll have to work quickly to reform transportation planning and land use policies to make it feasible. Otherwise, it will be left to TxDOT alone to get them where they’re going.