More questions than answers seemed to arise during a presentation to the countywide transportation committee earlier this month regarding traffic data compiled on major thoroughfares around Kendall County and the city of Boerne.
After the Kendall County commissioners sprung for a yearlong software subscription to help the transportation committee better understand traffic woes in the county, Kendall County, Boerne and Fair Oaks Transportation Committee member Steve Sharma presented information using the Streetlight Data software to show which roads are seeing the highest traffic volumes.
Streetlight Data is a company that uses GPS tracking to determine entry, stopping and exit points of vehicles moving through parameters set by a user.
“We use our vast location data and data science resources to shed light on transportation behavior and make it available to decision makers so they can make transportation better,” the company’s website states.
Transportation committee Co-chair Don Durden suggested the committee establish a subcommittee to further review the data pulled by Sharma for “those who want to delve into this in more detail to satisfy yourself about the potential for travel demand.”
“Streetlight is a very powerful tool that sometimes leads to as many questions as it does answers,” Durden warned before Sharma began his presentation. “And so, we can chase the rabbit around the room a lot or we can identify where the rabbit is and put a group on it.”
Sharma began his presentation by clarifying he was using 2019 traffic counts, which was a decision agreed upon by the committee earlier this year after it was decided the COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant and disproportionate drop in traffic. Sharma’s data supported this decision as he said there was a roughly 15 percent drop in traffic counts from 2019 to 2020.
Sharma found there were about 17,000 vehicles traveling through the Main Street and Herff Road intersection during the busiest traffic day in 2019 and more than 11,000 vehicles traveling on Highway 46 near Ammann Road.
Sharma then went into the origin-destination data, where he said 88 percent of vehicles heading east from Comfort or beyond did not stop in downtown Boerne but continued east on Interstate 10.
Another origin gate – meaning a point on the Streetlight Data map Sharma placed counting cars entering the city – was placed just east of Farm-to-Market Road 3351, or Ralph Fair Road, on Highway 46. Sharma said while the traffic counts showed 4,000 vehicles passing through Bergheim on the highest traffic day, he noted this data was clearly incorrect as other data already shows a much higher count. However, he noted 15 percent of the traffic entering the county at this point is heading south on FM 3351, 5 percent is turning left onto Herff Road, 12 percent is turning left on to Main Street, roughly 13 percent is heading westbound on Interstate 10 toward Comfort and only 1 percent is stopping in downtown Boerne.
While the data seems to show both the interstate and state highway are being used as to navigate through Boerne to reach a different destination, the committee members questioned what percentage of these vehicles were commercial trucks. Further, it became unclear if the number of vehicles counted as stopping in Boerne included people arriving home as each street or neighborhood off the major thoroughfares would have to be identified as a destination gate.
In all, the Streetlight data seemed to do little in the way of answering questions as the data seemed only to answer highly specific questions, leaving unaccounted percentages of traffic coming through major gateways into the county. Sharma said he didn’t have destinations set up at every road in town feeding off the state highway, so the numbers weren’t going to sum up, which several of the committee members were trying to figure out.
While truck counts were not able to be exacted at the meeting, Sharma said there simply didn’t appear to be a lot of truck traffic, even though it “may be perceived that way.” He estimated there may be about 300 trucks moving through downtown Boerne in a day outside of local deliveries, which he said wasn’t excessive at all. This was something committee member Bitsy Pratt said was observable in just walking the city.
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