Takeaways from the 2025 Movability Summit in Austin

This past week, Movability, Central Texas’ transportation management association (TMA), hosted a gathering of business leaders, policy experts, and transit advocates at its Annual Summit to discuss Austin’s transportation future. Our Director of Product Partnerships, Ruth Miller, attended to speak about employer pass programs, and shares these takeaways from the event.

Crisis/Opportunity: Austin’s Transportation Moment

While many would argue that the past decade has already been a busy development period in the Texas capital, the next decade will be even bigger – the region will invest over $25 billion in transportation capital projects over the next ten years. This includes rebuilding and expanding eight miles of I-35 through the center of Austin and finally bringing light rail to downtown. For a community already accustomed to permanent construction, local leaders are bracing for massive travel disruptions.

When trying to start a new habit, behavior scientists recommend looking for natural breaks to old ones. This is why colleges often prevent freshmen from parking cars on campus: when students start school without a car, they build their new habits around transit. The same logic moves employers to give new employees free transit passes. Transit advocates in Austin are looking at the upcoming decade of highway turmoil and seeing a similar opportunity to win commuters over to transit. If the region can make transit more reliable than driving now, they can potentially keep those converts beyond the construction boom. The Texan love of cars is strong, but hopefully Austin’s love for its friendly, weird, and walkable communities is stronger. 

Long Term Thinking and the National Zoning Atlas

Keynote speaker and UT alum Sara Bronin opened the event by sharing her work with zoning. Zoning and transportation are inextricably linked: smaller lots and mixed uses make transit cheaper and easier. But these functions are managed separately, with cities controlling zoning and major roads being planned and managed at the state level. Zoning is also a much slower process, taking years or even decades to manifest, so it was a thoughtful choice to begin the day with a long view. 

Sara first spoke of her work with the City of Hartford, which boldly doesn’t accept public comment on developer proposals. To anyone that’s been to a tense neighborhood meeting about a housing development, this idea is pretty shocking. But Sara framed this policy as one of putting community input upfront. Holding thorough public engagement processes to create the local codes, developers only have to follow these citizen-led rules and then their proposals can be handled by city staff as a simple administrative review. Fewer meetings and last-minute changes mean less uncertainty, faster development times, and lower costs, which all address our national housing shortage.

Sara also shared her work with the National Zoning Atlas. Every municipality in the country is responsible for its own zoning, and while many places choose not to use zoning, thousands do, and they all make up their own codes full of confusing exceptions and tangled maps. Adding a new overlay or tweaking an allowable use often only requires a simple majority in an appointed planning or zoning commission, so you can imagine how hard it is for a developer to learn a new local system and get to work. The team at the National Zoning Atlas has reviewed 925,000 pages of zoning codes, with many more to go. They’re creating a single digital atlas, which allows researchers to explore trends and common barriers.

If Only It Was That Easy: Commute Incentive Edition

Sometimes it feels like there are more people trying to shift commuter behavior than effective ideas for how to do it. For all the PhD-level behavioral economists, sticky rewards apps, and clever new commute incentives, there hasn’t yet been that breakthrough idea that shifts large swathes of commuters into transit, carpool, or biking. Marginal gains are of course valuable, and it’s important to normalize sustainable commutes and drive the conversation. But if changing travel behavior was as easy as a new app, the conversation around transportation demand management would be very different. 

Refreshingly, Movability assembled an impressive suite of panels and attendees ready to address this issue head on. We were reminded that good infrastructure sells itself; there’s no app incentivizing driving, people do it because there’s an entire network of roads, cars, and information that makes it easy. When cities are able to build good networks for transit or bikes, people might switch faster with guided bike rides, signage, and promotions (whatever addresses their specific concerns), but the switch happens organically, too.

We were also reminded that all too often transportation is just the most visible arena in which a broader social issue presents itself. A local program incentivized carpool matching, and collected data on the specific individuals with whom the commuters carpooled. In both El Paso and Austin, as seen elsewhere, participants tended to commute with people they were already connected with, if only loosely. In El Paso, a well-established community with long-time residents and deep family networks, participants averaged seven carpool partners each. In Austin, where residents tend to have moved in more recently, participants averaged only three partners. In effect, carpool matching is a lagging indicator of social connectedness. No app, let alone a carpool matching app, is going to overcome our increasing community isolation.

While there’s no silver bullet for changing commuter habits, gatherings like the Movability Summit show that Central Texas has the people, ideas, and momentum needed to make progress. With major infrastructure investments underway, transportation leaders have a chance to turn a period of transition into a catalyst for better transit habits.