Rashed Islam

What we talked about

He landed on the runway he would later redevelop

He arrived in Austin in 1995 to do a master's degree at UT, and he landed at the municipal airport, because in 1995 that was still where you landed. He notes, almost in passing, that the airport was a huge asset before it moved out to Bergstrom, but that it also disconnected the neighborhoods around it.

He then spent roughly twenty years working on the redevelopment of that airport into Mueller.

He does not make anything of the symmetry. It is worth making something of it. An immigrant graduate student steps off a plane onto a runway, and two decades later that runway is a neighborhood where a kid can ride a bike to the grocery store, and he is one of the engineers who made the connections work.

Water or traffic

He is from Bangladesh, and he explains his career choice as a choice between the country's two defining infrastructure problems. Bangladesh is a big delta with a great many rivers, so water resources is a major field, and his father is a civil engineer in water resources. The other problem is what happens to traffic as communities grow.

He picked transportation because he could see congestion becoming an issue down the road. He came to UT to study it, specialized in transportation, and worked under professors he still names three decades later.

What Austin traffic looked like before the boom

In the mid nineties there were signs of congestion but the community was still small: a university town with a legislature in it. There was some technology industry but nothing like what came. Then the boom arrived and things grew very fast, and that brought the transportation problems the city has been trying to catch up with ever since.

He is even-handed about the politics of it. Alongside the growth there was a strand of anti-growth sentiment, the don't build it and they won't come argument. His view is that communities evolve through those arguments rather than around them.

The Dallas experiment

What kept him here is the thing he says plainly and without hedging: he came from another part of the world, and the community embraced him. That was the main attraction to stay.

He tested it. An opportunity took him to Dallas for a brief stint and he did not enjoy it, did not feel the connection, did not feel the aura Austin has. He drove back every weekend to see friends, and when a chance came to return he moved as fast as he could. He says that is when he realized how much he loved the town.

Orange cone town

On the present moment he is upbeat in a way that will surprise anyone stuck on a frontage road. If you are visiting you may find it painful, because it is an orange cone town right now. But the construction is the point. For a long time the struggle was funding, while growth taxed a system that had not been built for it.

What is happening now, in his account: I-35 is being rebuilt to reconnect communities and add safer mobility options. The city's corridor program is rebuilding major corridors for multiple modes at once. Project Connect is moving forward. Pedestrian and bicycle facilities and transit are being added while still accommodating the single occupant vehicle, which he is candid remains the predominant mode.

His honest caveat is the best line in the episode about his own field. You will probably never mitigate congestion. You can manage it better.

And he is careful to give the credit away, twice, to the transportation professionals and the community leaders who pushed for funding, noting that he may not personally get to experience all of it. This is generational infrastructure and he talks about it that way.

Robotaxis, and what actually changes

Asked whether Austin will ever move away from the car, his answer is no, and also yes. There will still be a vehicle. It may be a robotaxi or a fully automated vehicle, but the mode persists. What changes is ownership, and the format.

He is measured rather than evangelical. He has driven cars with full self-driving. The technology improves with more data and more supporting infrastructure, and the interesting questions are how it gets managed, how the technology integrates, and how policy adapts. He notes testing already happening with freight.

Why MoPac behaves the way it does

This is the part to clip for anyone who has ever sat on MoPac wondering what is wrong with everybody.

Every driver brings different behavior. Some are on their phones, some are driving slow. When something happens, someone cuts someone off, the speed impact propagates backwards and creates congestion and safety problems downstream. Cars currently keep a large gap because a human needs one.

With vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, cars can hold consistent headways, signal an intention to exit or change lanes to the vehicles around them, and stop triggering the braking cascades that eat capacity. Shrink the gaps safely and the road you already own carries more traffic.

The insight underneath it is that a great deal of Austin congestion is not a shortage of pavement. It is variance in human behavior.

Why Mueller works

He describes Mueller as deliberate, not lucky. The city, the planners and the developer set out to build somewhere you could live, work and play, and the airport site was an opportunity to repair the disconnection it had caused for the surrounding neighborhoods.

Concretely: retail you can reach, employment on site, and pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure good enough that taking a bike to the grocery store is a normal choice. He mentions that early plans included bringing rail through Berkman Drive.

His professional summary of why it earned its recognition is the integration of land use and transportation. Because the multimodal system is there, you can add density and still manage the demand. Which is, in one sentence, the argument for building the transportation first.

The point of saving fifteen minutes

The most affecting stretch of the interview belongs to Aidan, who describes his mother's commute in New York climbing to four hours a day once traffic returned after the pandemic, and what those hours cost a family. His framing is that when you design a place intentionally, you give people time back, and time is the most precious resource there is.

Rashed takes the point and makes it operational. Think about a parent who has to pick a child up from daycare. If you are in congestion you are late. If there is an express lane you have the option to be on time. It is all about options, and the options are not only on the road: the pandemic showed that people can shift a meeting or take it remotely and reshape their own travel patterns.

That's my lane

On why he gives so much time to community organizations, he says the boards he has put his heart and soul into have given him considerably more back. Involvement is not only giving, it is how you learn about the place you live.

Then he draws the boundary, with a pun he may not have intended: he is a transportation professional, so that is his lane. But a community needs many other things to get better, and that is how he started getting involved beyond his own field, beginning with the Bangladesh Association.

Worth noting: when Aidan reaches for the name and says Bengali community, Rashed corrects him gently and accurately to Bangladesh Association. Keep that in the cut.