EDA On Traffic Congestion & Housing Markets in Colorado
Will Traffic Congestion Decrease In The Next Few Years Or Increase? Do expensive housing markets lead to extreme traffic congestion? What areas of Colorado are affected the most, if so?
I was really interested in why traffic congestion in Colorado has become so serious in certain areas over the past 20 or so years. There could be many factors as to why this is so, and one obvious reason is an overflow of people who moved here all at the same time, for the infrastructure can’t handle it. But what sub-factors into this overflow of drivers on the roadways are causing only certain areas to be worse than others?
Boulder, CO has been named the top location and housing market in the United States by SmartAsset for growth and stability. Fort Collins is in the top fourth spot, along with the Denver metro area in eighth.
When you look at this traffic data in Boulder (from the CDOT site), you can interact with the data and see those average annual daily travelers (AADT) from 2018. From interacting with it, I could see that Highway 36 has about 88,000 AADT, and more people stay on the highway transitioning onto 28th St. as opposed to branching onto the Foothills parkway; however, that merge on Arapahoe brings in a lot more AADT on the Foothills when you get to that point. There is a consistency on the Foothills Parkway up until Pearl St. when it comes to AADT, where the number plateaus around 53,000 and then lowers to 46,000 when you get past it. I’m assuming this increase is because a lot of people come in from Lafayette or live more east on Arapahoe due to lower living costs. The Foothills parkway leading further towards Longmont picks up again a lot as well in regards to travelers. This data explorer doesn’t zoom in enough to describe whether these travelers are coming north/southbound or from east/west, so I can’t exactly explain where the travelers are coming from in that sense.
But I ended up being able to download this data onto an excel spreadsheet.
I looked into multiple databases on the web to see differences in numbers over the years, but the CDOT has a lot of data on the average annual daily travelers on roadways across the state. I queried through the data provided from 1999–2017, and saw an interesting increase in numbers, but only across specific roadway codes.
This GIF delves into those routes and the number of travelers they have daily from 1999–2017. It seems that routes in Colorado which are the most popular are 002A (Colorado Boulevard), 025A(I-25), 070A(I-70), 076A(I-76), 036B (Highway 36 into Boulder/Lyons), and so on. It seems that populations dropped off after 1999, made a rise in the mid-00’s, then started to shorten again. A lot of this growth and then decline in travelers was happening along I-70, but a lot of consistent congestion was forming around Boulder County roadways.
I then decided to go into the Colorado Association of Realtors site to look deeper into Boulder County to see if there was a correlation between that increase in congestion and the housing markets of the time periods I could find data on. From the end of 2015 to the end of 2016, there was a 12.7% increase in average sales prices of a single family home in Boulder County, going from $566,099 to $637,936 in just one year. But what was even more interesting was the average condo price increased 22.0% in just one year, and the days on the market until the sale of a condo was made increased 30%.
This could be for many reasons. A very young demographic lives in Boulder County with CU being here, and a prominent enterprise area in the city of Boulder and surrounding areas. There is also a lot of development of apartments as opposed to houses, and unless you are of older age, investing in a house in Boulder isn’t the most cost-efficient if you’re planning to be more a nomadic worker/not sure if you want to settle down in such an expensive city.
All in all, this growth in days on the market and traffic congestion along Boulder County could be saying a lot about the inability for people to afford housing in the location their work requires them to travel to.
I was considering aggregating Zillow API data with the traffic data I already came up with, but after researching on Zillow I realized the market out here definitely defines Zillow more as a conversation piece (far from a primary form of advertising) and it might lead to some biases in my data.
Looking at demographics, Boulder’s industries are at a tie for first place between education and professional, scientific and technical services. 30% of Boulder is between the ages of 18–24, and only 16% are 25–34. This makes sense as to why apartment sales are high in cost.
Despite all this, Zillow’s Home Value Index rates Boulder the highest out of surrounding cities and neighborhoods.
Zillow predicts Colorado’s overall value index will raise 2% by September 2020. The value trend they show positively correlates with my previous analysis on how traffic congestion in Colorado slowed around 2011 and then raised back up.
I ended up checking the FRED for sales price indexes in Colorado from the same time frame I checked traffic congestion. Here’s what the rise in prices looks like on the graph:
I ended up combining these two datasets two see where they correlate, and where that line is drawn before they stray away from each other.
I think there might have been some outliers/misrepresented data in the years 1999–2000, but after that the two datasets positively correlate. As the cost of living goes up, so do average annual daily travelers. There seems to be a huge jump in the cost of living around 2012. If projections show that sales prices will increase 2% within the next year, I’m assuming so will the congestion on the roadways by at least 1%. It will be interesting to see when that however plateaus. I say this because fewer and fewer people will be able to afford the cost of living in Colorado, to even travel a few towns over to make their living possible and/or worth it.
