Project Connect plans to explore above-, below-ground options for East Riverside/Pleasant Valley Transit Center

The transit center at the East Riverside Drive and South Pleasant Valley Road intersection could still be above or below ground as the Austin Transit Partnership plans to move forward with both options.

The Austin Transit Partnership, the government corporation overseeing Project Connect designs, held a community design workshop to discuss the two options. Peter Mullan, the Austin Transit Partnership’s chief of architecture and urban design, said that it is important to involve the community, particularly for complicated designs such as East Riverside and South Pleasant Valley.

“We try to lay out for ourselves and for the community a series of criteria that are most important,” Mullan said during the ATP board meeting Oct. 20. “This is not just a one issue problem to solve. There are a whole series of different criteria that we have to balance.”

The station would serve both the MetroRail Blue Line, which would run from downtown to the airport, and the MetroRapid Pleasant Valley bus line, which would run from the Mueller neighborhood to the Goodnight Ranch neighborhood.

Mullan said the conversations during the community design workshop helped to highlight the tradeoffs that each design presents.

Putting the transit center below ground would allow for better traffic flow and ensure pedestrians, bicyclists and cars do not have to cross a rail line, according to ATP documents. However, the bus and rail lines would not be at the same level, and it would be a higher cost.

An above-ground station would create a more seamless transfer between the MetroRail Blue Line and MetroRapid bus line and offer public space opportunities, according to the documents. It would also likely slow traffic.

“The light rail is not very agile as a piece of infrastructure. It wants to be flat. It wants to be straight,” Mullan said. “Once you put it in, it's hard to move it. We want to get that right, so there are two different strategies for how to do that.”