With a 13-1 vote, the Central Corridor Advisory Group approved June 13 the recommendation of a 9.5-mile urban rail route that would serve East Riverside Drive to Austin Community College's Highland campus.
This group, which has been advising Mayor Lee Leffingwell for the past year on the project, is proposing a route with 16 stations with destinations near the Hancock Center, The University of Texas campus on San Jacinto Boulevard, Capital Complex and the downtown core. The project proposes building a new bridge across Lady Bird Lake to connect Trinity Street with East Riverside.
Leffingwell said mobility is the region's greatest problem that affects job creation, economic development and the city's quality of life.
"This project will go a long way to being part of mass transit system, which in turn is also part of the strategic mobility plan for the entire city of Austin," he said. "This segment alone will take about 10,000 cars off the road every weekday It's essential to the community to take this step."
The project is part of the regional transit plan Project Connect. Urban rail would run in the Central Corridor and connect eventually to other forms of transit, including Capital Metro's MetroRail and the proposed regional Lone Star Rail project. The city of Austin would serve as the owner of the project while Capital Metro would serve of the operator.
At an estimated cost of $1.38 billion, the city would seek funding from the Federal Transit Administration for about half with the other half coming from the sale of bonds. Voters could decide on a rail-road bond package Nov. 4. City Council is still discussing road projects that could be included.
The Capital Metro board of directors will vote on the recommendation June 23 while Austin City Council will take it up June 26.
Plan opposition
The lone dissenting CCAG vote came from Julie Montgomery—a member of grassroots organization Austinites for Urban Rail Action. She said she appreciated the amendment to the recommendation made by Martha Smiley that would require having an identifiable, secure source of funding.
"That is a wonderful thing we say we'll do, but without being able to verify and see the methodology that was used to produce both the population and ridership estimates for the future, we can't really be sure of the numbers we have or how expensive this system is going to be to operate," she said.
Montgomery said she fears the plan will not garner public support.
"Folks are suffering under the property taxes," she said. "This plan both costs a lot and is risky. If it were one or the other, I think we could do it."
Other opposing views include those of Lyndon Henry, a former Capital Metro board vice chairman who would rather see rail run along the North Lamar Boulevard and Guadalupe Street. Henry said UT's plan for rail on San Jacinto would bolster its development plans on the east side.
"The West Campus is where the people are and the third highest residential entity in Texas, where the heavy travel flow is and where most activity is clustered," he said.
AURA member Marcos Denton said he questioned the methodology that went into recommendation the Highland-East Riverside route instead of the Guadalupe-Lamar corridor.
"It's going to block indefinitely our most productive corridor, which is Guadalupe-Lamar," he said. "A second low-ridership, high-cost line, which this [recommendation] is and will be, is going to drain the political capital that we're going to need for future expansions throughout the system. You can't burn that up."
Groups supporting the project
Beth Ann Ray, vice president of regional infrastructure at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber's transportation committee supports the project because the process was based on analyzing data, she said. This week the chamber visited with officials from the FTA, U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration on a trip to Washington, D.C.
"While they're not going to go on the record or say anything today, there were a lot of heads nodding in that room and at least acknowledging that the things we were sharing with them very much matched a lot of the vision for this administration," Ray said.
Jeb Boyt, a board member from the Alliance for Public Transportation, read a resolution from organization supporting the proposed project. The main tenants of the resolution indicate support because of its affect on regional mobility by serving UT, the Capitol Complex and the future medical school as well as improving mobility between East Riverside and ACC Highland.
Larry Graham, board chairman of the Downtown Austin Alliance, which is a group of downtown property owners, said the DAA also endorses the project because of the growth that will occur in the corridor. This includes the construction of the Dell Medical School—which will create 7,000 new jobs in the northeast portion of downtown—of 2,000 housing units and of 1,000,000 square feet of office space.
"In the future this corridor will look a lot different than it does today," Graham said.
For more information, visit www.projectconnect.com.