It's precisely because the federal bank window is closing that, after a decade and a half of studies and hearings and campaigns and retreats, light rail is moving toward Austin with a mad, lurching rush. The Red/Green line was first formally proposed on Oct. 8; by Nov. 8, both the Cap Met board and the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO) board -- the latter being the final arbiter of Central Texas transportation decisions -- will have decided whether to accept it.
What that means is this: If you don't want light rail at all, you'll get your chance to say so at the ballot box. If you want rail, and you want it on the Red/Green line first, but have concerns about, say, the impact of construction on local businesses, you'll have months of engineering and environmental study -- as prescribed by federal law -- to voice your concerns after Nov. 8. But if your qualms lie in the middle -- you want rail transit, but you want it somewhere else or in some other way first -- you have less than three weeks to turn the tide.
If that describes you, you're not alone -- the Cap Met recommendation has plenty of detractors already, and its acceptance by CAMPO, in particular, is not going to be routine business. What follows are the details of the proposal and some of the big issues it raises.
A Patchwork Process
The Red/Green line is so named because it combines portions of two of the color-coded potential alignments Capital Metro has advanced since 1997. The full Red Line runs along the old Austin and Northwestern railway tracks, which basically follow U.S. 183 (with some significant detours around that highway's interchange with MoPac) through the Northwest Corridor, and then follow Airport Boulevard into and through East Austin. The Green Line, by contrast, includes no railroad right-of-way; it's an on-street alignment that, in the staff recommendation, would run down Lamar, then Guadalupe, then Colorado into the Warehouse District, and then across the river and down South Congress all the way to Slaughter Lane.
The third color you need to remember is Orange -- the line that would run crosstown on Fourth Street, then through the East Austin railyards past Plaza Saltillo to Pleasant Valley, then across the river, along Riverside Drive, and out to Bergstrom. There used to be a fourth line, the Blue Line, running down the MoPac tracks; Cap Met has abandoned plans for light rail on that line, though it still remains the focus of plans for commuter rail from Georgetown through Austin to San Antonio. (To refresh your memory: Commuter rail is station-to-station, like Amtrak; light-rail is local transit, like a bus.)
Over the past few months, Capital Metro and its consulting team, led by Parsons Brinckerhoff, has studied each of these alignments, in various permutations, to estimate its ridership and costs. To few people's surprise, the Red/Green alignment, connecting the high-growth Northwest Corridor with downtown, the Capitol, and UT, had by far the highest estimated ridership potential: nearly 46,000 daily boardings in 2007. It was also the most expensive, originally coming in at closer to nearly $1 billion -- although the Orange Line was more expensive per mile, largely because of the need to build a new bridge across the river, since Longhorn Dam cannot accommodate a train.
Neither can the Congress Avenue bridge, which brings us to this strange thing called bus rapid transit, or BRT. Reconstructing the bridge, or building a new bridge, is an option, but there are a few hundred thousand bats in the way; a major construction project would imperil downtown Austin's biggest tourist attraction. So for now, the train will stop north of the river, which is what some South Congress business owners, fearing that construction would likewise imperil them, wanted from the beginning. Instead, a BRT system -- which uses rubber-tired buses but runs them in separate infrastructure, with platforms and stations just like light rail -- was put in place for the south end of the Green Line plan, connecting to the trains at a Fourth and Colorado transfer point.
Truth be told, even aside from the bridge and the bats, BRT on South Congress has attractive qualities -- by using it, the cost-per-mile of the Red/Green alignment was brought down to $33.5 million, below not only the Orange but also the full Red Line, which had in past years been Cap Met's #1 choice for cost reasons. (The new estimates, however, presume that all the Red Line track will need to be replaced.) And the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is gung-ho about BRT. But South Austinites, and citizen watchdogs from throughout the city, are complaining loudly about the Southside getting second-class service, and Cap Met has already gone back to run the numbers for getting rail across the river.
Because Parsons and Cap Met studied each alignment as if it were the first and only one, it's impossible to say, for example, what ridership would be on the Orange Line if it were an extension of a current light-rail system. For that reason, the phasing of the system after the Red/Green Line (projected to open in 2007) is still pretty arbitrary.
It's inevitable that the "Inner Orange Line" -- the Fourth Street connector to Pleasant Valley -- would come next, in 2008. After that could come either the Outer Red Line, from Howard Lane north to Leander, or the full Orange Line out to Bergstrom; the first choice could also be done in 2008, but the latter might not be complete until 2015. The Inner Red Line through East Austin would be last, in 2016 or 2017.
Political Implications
And this all assumes that Capital Metro makes assiduous use of innovative financing and revenue bonds to leverage its future tax and farebox income and speed the project up. (It does not assume, the authority takes pains to point out, that Cap Met will raise its sales tax rate.) If the authority instead aims to pay as it goes, along with whatever federal funds are forthcoming (the plan assumes a 50% match), this sucker may drag well past 2020 to finish.
That's a long time from now, and in its presentation of these phases, Cap Met staff has included helpful hints about what sort of political decisions might move each line up in priority. For the Outer Red Line, it would help if Cedar Park rejoined and Round Rock joined Capital Metro (Leander is still in the district), or at least contributed some cash.
For the Orange Line, "conditions -- would significantly improve if the City of Austin targets this corridor for future development." Since, contrary to popular belief, an airport the size of Bergstrom does not generate a huge amount of road traffic -- about as much as a good-sized shopping mall -- dense development in Southeast Austin would be required to make an Orange Line as viable as the Green and Red.
As for the Inner Red Line, Capital Metro notes that it "needs to evolve community consensus with neighborhoods and economic development proponents." In other words, East Austin needs to get its act together. Even though redevelopment at Robert Mueller Airport and elsewhere on the Eastside is supposedly a paramount civic goal, and light rail could be an important asset toward meeting that goal, the bitter opposition of neighborhood activists such as those of El Concilio has succeeded in turning the Red Line into an amenity for the next generation, if it gets built at all.
Of course, neighborhood queasiness about light rail extends far beyond the Eastside barrio and its fears of gentrification. Crestview and Wooten, which straddle the Red Line just north of its junction with the Green, have been locked and loaded against light rail through their backyards for nearly a decade; they want the line to go around them, down U.S. 183 and North Lamar -- a change that Cap Met estimates will add $50 million to the Red/Green price tag. And neighborhoods all along the Green Line (especially south of the river) have voiced concerns about the equation of light rail with dense transit corridors and unwanted (by them) intense redevelopment.
"The typical outlook is that this could be hurtful to neighborhoods, but that doesn't have to be the case if the project is done right, with good neighborhood involvement and a proactive agency that makes and keeps commitments," says Austin Neighborhoods Council president Will Bozeman, who has long been one of Austin's most vocal advocates for light rail, but who now leads an organization whose membership is less enthusiastic. "Capital Metro needs to establish a policy here and now about how they're going to deal with neighborhoods in the process and the impacts upon them."
At this point in the Smart Growth saga, many Central Austin neighborhoods are looking at the farther reaches of the city's Desired Development Zone as a place to redirect infill pressures. That would suggest that the Red (especially north toward Leander and at Mueller) and Orange Lines might be more desirable places for Cap Met to put its initial bucks, since those zones offer far more potential for development than the already-built-out Green Line precincts. "Building transit-oriented development at Mueller or in the suburbs could balance out the demand for infill in the central city," Bozeman notes.
This presumes a fairly postmodern approach to mass transit -- looking at rail not as a way to move people, but as a way to shape growth. This is a pretty established tenet of the pro-rail community nationwide -- witness the annual Rail~Volution conference, held in Dallas last month, which had the motto "Building Livable Communities With Transit." But it would be surprising if either the CAMPO board or the FTA were willing to back an initial alignment that didn't connect to any of Austin's most popular destinations, all of which lie on the Green Line -- especially when, in the case of the Orange Line, the infrastructure costs are just as high.
Regional Ramifications
Where there might be cavil at CAMPO and in Washington -- if not at the FTA, then certainly in Congress -- is over the Cap Met plan's "Austin-centered" approach. This may sound like a non-issue, since the Austin metro area is by definition Austin-centered, but "regionalism" is a hot concept right now, and this proposal has already drawn fire for not doing enough to address the needs of Central Texas as a whole.
Most of the region, of course, lies (largely by choice) outside the Capital Metro service area, which doesn't even include all of Travis County and encompasses only small portions of Williamson County. And Cap Met's plan is coordinated with the Texas Department of Transportation's plans for high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes on all our major roadways -- sizable investments that Capital Metro would help fund. The HOVs, along with new roads like S.H. 130, are probably the most realistic solutions to the woes of suburbs that don't have or want bus service. But for now, "regionalism" appears to mostly be a code word for "commuter rail."
The position of a Georgetown-San Antonio commuter rail system -- which has become almost as imposing a mythical beast as light rail itself -- in the Cap Met plan is curious. It's there; Capital Metro supports it, agrees that it's feasible, and wants to see it move forward. But the authority is not committing to do anything to make it move forward. Indeed, the maps and data presented by Capital Metro staff on Oct. 8 do not even show a place -- presumably near Seaholm Power Plant -- where the light-rail and commuter lines would connect at a multimodal station. The agency says this was a simple oversight that will be rectified, but commuter rail proponents want more; they'd like their project to share top billing with the Red/Green Line as Cap Met's initial phase.
"I would like to see them take the lead in trying to implement commuter rail through the region, and I would like their plan to include commuter rail," says Ross Milloy, executive director of the Austin-San Antonio Corridor Council, the leading institutional proponent of commuter rail. "As a practical matter, we keep hearing from the federal government that they want regional, integrated, intermodal solutions. The efficiency and cost savings you get looking at one large, integrated system are significant, but more importantly, the political impact seems to me to be impossible to ignore. If you add commuter rail to your deal, you pick up six congressmen" in districts to the south of Austin.
The Cap Met response is that the Corridor Council's own feasibility study presumes -- as did CAMPO's official regional transportation plan -- that there will be 54 miles of light rail on the ground. "Karen Rae [Cap Met General Manager] and I can't do much about transportation between here and San Antonio when there's so much need for more integration here locally," says Capital Metro board chair Lee Walker. "I understand the impatience, but we need to bust down the walls to improve mobility here, or else none of these ideas will work."
Commuter rail might seem half-full to the Corridor Council and half-empty to Cap Met not just because the transit authority is Austin-centered, but because it has to not only plan and advocate for but actually run its rail system. Right now, the question of who will actually run commuter rail -- since it likely won't be Cap Met or its San Antonio counterpart, VIA -- remains unresolved. The Legislature in 1997 enabled a commuter-rail district, contingent on Austin, Travis County, San Antonio, and Bexar County all opting in, which has not yet happened.
Nor is it clear how a Blue Line commuter rail alignment will share the MoPac tracks with Union Pacific, which owns them and has had notorious troubles moving its own freight trains, let alone someone else's passenger trains, in a timely manner. Capital Metro has in fact offered up the Red Line for potential consideration as an alternative commuter route. And, as Cap Met points out in its Oct. 8 document as another helpful hint, there is a "need to solidify financial contributors for the entire length of the line" -- as opposed to simply Cap Met and VIA.
In the nicest possible way, the Corridor Council and Capital Metro have accused each other of exaggerating and/or minimizing the obstacles facing commuter rail. This is probably the most important field of battle for CAMPO, which has a board that includes municipal, county, and state elected officials from throughout the metro area. If anyone is going to force Cap Met to think and work in a more "regional" context, it will and should be CAMPO, the keepers and arbiters of our official regional transportation plan.
But it would be surprising if CAMPO -- which, after all, acceded without much comment five years ago to the light-rail plans of the old, discredited, and legislatively disbanded Capital Metro -- put its foot down now against light rail of any kind. That, thanks to the Legislature, is up to you; and traditionally, light rail has been boiled down to a straight yes-or-no choice. If you didn't like it, no transportation plan, ridership estimate, or glamorous redevelopment project would sway you; if you did like it, it didn't really matter where it went or how it worked, and $687 million didn't seem like too much money. Only the people in the middle could be swayed by the details.
So how important are the next few weeks in the 15-year-saga of light rail in Austin? It depends on what you think the outcome of a May or November 2000 election would be. And, on that score, food for thought: In its public opinion surveys of the last few months, Capital Metro found that over 60% of respondents said they'd vote for light rail -- but an even greater number felt it would fail at the polls anyway. 
