RTP: Been There, Haven't Done That

Capital Metro General Manager Karen Rae (Photo By Jana Birchum)

Regardless of their feelings about transit, perhaps it would be easier for some Austinites to pretend that the November 2000 light-rail election never happened. Like it or not, Capital Metro has gone ahead with the federally mandated planning work for what it now calls the Rapid Transit Project (RTP). Ideally, this study -- in transit-ese, the "preliminary engineering/environmental impact study (PE/EIS)" -- would have been completed before anyone was asked to vote on the deal, but politics is politics.

Not that the light-rail vote was meaningless. As Cap Met General Manager Karen Rae has noted publicly, the transit authority's narrow defeat (roughly 2,000 votes) gave it "a better understanding of the community's needs and the importance of more effectively listening and responding to those needs." Whether the current RTP process -- which relies on "area teams" of community representatives in neighborhoods adjoining Cap Met's proposed starter line -- is "effective," or not, is subject to debate. Residents of rail-skeptical hot spots such as Crestview, South Congress, and the Eastside rail yard are no more disposed to cut Cap Met any slack now than they ever have been. Witness Güero's owner Rob Lippincott, organizer of the Save South Congress Association, describing rail as a "reckless folly" and its defeat last year as "a triumph of democracy."

As much as Cap Met contorts itself to be "flexible" and "responsive," we only have one transit authority -- so where RTP planning is concerned, it's (literally) either their way or the highway. A heavily publicized Cap Met workshop on rail station location and design, held Nov. 17 at the Convention Center, gave nearly 100 citizens a chance to muck about in the arcane arena of transportation system planning. (As Cap Met spokesman Ted Burton notes, the turnout was "not bad, coming on the heels of the flood," but the African-American weekly Nokoa newspaper -- no friend of light rail -- complained that no Eastsiders attended.) Attendees devoted substantial energy, in area-specific small group sessions, both to tinkering with Cap Met's tentative station locations (shown on the map), and weighing what kind of stations those should be.

The workshop moved Cap Met closer to fulfilling the third of six milestones identified in its outline for the RTP. But almost everything remains open for discussion. The first milestone, for instance, was determining a route for the starter line. This was basically done before the 2000 election: from downtown north along Guadalupe and Lamar to Howard Lane, with spurs south along South Congress to Ben White and east toward Pleasant Valley and then up to MLK. But the study currently includes many variations of this "baseline alignment" -- for example, around the restive Crestview neighborhood rather than through it -- so the make-or-break issue of where the train goes isn't really solved.

Milestone No. 2 -- deciding what kind of vehicles and technology to use -- hasn't been settled either, although Cap Met's study team has laid out in great detail the pros and cons of light rail, heavy rail, bus rapid transit, monorail, and other alternatives. (Hence the name "Rapid Transit Project," which provides flexibility.) The original RTP schedule called for both the route and the type of vehicle to be decided in November 2001. "Decision" remains a fluid term, though, since what will actually get built, if anything, won't be completed for years and could change. So when the same RTP schedule called for station location and design to be completed in December 2001, that's not the sort of finality on which you might decide to sell your house.

Regarding station location -- Milestone No. 3 -- Cap Met is contemplating four basic station types: neighborhood stations, or platforms; destination stations at places like downtown or UT, by necessity larger than neighborhood stations; transfer stations that plug into the bus (or, in the distant future, commuter rail) network; and park-and-ride stations (or smaller scale drop-off stations, often called "kiss-and-rides"). Parceling these out along the line should be a fairly brainless process, except that it's hard to predict what some of these station locations will look like in 2008.

This takes us to Milestone No. 4: "land use and joint development." Through its neighborhood- and corridor-planning efforts, the city is already trying, however fitfully, to plan around the locations of transit lines and stations. Cap Met needs to come up with ideas and guidelines about how to sensibly develop land it already owns or may acquire along the route. Considering that anti-rail neighbors won't be swayed easily, the discussions on this milestone -- set to be "decided" this spring -- should be lively and intense.

After that, the last two milestones -- a financial plan and the preliminary engineering plan itself -- should be a cakewalk, to the degree that anything involving Cap Met and light rail comes easy. The completed study is supposed to go to the Federal Transit Administration next summer.