Austin at Large: We’re Deciding How to Decide

A page from the Austin Transit Partnership's first-ever annual report, issued in late November, outlines where we are right now in the Project Connect rescoping process (courtesy of Austin Transit Partnership)

Austin is almost certainly going to settle for a less dramatic reinvention of its mobility grid than the bold visions and pretty renderings that guyed the Project Connect referendum in 2020. We have the money we thought we would, but that cash won't go as far as we thought it would two years ago to build high-capacity transit, the rail system Austin voters should have approved in 2000 but didn't. Inflation, supply chain, labor shortage, you know the details.

The need to start thinking small became real just a couple of months after the Project Connect teams at the city, Cap Metro (as it is now called), and their joint venture the Austin Transit Partner­ship had felt the need to think big. You may remember we went from plans for a Downtown tunnel of less than 1 mile to one of more than 4 miles, going under the lake, to avoid messing up the Capital View Corridor along South Congress. (I hate CVCs but I admit that the view up South Congress to the Cap­itol is a picture-postcard iconic image that we'd all miss were it messed up. How rail would do that, I don't know, but I didn't write the stupid law.) That meant we had two different new lake crossings so that the Orange and Blue lines would meet up at the Conven­tion Center and Republic Square. Those two stations could be connected not just by a subway tunnel for the train, but by a continuous pedestrian concourse that could, of course, become an underground mall and a place for live music. And so on. There's a lot of scalability here that now the community will explore.

We’re Gonna Get Engaged

At least some observers thought the Nov. 30 joint meeting of City Council, the Cap Metro Board of Directors, and the ATP Board – the "tri-party" – would be where the ATP in-house and consulting planners and engineers would lay out what Project Connect 3.0: Dark Brandon Edition would look like, at least at a high level. That did not happen; instead, ATP, which of the three parties has the most responsibility for the expensive rail components of Project Connect, basically laid out how they will decide what gets rethought and rescoped. The actual decision will be in the latish spring, after four members of Council, three of whom are also Cap Metro Board members, have left the building; it will be something for the new folks to champion.

Politically, of course, this makes sense, and ATP bought itself time and credibility by announcing back in April that the cost projections for the light rail system had nearly doubled, to $10.3 billion, and would likely keep going up. Rather than promise they'll close the gap in "value engineering" and at construction, ATP has planned out, and last summer launched, what it calls "an intense, intentional technical and community process that will allow for an assessment of cost changes, consider options for addressing them without additional tax money, and update the light rail implementation plan."

The community will be engaged, ATP staff told their board(s) more than once at the tri-party meeting, which also makes sense; otherwise there would be reason for people to not buy in, get hacked off by the choices made, and start trying to undo the deal voters approved in 2020. That would suck! As the process is outlined by ATP (see chart above), it looks like the community will get to voice its choice about a range of alternatives now being developed, along with the criteria on which to evaluate them.

’Ere That Way Be Monsters

This is fine; if you want to do more than place your sticky dots on the board of your preferred choice out of three or four options, you probably don't really need for ATP to invite you to engage. You have thoughts! Most of them are probably about either the rail alignment or the multiple layers of new Downtown construction, but there are other things to look at. What kind of rail equipment can we use, and does that change if we turn tunnel sections into bridges or even just trenches? How long could we wait to build out the full Orange Line? A big influencer here is the Federal Transit Admin­i­stra­tion, which would like to give Austin money but still expects us to show how our work will improve the lives of the people who need better mobility the most. (That's also why nonrail parts of Project Connect, such as the new MetroRapid lines in East Austin, are non-negotiable here.)

Our town's derailed past attempts to move forward with rail transit at the scale called for by Austin's new urban(ist) growth (two failed elections and probably four or five other plans abandoned pre-election) bear the fingerprints of people who care a lot about transit but differ amongst themselves in their enthusiasm for any specific transit plan. Project Connect's triumph was to go big enough to appeal to not just transit geeks but a solid majority of Austin presidential election voters with a vision that transcended those differences. Let's see if that spirit can be sustained.