Capital Metro’s New Transit Plan — Go Big or Go Home, or Too Big to Fail?
Took you long enough, Capital Metro. Is there hope for Project Connect, redux?
Phase 2 of Project Connect, Capital Metro’s ongoing high-capacity transit study, is wrapping up and a draft system plan is out. After radio silence from the agency for years, we finally have a hint of what Austin’s transit future will look like — and a cautious hope that this time, things will be different.
You might ask what happened during Phase 1. Well, that just identified a hodgepodge of “corridors” to study for future transit investments. Basically, Phase 1 reaffirmed the need for high-capacity transit along Austin’s busiest and most congested city streets.
Gee, like we didn’t know that already.
Some corridors were more promising than others. Unsurprisingly, Airport and Oltorf — crosstown corridors that run through unremarkable suburban landscapes — receive no investments in the draft Phase 2 plan.
Phase 2 was also expected to recommend which transit technology should be implemented on each corridor. That’s high-profile news that always draws out would-be transportation experts in droves, from light-rail zealots to not-a-single-dime road warriors to aerial gondola visionaries.
In February, a community advisory board “leaked” an early version of the now-public draft that envisioned a sprawling system of light rail and bus rapid transit lines. To transit advocates’ delight, light rail was Project Connect’s pick for Austin’s premier corridors like North Lamar, South Congress, and East Riverside. The stage was set for the grand unveiling…
Until incoming head honcho Randy Clarke, who just assumed Capital Metro’s CEO position in March, decided to nix that mode information from the draft. Just before the public reveal of the plan, he gave a long speech in which he emphasized that it was more important to acquire dedicated right-of-way for transit before worrying about what exactly will run over it.
Well, what gives?
Based on Clarke’ statements about “[making] sure the larger community gets more of an understanding and feel,” it would seem he wants to solicit the public for just a few more months before solidifying the plan.
Perhaps Clarke was filled in on the public relations train-wreck that was Project Connect, circa 2013.
A History Lesson: On the Wrong Track
It was little more than a statistic for American transportation policy (another sunbelt city rejecting a light-rail investment; score one for the Cato Institute), but to Austin transit advocates, the 2014 urban rail vote will forever be remembered as the despised product of a corrupt-to-the-core planning process.
Back then, the study was also called “Project Connect” (I’m going to disambiguate both studies as Project Connect 2014 and Project Connect 2020) and it produced a light-rail starter line that wound its way along lightly traveled streets, underneath the parking lot of an H-E-B, and over a gold-plated Lady Bird Lake “signature bridge” to reach a dead-end shopping mall next to a freeway interchange. How did planners justify picking such a pathetic line? Basically, the whole plan relied on hyper-optimistic growth projections that nobody but Capital Metro and the city believed.
Pro-transit people insisted the performance of the new line would be so bad — based on their best guesses, as Project Connect’s projection of 18,000 daily riders was for the far-off year 2030 — that it would harm existing transit service and preclude further expansion.
In retrospect, the Project Connect team will tell you they simply weighed the variables wrong. Supposedly, the route they selected in 2014 looked perfectly rational if you believed those growth projections and had an aversion to taking traffic lanes away — from, say, Guadalupe Street, Austin’s busiest north-south artery that runs through the heart of the urban core and maxed out its automobile-moving capacity decades ago.
But there were very likely other forces at play. It’s sufficient to say that between the University of Texas, the city, the state, real-estate interests, and the Mueller neighborhood, there were quite a few politically influential entities that wanted Austin’s first rail line to take the route that Project Connect ultimately picked. Guadalupe Street and Lamar Boulevard — transit advocates’ top choice — would be stuck with MetroRapid, Austin’s bargain-bin rapid bus that was oversold and continues to under-deliver, for the foreseeable future.
That left transit advocates fuming. In any event, Austin as a whole resoundingly rejected the 2014 plan, 57–43. Whether the “data-driven” Project Connect process was blindsided by an apathetic public or strong-armed to crown a predetermined route will probably never be known for sure, and that question is still debated on Austin-area social media and obscure discussion forums. But for now, 2014 continues to cast a long shadow over Capital Metro’s current planning efforts.
Advocates either insist that Capital Metro can’t be trusted at all or is dysfunctional beyond redemption. Even members of AURA — a local urbanist organization that spearheaded the fight against urban rail in 2014 — seem loathe to broach the subject or speculate on what went so horribly wrong.
Today, as Capital Metro prepares for another big transit vote in 2020, the agency has just one question to answer — what has the new Project Connect learned from the debacle that was 2014?
Project Connect, Reborn: Critiquing Phases 1 and 2
The new Project Connect is far from perfect, and Capital Metro should be far more upfront about the agency’s previous missteps. But the good news is that, so far, the new study is avoiding some of the pitfalls from 2014.
Focusing on service, not political trophies
It all starts with the new system map.
The new draft system plan separates potential transit lines into higher ridership, high ridership, medium ridership, and developing ridership categories. Exact ridership estimates are available on the project’s website. Straight from the outset, we know which corridors will serve the most riders and which can justify the most expensive transit investments.
And notice that the Highland Corridor, which was selected as the starter line for the 2014 vote, is only considered “medium” ridership.
Additionally, the rankings are very reasonable, too. I would, however, quibble with the designation of the Austin’s existing Red Line as a “high” ridership line. Ridership on that commuter rail service is still less than half of projections, and while it’s standing room only during peak hours, the trains are practically empty in the reverse direction and during mid-day.
Running along old freight tracks, completely missing the University of Texas, and barely penetrating the southeast corner of downtown, the Red Line is simply not a corridor that’s useful for urban travel — and that seems unlikely to change, no matter how much service Capital Metro adds. (As of now, the premium commuter fare doesn’t exactly encourage would-be urban riders either.)
So how does the current draft plan compare to Project Connect 2014?
Before choosing the doomed starter line, Project Connect 2014 also mapped out a transit vision that looks strikingly similar to the current draft plan — but lest you despair that history is repeating itself, the 2014 concept annotated transit lines by mode instead of potential ridership and assigned equal weight to rapid bus, light rail, and commuter rail services. If you’ve ever been stuck in the Drag on a MetroRapid bus, you know that’s a complete sham — MetroRapid is missing so many rapid transit features that nobody would seriously call it “BRT,” and its speed and reliability fall far short in comparison to the performance of light rail in dedicated guideway.
Essentially, Project Connect 2014 drew a fantasy transit map that delivered a political trophy — urban rail, the “gold” lines — to as many neighborhoods as possible and deferred the task of figuring out which lines were the most important to serve. The ambiguous rapid bus and light rail overlays on South Congress and North Lamar communicated an inconvenient truth: with limited resources, it had to be one mode or the other, so which was it going to be?
Using a sane definition of “corridor”
The decision to build Austin’s first urban rail line on the Highland-East Riverside alignment was made in another phase of Project Connect 2014, the “Central Corridor High-Capacity Transit Study.” This is the point when transit advocates began to call foul.
The goal of the study was simple: focus on Austin’s congested urban core and determine which portions of urban rail in the system vision could provide the greatest mobility benefits. Then, build those portions first. What could possibly go wrong?
The catch was that the Central Corridor Study used very strange methodology to analyze potential corridors for urban rail. Project Connect 2014 used arbitrarily defined “corridors” that covered wide swathes of land and overlapped each other. While I’m no transportation planner, these “corridors” look essentially useless for analyzing travel patterns; they distort the distribution of travel demand through ridiculous amounts of aggregation.
For example, nobody will suppose that the entire Core region was adequately served by the final route, which ran through the very eastern edge of it along Trinity and Red River.
Project Connect 2020, if you recall, is using well-defined lines that follow Austin’s busiest streets, which is what most of us imagine when we think of a “corridor.”
Another issue I have with the 2014 methodology is that the study confined itself to a very small area within Central Austin. That ignored the huge amount of travel demand into and out of the arbitrary study area, including the high bus ridership to and from the North Lamar Transit Center and the Rundberg Lane neighborhood, which lie north of the boundaries of the “Lamar” corridor.
Essentially, Project Connect 2014 eschewed longer-distance travel and used downtown circulator demand to justify a toy streetcar line. Even voters that weren’t as fervent as transit advocates about the location of the starter alignment felt the proposal was “rail for rail’s sake” and didn’t seem to confer any benefits away from the downtown-UT axis.
In Project Connect 2020, corridors extend for much longer distances, which more accurately captures the potential transit demand along Austin’s busiest corridors, like Guadalupe-North Lamar.
That’s fine, but what about the modes?
As of now, light rail boosters are up in arms about the removal of the mode recommendations from Project Connect’s draft plan.
The optimistic perspective would be that Mr. Clarke, keenly aware that transit is such a hot-button topic in Austin, is trying to coalesce the conversation around objective cost-benefit analysis instead of fanatical debates over whether trains, buses, gondolas, monorails, Chinese straddle buses, or Mr. Musk’s Hyperloops are the “right” technology for our city.
The skeptical perspective would be that he’s delaying the process for no good reason, wasting time studying “emerging” transit technologies, or even has something to hide, like a stealth reprisal of the Highland-East Riverside starter line.
Realistically, we can expect the mode recommendations to mirror the ones on the draft leaked in February. That would mean light rail on the flagship corridors — North Lamar, South Congress, and East Riverside — and rapid bus or full bus rapid transit on the others.
That’s a pretty solid plan. But now, Capital Metro must show that it can pay for it and has a snowball’s chance in hell of building it out. And like Project Connect 2014, the devil will be in the details.
Looking Forward: Is There Hope for Phase 3?
Go big. That’s the atmosphere that Project Connect 2020 is evidently trying to project.
At a March open house, Capital Metro quietly displayed a flipbook that graphed metro areas by per-capita transit spending. Nashville, this graph showed, is currently dead last; but if the other Live Music Capital of the World passes their $5 billion transit bond, they’ll rocket to the ranks of cities that spend big bucks on transit, on par with Denver and San Jose.
Officially, we’ll have to wait until the conclusion of Phase 3 to know for sure, but all signs seem to be pointing in the direction of a copycat strategy for Austin.
Perhaps Project Connect 2020 hopes that a titanic, awe-inspiring, regional-scale transit paradise will ameliorate old feuds and convince community leaders to back such an ambitious plan. The question is: will this strategy work?
Very small starts
The sensible side of me declares this effort dead on arrival. Having just been fleeced for $720 million on glorified road widening, Austin — a Texas suburb with big-city problems that desperately wants to stay a Texas suburb — would never vote to spend $6–8 billion on buses and trains. Not a chance.
The sensible side of me recommends starting small. Pick the best segments of the North Lamar corridor — say, Republic Square to the North Lamar Transit Center — and build affordable, surface-running light rail. Ditch the Chicago-style elevated rail that Project Connect is now recommending, and even the river crossing, and just build the best damn starter line Austin’s limited resources can buy.
The sensible side of me says once Austinites get their first taste of frequent, convenient urban rail along the city’s best corridor, the “rail does not work in Austin” narrative will finally be squashed after a decade of a commuter rail compromise. No longer would trains stop running after 6pm or require poorly advertised connector buses to reach the University of Texas; they would come every 10 minutes instead of every 60, even on Sundays. Afterwards, the political momentum would be in place to extend the system throughout the rest of the city.
The sensible side of me says that if Capital Metro had done this in 2014, the North Lamar line would probably be on the verge of opening today.
But is it enough?
But I look at the numbers, and I wonder. A double-digit loss. How much of that was really influenced by outspoken transit advocates who talked urban form and per-passenger subsidies? I wonder if, in the final analysis, Austin is condemned to regionalism; that we must appease the suburbs if we have any hope of delivering badly needed improvements to the urban core.
Indeed, the last time Austin had a transit plan that struck a reasonable compromise between suburban and urban interests was in 2000. It had light rail that served the North Austin suburbs and the best parts of the North Lamar corridor, but it also cost over $1 billion dollars and was voted down by 0.9 percent (despite levying no new taxes).
Every transit proposal since then has leaned strongly toward one camp or the other. The Red Line, a product of the successful 2004 vote, has turned out to be pretty useless for urban Austin, as I have previously noted. As for 2014 — the Highland vs. Guadalupe debacle aside — I suspect that voters were never going to accept a light rail system that was largely confined within the central core. Even the proposed extensions of the 2014 urban rail line rarely strayed far from downtown.
Once again, the blame lies squarely on Project Connect. Rail transit is not a false dichotomy between circulator streetcars and long-distance commuter rail — that’s a uniquely Austin way of thinking. From Los Angeles to Portland to Baltimore, we have examples of great light rail systems that provide regional, as well as urban, mobility.
If Project Connect goes with a super-sized transit bond complete with gold-plated elevated light rail, I would still be a skeptic. I still think that’s completely out of scale for Austin’s needs. But there may be a method to the madness after all.
Agree with “go big” or not, we’re probably in for the ride anyway
If Project Connect goes big, they’ll probably stay the course. Capital Metro doesn’t have a very good track record on making substantial changes in response to public feedback. See the fight over 2014.
So if Project Connect goes big, then the draft plan will be our transit moonshot, whether we like it or not.
If Project Connect goes big, I will lend my support in spite of my reservations. I can’t decide whether this strategy is certifiably insane or so crazy it just might work — but it’s shaping up to be a decent plan, and it’s Austin’s best shot at getting a rapid transit network, take it or leave it.
In the end, I cannot say whether Capital Metro has atoned for its past sins, but I hope I’ve offered a complete and fair interpretation of the prevailing winds of the process, so to speak, and demonstrated that while the tea leaves are far from definitive, they do show the inklings of something great.
And in the end, I still believe in better public transportation for Austin.
Do you?
