.jpg)
Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 39: Central Texas Passenger Rail
Imagine a Texas where you can effortlessly travel by train from Austin to San Antonio, or even journey all the way to Monterrey, Mexico. On this episode of Transit Tangents, Judge Andy Brown of Travis County joins us to share his vision for transforming passenger rail service in Central Texas. He gives us an insider's perspective on the challenges and opportunities for developing these critical rail connections. We also highlight the collaborative spirit driving these rail projects forward, emphasizing the strong partnerships between local leaders like Judge Sakai in Bexar County and their counterparts in Mexico.
Doors are closing. Public transit that's my way to roll On the metro. I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind. Public transit, it's the rhythm of my life.
Speaker 2:On this episode of Transit Tangents. We talked to a local official here in Austin, Texas, working across the state to bring improved passenger rail service between Austin, San Antonio and beyond. All options are on the table, from commuter service to high-speed rail. Learn all of the details coming up on Transit Tangents, hey everybody and welcome back to Transit Tangents.
Speaker 3:My name is Chris and I'm Lewis, and today we are at the Austin Antrax Station where there's just a press conference about starting rail connections better rail connections from Austin to San Antonio.
Speaker 2:And before the press conference happened, we actually had a chance to chat with Judge Andy Brown from Travis County here in Austin, Texas. For those of you who don't know, a judge in Texas is not someone deciding court cases. They're essentially the executive of the county.
Speaker 3:Like the mayor of the county Basically.
Speaker 2:So we had a chance to chat with Judge Brown. So without further ado, let's jump into that interview with Judge Brown and throughout you'll probably hear a couple of clips from the press conference. If you're watching, maybe see a couple of clips of the press conference.
Speaker 2:We're here at the Austin Amtrak station and purely by coincidence, there happens to be one of two trains a day that goes through here. You've been talking a lot about plans that would increase that frequency of two trains per day quite a bit into downtown Austin and throughout Central Texas. I guess if you want to just start off kind of explaining what your vision is for this passenger rail improvements throughout Central Texas and why you've gotten so involved, yeah well, thanks for talking about this.
Speaker 4:You know I love this train. First of all, I've taken it several times I mean a lot of times over my life between here and Fort Worth, dallas, sometimes even just a day trip up to Taylor. It's a wonderful trip up there. The the main problem is that it interacts with freight traffic a lot, and so even like I took it, like a month ago up to Fort Worth to see the Rangers play, with my son, we had a sleeper car. It was a great experience. Except it was supposed to take, I think, four hours and it took six, and that was largely because it never stopped because of a freight chain. But when freight trains like go into a siding, it slows down really, really slowly and apparently adds two hours to the trip.
Speaker 4:Um, so my dream is to have either a lot more amtrak's on this train in a some way that they work out a better deal with union pacific, and that probably means, you know, adding a track for a lot of the journey. That's one option and we've talked a lot to Todd Stinson with Amtrak and with TxDOT, who's, you know, applying for these federal rail administration grants. So that's one option. Another option is there's a private company in florida called bright line that you know they have. I went out there and wrote it and it's very nice train. It's pretty expensive. This is you know. I've seen tickets as low as like 10 or 20 bucks on this we went to san antonio for like 12 bucks.
Speaker 4:There you go, yeah, yeah yeah, and Brightline doesn't have those same controls, and so they I've heard some criticism that they're, they're very expensive, they. They cater, I think, to people who might otherwise, you know, travel on a plane and kind of compare it that way. And they're the ones that are. It's like a high-speed concept that would go initially from Fort Worth to Dallas, to College Station, to Houston, and then what they have told me is the second leg could come to Austin and hopefully San Antonio, and that would be high speed.
Speaker 3:I would take any one or all three of those options, all three, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:But yeah, so that's where we're trying to get.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah yeah, but yeah, so that's where we're trying to get. So a couple years ago, this initiative started with under the name Lone Star Rail. It was only within the last year and a half two years, I think that this initiative sort of came back to the surface. How did you get involved this time in getting this project to become a reality?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I mean, I've always loved passenger trains. They work great in the Northeast, they work great in other countries, and Austin and San Antonio are. We're growing so fast we're. I think by 2050 we're supposed to have eight million people between the two sort of metro areas, which is would make us, I believe, the two largest metro areas in the world without great passenger rail in between them, and I think even now we're probably in that category. So, uh and and, with all the you know construction they're going to be doing on i-35 and the fact that they're never going to build their way to enough space for all the cars if there's, one more lane is going to fix traffic exactly.
Speaker 4:Yeah yeah, and it's like I I've seen somewhere where you know you build something and it fills up and that's just how that goes. So you know, combining my love of the concept of passenger rail with just the necessity here, we started down this path of you know why are we not talking about this again? Realize that it's not a partisan thing. There's people with like Austin Chamber, there's people who disagree with me vehemently about national politics but love this concept and so, and that, combined with the Biden administration being willing to pay 80 percent of the cost to get this going, made it made me feel like we were really missing out if we didn't go do this.
Speaker 2:You mentioned like the bipartisan element to some of this. Obviously, like historically, not only Texas, but there's a lot of states that their state government's makeup does not necessarily favor rail in all cases. I'm curious how much state involvement would be required for some of these different plans, and can you cue us in on what some of those conversations are going like and how we can get more of our state-level leaders here in Texas on board for stuff like this?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, at some point in the past there was, I think, Ben Barnes and others tried to get this Texas Triangle thing going and my understanding is that the airline some airlines didn't want that because they made a lot of money doing that same trip. That dynamic does not seem to be here anymore because, like Southwest, it does more long haul. They're not just making their money in that sort of triangle. And yeah, and I just it doesn't seem like there's nearly as many people that are like, yeah, I'm going to get on a plane to go to Dallas. They're like I'll get on a, maybe a bus or I'll drive. But so I think that opposition seems to have gone away.
Speaker 4:The I've not run into a lot of Republicans that are like, man, I'm going to be the rail champion. At the same time, behind the scenes, I think there are good conversations going on where people understand that if we had great passenger rail to San Antonio, that could reduce I saw one study said, reduce traffic by 25%. And so people that want to drive can still drive and have an easier time and people like me that want to ride the train can do that. And then you know, talking with with Brightline and Texas Central seems like they're having good conversations with leadership in Texas too about those concepts, and so it seems like the winds have shifted and it's something that the business community understands that we're going to hit a brick wall at some point here if we don't have better ways to get around, and so it's seen as more of an economic development driver as well.
Speaker 2:Here's a bit more on this from Judge Brown's counterpart from Bexar County, Judge Sakai, which includes San Antonio.
Speaker 1:It's the reality that IH35 is going to be further congested and so the more trucks coming out of Mexico, coming down from Laredo up to San Antonio, up to Austin, up to the Canadian border, people are going to just get fed up and they're going to look for alternative transportation. So if we're proactive and we can put the vision of what rail transportation can be and how cost effective it will be, especially in light of cost and time I think we live in a world now, time is money, and so I think it's just going to be the natural market situation that will encourage and enhance and really require people to take the rail.
Speaker 2:We're going to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video, go ahead and do so. Also leave a comment. We love reading all of them and respond to as many as we can, and be sure that you are subscribed so that you catch every episode as they come out.
Speaker 3:Please share this with your friends and if you don't have time to watch YouTube videos in the future, you can catch us on any of the podcast platforms that are out there. Just be sure to leave us a rating and give us a comment. So a logical route would be to take the existing line that already that Amtrak's already flowing on from Austin to San Antonio. That line's currently owned by Union Pacific. I know that some conversations have been had. Can you give us any details about Union Pacific and how they've been receptive to this conversation?
Speaker 4:yeah. So I've talked to them I think three. I've had three meetings with them over the past I don't know year or two and one here, one in DC and then another. We just had a virtual meeting and they feel that they put a lot of energy and time and, I guess, money into working with the Lone Star Rail concepts and I wasn't in the middle of that so I don't know really what was the end of that.
Speaker 4:But they the plan there was for to build a spur for freight to go largely around like down by 130, like east of Austin and San Antonio, but their position is that even that would not have eliminated all freight because they have customers like aggregate and concrete and stuff like that that are along that corridor that they couldn't. They, you know, didn't want to customers. So they're I would not describe them as excited about the concept of passenger rail on their land. I think the way that I would like to approach it is if we can get an agreement from the state and the feds to say you know, we've got this many billions of dollars to build a new track or maybe a new route. I think that's when we really can have a good conversation with Union Pacific when we've got some money on the table.
Speaker 2:The idea being that they would reroute and use those, or we would, or it's too far out to kind of they.
Speaker 4:They don't so well, but they have that customer, I guess, right yeah, they've got customers and also they are of the position that the rail as it stands between austin and san antonio is a slow moving track, because I don't know if it turns. Y'all took it more recently than I have.
Speaker 2:Yeah it went faster than we thought actually we were doing speedometer tests on a lot of it and we were on average 65 to 70 in some places, yeah the only spot where we slowed down was the last section.
Speaker 3:Getting into san antonio, uh-huh felt like it took as long as the whole rest of the journey as you were saying, we made it to san antonio faster than we expected and we're like, oh, this is great. And then we were stuck for over an hour and making the turn all the way around san antonio so it sounds like that part needs some engineering fixes.
Speaker 4:And I think that was Union Pacific's point is that that is just a tough road. So, you know, I think there's some pretty wild concepts, like there is a power line somewhere between Austin and San Antonio that has like a hundred feet of right away under it, and in other places in the country they have put rail on those right ofof-ways. I think they bury the power line in that case, and so that's something. There's a. There's also a natural gas right-of-ways for part of this. There's 130.
Speaker 4:You know, we have to be creative and and I I don't want to make union pacific seem like the bad guy, because they made a really good pitch to me about how they take a lot of freight off of highways as well and their business model is increasing. You know they're getting more business from Mexico and they're trying to figure out how to expand the freight that they haul, and so we have to come up with a solution that helps them expand as they needed, because we don't want all that going back as truck traffic. But also I think I think you know my thought is, having ridden this at least from austin to dallas, there are a lot of places to put an additional rail, like these places where we were slowed down because of a freight train going on a siding. It seems like there was enough open space around there. I mean, what I don't make it right out of third line? It certainly seems like they could add a third line in those places, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about how adding this passenger rail service to make it easier to get around Central Texas and beyond kind of lines up with a lot of the transportation projects happening, for example, like here in Austin with Project Connect, things like that, to kind of help residents not only with just getting around, but also how it can be like a help for affordability. That's something that I feel like we don't hear a lot of people talk about, but having better options than needing to drive around in your private car feels like a no-brainer yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:So I think a big one is just the fact that if we had great passenger rail between just here in San Antonio, where you could live in San Marcos or New Braunfels and work in Austin or San Antonio, that would help affordability, because a lot of people are having to leave Austin, at least central Austin, because of pricing and if, if you're a student here or you're working here and want a more affordable housing, it would help with that. It would also with that. It would also help, on the other hand, people that want to go see the Spurs or come see the Austin FC soccer team. You can't do that on the train right now unless you have a couple days, but if we had six trains per day, it seems like we could do it to where you could go down for an evening and come back on a late train. Um, so, yeah, there's a lot of benefits there. Um, I don't know enough details about project connect to know how this would interact with that, but yeah, in general, um, it seems like it'd be synergies at the least.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah, I think a lot about the impact it would have for students, because there's obviously students who live in Austin who may not go to UT and have to traverse back and forth to San Marcos. Yeah, and that would be such a huge, huge boost for them.
Speaker 2:You mentioned the Spurs game and I want to mention this, so it seems like you've had a good working relationship with your counterpart in Bayer County, Judge Sakai Sakai.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 2:I guess can you talk about some of the excitement from the San Antonio side of this as well and other folks you're speaking with to kind of show it's not. You're not just here on your own trying to get this done. It seems like you're really building a coalition of folks to try to make something like this happen. A bit of added context is that, ahead of this press conference, a group of leaders from across the state, as well as Mexico, rode the current once-day Amtrak train from San Antonio to Austin. Thanks to our friend Skyler, we have a few photos from their journey, and we were at the Amtrak station when they arrived.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we're working really hard. I first reached out to Judge Sakai because you know the two large metro areas right next to each other. He's been a great partner. I'm also reaching out to there's a Republican county judge in Denton, texas, that is in favor of expanding passenger rail, to basically all work together on getting the legislature to invest in this. There's Hoppy Hayden in Caldwell. He's a Republican. He's a big fan of this concept. I've been talking to the judge in Bell County. I think he likes the concept. He's trying to work through the details of it but we've tried really hard to make it a bipartisan thing and it is, I think. But yeah, there's a lot of folks different county commissioners in Bexar County, city council member. That's the also the head of AMPO, which is their version of CAMPO, their MPO.
Speaker 4:And then I got to say we, jackie and I, took a trip down to Harlingen to have one of our TPRAC meetings, our Passenger Rail Association meetings, there and there is huge energy Like they would love, absolutely love, to have great passenger rail. That went from, you know, dallas to Austin, to San Antonio and then to Harlingen or McAllen. And then that opens up the question of Mexico. So we've got Governor Samuel Garcia. When I first met with him, I was talking about how he was trying to get passenger rail to the border. I think he said to San Antonio I was like come on, man.
Speaker 2:Let's do it to Austin, yeah, yeah yeah. Great timing, beautiful sound.
Speaker 4:And so him and the mayor-elect of Saltillo, the former mayor of Monterey. They're all huge fans and frankly, I think they're a little farther along than we are, because I think they've identified the corridor and the right of way.
Speaker 2:We were chatting with Jackie ahead of time about that in particular, and I've driven down to Monterey before and it's yeah, I mean flat open desert basically for the vast majority of it, so it'd be a great candidate for something like that.
Speaker 4:I mean flat, open desert basically for the vast majority of it. So it'd be a great candidate for something like that. Yeah, and just the economic, like Monterey is the second wealthiest urban area in Mexico after Mexico City, and it's where there's Monterey Tech. There it's growing massively. A ton of companies that used to have factories in China are moving to the Monterey area, the Saltillo area, and just the growth potential of having great connections between them and us makes a lot of sense. And I think that a lot of people you know in the business community here tend to look overseas. They tend to kind of look at other US cities and to the north, and that's what I'm working on with Austin Chamber too is to get more working together with Monterey, because I think there's a lot of synergies and it's not really that far away from us.
Speaker 2:For more context on possibilities across the border into Mexico. Here is Emmanuel Liu, a representative of the state of Nuevo León.
Speaker 5:We are as a region, if we're the center of Texas 5 million population that the judges just mentioned and also in Monterey 6.5 million population that the judges just mentioned, and also in Monterrey, 6.5 million population Linking together will be one of the fastest growing regions in the world. So I think the US trade relationship with Mexico is going to continue to grow. Mexico, for the first time in a long time, has become now number one trade partner of the US. This perfect partnership of having a high speed rail. We create a lot of opportunity.
Speaker 5:The new president already talked about having that connection between Mexico City all the way to Laredo, texas. We'd love to grow that connection to the Texas Triangle, which will be the seven largest economy in the world. So I think, as the Mexico authorities would love to have this connectivity and work hard with the Texas authorities, continue to grow this relationship. Every day 25,000 trucks leave Monterey through Texas to go to the US delivering different goods and services. So I think that's just going to continue to increase. So we have to create new alternatives for that cargo to get here and for that transport for those passengers to get here. Every day we move a lot of people between together, within the two states, so we look forward to continue working with the state of Texas and with the local and federal authorities to make this a reality. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3:We'll take it as the rock climbing train. We'll take it down to rock climbing train. We'll take it down to el petro chico.
Speaker 2:Yes, have you taken that train, the. Oh, I haven't taken a train down there, no, um, but I've driven. I've driven down there. No, I haven't. I think they still run that huh in mexico.
Speaker 4:I, yeah, it's I think it still runs the copper canyon train. It's, I think, mainly touristy but supposed to be real gorgeous. I did take a train from where was it? Leon, which is right by San Miguel de Allende, to Nuevo Laredo. This was in the 90s. It was probably the end of the passenger service there, but it was not a great experience. But it took 24 hours on a route that a bus, I think was like 10 hours, but it was neat to see.
Speaker 3:Yeah that's amazing. I love what you're talking about too. You know, when we think of what this project started as is sort of a connection between Georgetown to San Antonio, that's obviously good for the Austin-San Antonio metros, but this is really a benefit for all of Texas and, as you said, even going into the communities in Mexico. So I think we should probably start framing the conversation you know around that like this benefits not just Central Texas.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, unless there's anything else you want to ask.
Speaker 3:Last thing I would ask is to anybody who's watching if they're interested in this project. They want to get involved, they want to learn more about it. How do they find out more? How do they get involved?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so first I would recommend they take that trip either to San Antonio or it's an easy day trip. You can get an Uber back, but any you know any morning around what 915, 930 is when the train leaves here, goes up to Taylor. You can get some barbecue there's a great brewery there and then come back. That'll give you a good flavor of just how easy it is. Like you're cruising up the middle of Mopac, there's traffic, you're on a train, it's great. After that, yeah, if they want to get involved with us, we have this group that me and Judge Sakai set up the Texas Passenger Rail Committee.
Speaker 4:Okay, we'll get a link in there for you and, yeah, if they want to come to those meetings. We've got somebody from the governor's office, we've got folks from TxDOT, we've got some sort of engineer folks that build train tracks for a living, a lot of local elected officials that are in that group, and we just meet every month trying to move the ball forward. And so our next step is we've pretty much got a letter together that we're going to send to the legislature as a group asking them to put 300 million dollars in the texas rail fund. It's a. It's a. It's a thing that was established a long time ago but it has no money in it, and so that would help with matching of federal funding, um, and so that that would be great.
Speaker 4:And then just, you know being uh, talking about it, trying to get on people's minds again, I think it's a good concept. I don't haven't really run into anyone. I haven't run into anyone that's opposed to it. There's some at the state level that get a little queasy about when you're going through, when you're doing condemnation through private land. This is not that at all, and so I think I can say that I've not heard of anyone at the state level or local level that is opposed to this concept. So I think, just talking about it more, getting it out there is the way to get it moving.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well. Texas is already pretty solid as far as building roads go. I'd love to see them get really good at building railroads as well. Big thanks again to Travis County Judge Andy Brown.
Speaker 3:Also to his staff, cynthia and Jackie as well, for helping us get this coordinated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, first off, very curious to hear what all of your thoughts were to that conversation. If you haven't left a comment, please go ahead and do so. We love reading them. We'll maybe take some of the best and forward them along to the judge to check them out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let us know if you would take this train ride from Austin to San Antonio or beyond.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean to me. There's a couple things that stood out to me in that conversation. One I mean the fact that it's not just the potential for using the existing right of way here, but either using an entirely new right of way to be built he talked about power lines and gas lines and even the potential for a player like Brightline to come in into play here. It sounds like there's actually been pretty serious conversations there Also. I don't think he would have brought it up.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my big takeaway was hearing about some of the support from Republican officials around the state as well. As he said, transit is not a partisan issue. It really should not be a partisan issue.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it plays out that way, but hearing that there is some Republican support in the state of Texas, that's good to know Totally and there was like specific people who, like I mean they weren't like you know, I support it, but you can't talk about it. I mean he name dropped a few other county judges as well as other officials in the state. I also think it's positive that there's someone from the governor's office in some of these meetings. Historically speaking, obviously, greg Abbott is not really a public transit guy, but I will take a small victory if we're able to get something that I agree with Greg Abbott on. If he kind of moves over to the pro-train side of the spectrum Not to hold my breath.
Speaker 3:but what I agree with Greg Abbott on is reducing traffic in Texas, and the way we do that is using transit right, just like judge Brown said, I would also take a train to all these different places.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you would take a train. I'm sure many of you watching would take a train to some of these places. Yeah, yeah with that.
Speaker 3:Please share, like this video, subscribe. Find us on any of the audio platforms for podcasts if you're enjoying the show and you wanna give us a little support. If you go to our website, there is a little button that says support. It takes you to buy me a coffee, and we love coffee, so buy us a coffee.
Speaker 2:And, with that being said, as the sun is now blinding us, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit. Tangents Tuesday.