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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. 43: Austin - Transit Tour
Join us as we traverse the streets of Austin, mastering the public transit system, including buses, trains, and bike share.
In this episode, we take a day-long journey around Austin, relying solely on the city’s public transit network. We discuss the system's strengths and challenges, providing tips for commuters and visitors alike. For the adventurous, we also explore Austin’s bike share program, seamlessly combining it with transit to reach some of the city’s hidden gems.
Whether you're a local looking for ways to leave the car at home or a visitor exploring the city, this episode is packed with useful insights and real-time experiences. Tune in for practical advice, a few fun detours, and a deeper look at what makes Austin's public transit tick.
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. On today's episode, we do Austin in a day using only public transit From the bus to the train, bike share and more. We see how much of the city you can see without a car Coming up on Transit Tangents. We are here downtown Austin. We are gonna be doing Austin in a day using only public transit, simulating the fact that we just got off of this Amtrak train that just came up from San Antonio. This morning.
Speaker 1:Which we have talked about on several episodes at this point. Yes, we'll make sure there's some links in there. Obviously, we live here in Austin is the reason why we are simulating that. But yeah, so today we're going to be hitting all sorts of major sites across the city. We'll be riding buses, trains, bikes, walking. We'll see what they bring.
Speaker 2:Swimming, who knows? Yeah, we'll see what happens. Question mark.
Speaker 1:The only thing I'm disappointed with is the last couple episodes like this we have started out in a full sprint, missing a bus or something, yes, and we don't have that full sprint happening yet Still early in the day.
Speaker 1:I think that at some point by the end of the day, we'll probably be running for something. So, uh, all right with that, we're gonna head over to republic square from here. It's a bit of a walk, yeah. Uh, transit from the amtrak station not the greatest. There are a couple buses not far away. Some of the closer ones actually require you to walk over the train tracks up here. The only time I've taken public transit to this train station before I, I had to literally, like, go through a hole in the fence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's signs that say do not cross tracks, and that's the only way into downtown.
Speaker 1:Right. So it's not ideal? No For sure. But yeah, with that, let's start heading over to Republic Square.
Speaker 2:We have started at the Amtrak station and you may be wondering why did we start at the Amtrak station? Well, I don't know how many times I've heard in a conversation about it'd be great if we built train lines from city to city, but as soon as you get to another city there's no way to get around.
Speaker 1:Well, we're going to show you in Austin there is a way to get around Totally, and I will also say that that same argument is the same thing for flying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and no one talks about it there. Yeah, and we're going to talk about it. You can do this same trip we're doing today with a flight into Austin as well.
Speaker 1:Right, and just to briefly talk about it while we're on our walk over to Republic Square taking transit from the airport here. It's not ideal by any means, but there is a bus that arrives basically every 15 minutes. It's the 20 route. It does take a while to get to downtown on the 20, just because there are a lot of stops and it's something like the third most popular bus route in the city, or close to three if it's not that. So it's a perfect no, but can you do it Absolutely and hopefully in the future we'll have the blue line from Project Connect will get us all the way to the airport, or almost there with the connection.
Speaker 1:So that is improvements coming soon. Yes, fingers crossed For more. On Austin's plan for Project Connect, we published an entire episode on it earlier this month, linked in the description. In addition to that, since filming this in September, there has been a renewed push by Mayor Watson, as well as Transit Forward, an advocacy group we will talk more about later in this episode, to extend light rail to the airport. We'll link an article with the latest updates in the description.
Speaker 2:There's not a driver in this one.
Speaker 1:The future is now that's going to be the topic of a future episode. For sure, waymo is currently testing in Austin at the moment. The first week of October, waymo began launching to the public in Austin via the Uber app.
Speaker 2:We have made it to Republic Square. This is where the federal courthouse is in Austin. It also happens to be sort of the central hub of bus transit in downtown. So I have pulled up my Cat Metro app and I already have a ticket pre-loaded. However, if you don't have a ticket pre-loaded, it's very simple you go into the app, you can click, manage your account and then you can add passes as well. So very, very simple and new to Cat Metro you can also use the transit app to plan your trips. However, you can't quite buy a fare on there just yet, Right.
Speaker 1:We're now going to be looking for the 30 bus. The 30 is going to take us to Zilker Park. Some pros and cons of the 30. Number one it does go right to Zilker Park. The con is that it only runs every half an hour, which not ideal. So hopefully we're catching one soon. Yes, if not, we're gonna be waiting for quite a bit here. I'm gonna get into some potential improvements on what we can do with that after we get on the bus, but until then we're going to look and see how long we got to wait. You can go out in front of me.
Speaker 2:Hey, how's it going Good.
Speaker 1:Come on. All right, we lucked out on the 30 big time. That bus comes every half an hour and we only had a like two minute wait for it. Three minute wait maybe. So yeah, very quick Takes you right into the center of Zilker Park, which, as you can see, currently has a lot of construction going on, which is actually normal this time of year. We're getting ready for Austin City Limits.
Speaker 2:Which, for those of you who don't know, massive music festival. It happens for two weekends. A lot of big acts. It's kind of one of our biggest events of the year here in Austin.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mentioned earlier that there is only this one bus that comes here, with the exception of taking maybe the 803 or another couple other buses that have a decently long walk. Our transit agency, cap Metro, currently next year has plans for two new of the cap metro rapid routes. So buses in austin are also on like a tier system. So you've got the metro routes which run every 15 minutes or worse in a lot of cases. So there's a lot of 30 minute routes, there's a couple one hour frequency routes, but then you have the metro rapid routes that during the peak times during the day are every 10 minutes and at worst they're supposed to be every 20 minutes.
Speaker 1:Occasionally we run into issues where, like, there's a mystery bus that gets canceled or something, but for the most part the 801 and the 803 are the more reliable routes and those are the Rapid routes Two new ones coming next year and one of them could have the potential to connect to Zilker Park. In my opinion, right now it goes from kind of far northeast Austin through Mueller and ends at Republic Square, which is where we caught the 30 bus just now, a lot of neighborhoods, a lot of like pretty dense neighborhoods to cutting through town all the way to downtown, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And my proposal this is my first time sharing this, actually, I think I've told a couple people in person but that route should not end at Republic Square. It should continue here to Zilker Park and turn around. There's a great spot to do a loop for the bus to turn around here, which would solve a couple issues. It would make it easier to get to Austin's most popular park from different parts of the city, and parking here is such a nightmare and, like the solution in quotes, quotes has been to essentially turn a large field into a dusty wasteland in the middle of the summer. Yeah, not ideal. And this would make it so that you'd have more people having a one seat ride to Zilker Park and you would increase the frequency to get to Zilker Park from downtown. So so, cap Metro, if you're listening, take me up on the idea.
Speaker 2:Extend that BRT to Zilker.
Speaker 1:Let's do it All right. Let's check out Zilker Park, and we're going to head over to Barton Springs as well, which we'll talk about when we get there. The other potential option, instead of extending this new Cap Metro rapid route to Zilker Park, would just be extending the Zilker Eagle across the lake. Yeah, that would be better. So sad news Austin's newest greatest train line. It's closed for a month. Closed for a month because of austin city limits as well, and it's not even out for us to see.
Speaker 2:They put it away in a tunnel, out of sight and what we were talking about is the zilker eagle, which replaced the zilker zephyr, and it is a small amusement train that takes you around zilker Park. So, as I fall down, so if it is not ACL. Come and bring your kids and check out the Zilker Eagle mm-hmm all aboard if it was running that's hilarious.
Speaker 1:Barton Springs was our next stop and is a popular natural spring fed swimming pool located in Zilker park. We are we're going for the swim it is.
Speaker 2:It is always very cold uh, typically 68 to 70 degrees all year long.
Speaker 1:Yeah and, of note, today is the coldest morning we've had in months, which is, yes, it's still above 80 degrees right now. But you were the one who was like, oh, we have to jump in. All right, ready, three, two, one. There's more to the shot.
Speaker 2:We, we jumped in we're definitely a little ice cold. There's more to the shock we jumped in we're definitely a little cold. Next up, we are going to grab the CatMetier e-bikes which are in Zilker.
Speaker 1:Park and head over to Soka. Yeah, excited to try them. The e-bikes are new now. They just upgraded the system and now every bike is electric, and over the next two years I think they're doubling the amount of e-bike docks around the city, so excited to try them out. All right, so we are at the new CapMetro bike share stations here. I already have the app downloaded, but Chris is currently downloading it, which we'll get some insight from him in a second here.
Speaker 2:It's very simple. There is a QR code on the bike station. You will scan it with phone. It'll bring up the app and you download it if you don't already have it. After that, sign up is incredibly easy. Just put in your personal details, like your name and phone number, and then a credit card, and then you're good to go. So it took me maybe two or three minutes to get set up on the app and now I'm going to click scan to unlock, which is, uh, right inside the app, and then I'm going to scan the bike.
Speaker 1:Found the bell you found the bell? Oh, there it is. That's a nice sounding bell. They do seem to be pretty nice bikes yeah, all right, we're gonna hit the bike trail on barton springs road as we exit zilker park we're to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video or subscribed, please consider doing so. It helps us out quite a bit. Also, leave a comment. We love reading them.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and if you don't have time to watch YouTube videos every time we release, you can always catch us on your favorite podcasting platform from Spotify to Apple to anywhere podcasts are available. And Spotify to Apple to anywhere podcasts are available.
Speaker 1:And if you want to support the show, we now have a Patreon launch. You get lots of additional benefits for being a member on Patreon. All the information for that is in the description. But without further ado, let's jump back into the episode. So, right here, this used to be four car lanes wide with no bike lane, and now we have three car lanes with bike lanes on both sides. They're not perfect, but they're there. And then once we cross here a little close there, this also used to be this wide, so it was two car lanes on either side. It used to be that through this whole thing. But now we have what we have here, which is now one car lane in either direction with some turning lanes, so the bus stop here and then we have these really wide, nice, nice protected bike lanes. Now, and if I can catch up to Chris, we'll see. What do you think? You've ridden these right? Yeah, I have.
Speaker 2:Not this bike, but I've ridden this path, yeah, and it's nice.
Speaker 1:It is nice.
Speaker 2:This is a big improvement to what it was before.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It feels safe. We can cycle side by side in this section, which is also nice.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, though, this one is going to be short-lived here, because we're going to now cross a really scary intersection in a second, but we'll see it's scary and then it gets a little better.
Speaker 1:It gets a little better again, yeah, yeah. And this is a perfect example of we'll see what he does. He's supposed to wait for me. Is he going to do that? No, he's going to try to go out in front of Chris. He's going to go behind here. That's a perfect example of why this intersection is not great. So the intersection leaves some to be desired, but it does turn back into a fairly good bike lane again.
Speaker 1:Here on the other side, where we're headed now is an area called South Congress. It's an area where there's a lot of shopping. There are some restaurants. This is where, if you've heard of the bats in austin it's under the congress bridge. It's a popular spot for tourists, for sure, but there's also spots and reasons for locals to go there. There's some music venues, all that sort of stuff, but a fun little street, uh, just south of downtown austin. So that's where we're headed. This bike lane definitely gets less comfy through this section, obviously, you're just like sandwiched between parked cars and traffic, and we are in Texas, so the size of these parked cars not exactly small. I feel like that bike ride gave a decent little clue as to like bike infrastructure in Austin is that it's like very different in very different parts of the city and kind of evolving as we speak. We went on some really nice bike lanes there. We were on some disappearing bike lanes. There. South Congress starts the decent bike lane and then weaves through parking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it gets a little sketchy on South Congress with how narrow it is next to the cars, yeah, but overall and we'll put a link to this somewhere like Austin, has a plan for what they're calling a Triple-A bike network, which is all ages and abilities. They want to build out this network so that people of all ages and abilities feel comfortable riding on their spots. Some of what we went through today counts for that, including the Barton Springs road segment. That was nice. Other sections, like this part on South Congress, definitely do not Imagine trying to bike down this road with an eight year old or your grandmother biking down this road I would not feel comfortable taking my parents down this road on a bike, exactly.
Speaker 2:When you're in Austin and it's hot, the best thing to do is get Amy's.
Speaker 1:I'm actually more of a. Actually I don't even know if it's local or not, but I'm a big Jenny's fan. Oh, don't say that Jenny's is so good. We're going to run you out of town. I can run you out of town. I can walk to Jenny's from my apartment.
Speaker 2:All I'm hearing is that you're a trader, eh, I guess. So we're sitting at a metro rapid stop on South Congress, and this actually happens to be the path that Project Connect will take when going south. It's gonna go about another mile down the road to Oldsworth. So stops like this, the one that we're sitting at, they're gonna make really great light rail stops in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Alright. So the board right now shows an 801 in 8 minutes, an 801 in 12 minutes, a 1 in 21 minutes, an 801 in 23 minutes and then another 801 in 36 minutes. Not terrible, considering we did just see one go by. We saw one and an 801 go by.
Speaker 2:We were not optimized in our decision making Not optimized.
Speaker 1:We're gonna wait longer for the rapid bus than we did for the 30, which is lucky. We'll also see how accurate the sign is. Normally I would not go by the sign. I would go by my phone More often than not. When I take the bus here, I'm like going between my apartment and downtown or vice versa, and for my apartment I will look and I'll like be like, okay, there's a bus in five minutes or eight minutes and I try to walk out to the stop knowing that there's one coming. Yeah, versus just showing up yeah. Um, I live in probably one of the only parts of town where I probably technically don't have to do that. However, uh, my partner, jerry, in particular, has been burned by it a couple times by not looking. He was taking the bus sometimes to commute into UT where he works, and sometimes he'll go to do it in the morning and wait 20 minutes for a rapid bus, and that's usually like one bus gets cancelled. Something happens.
Speaker 2:That's usually not a big deal, unless it's really cold or really hot, yes, which is really really hot.
Speaker 1:Really hot is normal, yeah. So from here we're gonna get on either a 1 or 801. Based on the schedule, it looks like we'll get the 801, which is the rapid route bus, and we're gonna take it just a couple stops north to Capitol Station, where we're gonna then walk over to the State Capitol building. We'll show you around inside and then from there we're eventually gonna walk north towards the UT campus. Now approaching Nebaka at 13,. Capital station transfer for downtown routes express bus.
Speaker 2:Transferencia para rutas. Ruta del centro have a good day. Ruta express have a good one, Thank you.
Speaker 1:So that was a nice quick and easy ride up on the 801, again one of the express buses, Something I tried to record on the bus, not sure if if it came out, so we'll do it again here. Uh, the metro rapid buses, or cap metro rapid buses, technically have a different bus style for the most part. Uh, that one was not one of them because they don't have enough of them, yeah, uh, but usually you'll see some of like the I usually call them bendy buses yes, um, they also tend to have like additional signage inside of them.
Speaker 2:Are they?
Speaker 1:actually called articulated buses. Yes, articulated buses, bendy, is way better, though. They have better signage inside of them so you know which stop is coming up next, whereas the bus we were just on it just announces them, and oftentimes I find that it does not always announce them, so you kind of just have to like be really paying attention All right, we have stepped off of the 801.
Speaker 2:We've walked over to the Texas State Capitol building, which is right in the middle of downtown Austin. We're going to go inside, show you around a little bit before we move on to our next stop.
Speaker 1:All right, let's do it After our last conversation with Judge Brown. Maybe there'll be some positive railroad funding coming out of this building.
Speaker 2:We're walking into this building putting out positive vibes for transit.
Speaker 1:Transit can be bipartisan. Absolutely, transit is bipartisan. We're actually we haven't mentioned this yet, but we are going to be having a conversation later today with a gentleman from the organization Transit Forward and that's going to be part of our conversation. And we haven't mentioned this yet, but we have just kind of soft launched a Patreon account here and if you're watching this right now, you will get early access to that interview. I'm promising you that I will have it edited in time, that if you're on Patreon, you'll have early access to that video, that interview. So check that out, if you haven't already. Chris knows how to walk.
Speaker 2:I was thinking like maybe I could do like a side walk and talk.
Speaker 1:No yeah. I'm not that coordinated we just checked out the Texas Capitol. If you are ever here, I actually really recommend going in. Anyone can just go walk in, which is cool. You go through a little security thing, but it is open like all the time.
Speaker 2:And when we say open, I mean it's very open. You can go look at the chambers. If you go down below the rotunda, there's like the crypt. You can go into the crypt and there's actually a staircase that takes you down underneath this entire expanse behind us and there's an office building beneath here where all the representatives have their offices and you can just go and explore.
Speaker 1:From here we're gonna walk further north and we're gonna be cutting through what is now like the the Capitol Mall. It is new. It used to be essentially a north section of Congress Road, just the street, and now it's. Now it's a nice area there. It's it's basically brand new, so they're still kind of doing some work to it, and it essentially connects the Capitol complex to the campus at UT Austin, which is where we're gonna walk through now, one of the ugliest roads in downtown Austin. In my opinion. It really is. It's just like it's terrible to cross this road.
Speaker 2:It is terrible, it's yeah it could be a lot better.
Speaker 1:This is a nice plug, in my opinion, though, for the City Leap Program that's currently being explored in City Council thanks to efforts by a nonprofit called Safe Streets Austin. Tell us more about what the LEAP program does? Yeah, so we've mentioned it lightly, but essentially it takes some of the bigger arterial roads in the city. Many of them are classic definition stroads, feeling similarly to what we're walking next to, and, in a lot of cases, is advocating for removing a car lane in either direction and replacing it either with a dedicated bus lane or protected bike lanes. Definitely encourage you guys to check out Safe Streets Austin. They have an online petition and forum about this. I will put a link in the description and you can go check it out.
Speaker 1:So we were just in the Capitol building down there and there's still some construction in there, so we had to walk around a little bit, but this is the new capital mall we were talking about. Chris is standing on the map of texas. Where we're at um to the north, there is the beginning of the ut campus uh first, though, where you can see all those kind of uh, what do you call those sculptures. That is right next to the blanton uh art museum. Um, supposedly I actually haven't been to blanton yet. Oh yeah, it's a good art.
Speaker 2:what do you call those Sculptures that is right next to the Blanton Art Museum? Supposedly I actually haven't been to Blanton yet.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, it's a good art museum for Austin Definitely recommend checking it out Absolutely. And also to the left here is the State History Museum. Yes, Also, it's also great. I've actually been to that. One Walked from the Capitol up here to campus. That's the UT tower up there. We're running a little behind schedule so we're gonna kinda keep this brief, but UT is a pretty central part of the city. Here it's in the city.
Speaker 2:If you don't know what UT is, it's the University of Texas at Austin, which is like for anybody who wouldn't know, it's just a major research university here in the heart of Austin.
Speaker 1:Also very famous for UT football games.
Speaker 2:Go Longhorns the stadium holds over 100,000 people.
Speaker 1:It's one of the largest stadiums in the United States.
Speaker 2:You can tell I'm not a Longhorn fan when I say go Longhorns instead of hook'em horns.
Speaker 1:Hook'em horns, that's the right. Yeah, I would like to get to a game at some point. Actually, I've never been to one, I would too, um. But and then there's also kind of an interesting housing element to this. So the student the campus has almost 50 000 undergrads. Yes, just wild. Uh, that number goes up quite a bit when you add in grad students, faculty staff, all that sort of stuff. So it's a whole bunch of people here, um, and then the whole kind of area just west of campus used to be a lot of smaller single-family homes and there were some apartments and uh, in recent years the city of austin has kind of rezoned that whole area um.
Speaker 1:It is now the most dense district in the city yeah, and you'll see.
Speaker 1:I mean there's quite a bit of construction going on in the area, lots of tall apartment buildings almost exclusively aimed at students, but the area has seen a lot of changes. From UT, our next destination was Q2 Stadium, located near the Domain. The Domain is a mixed-use development north of downtown Austin. The main is a mixed-use development north of downtown Austin. One thing I want to point out about that bus ride we did just take was it was pretty full the whole way from UT all the way up. At one point there was a gentleman standing, there was probably like a seat somewhere, but basically a full bus at one o'clock in the afternoon. So by no means rush hour. And what further justifies the need for for light rail in these areas. I think it would be well ridden and people would rely it, would use it more honestly than what exists now.
Speaker 2:those rapid routes are a great use case of where. Where rail makes the most sense, I think I would. I would refer to the same road as a domain. It's actually a really interesting neighborhood or area because you have the JJ Pickle Research Institute or research campus for UT Austin, which is a major research campus. You also have the domain which is behind us, which is retail and shopping Sorry, retail and apartments and offices, and it's a huge district. It's almost like the second downtown, yeah, and it's meant to feel like a walkable community.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people would describe it as like a lifestyle center is kind of like the term for it. Now, there's a lot of oh, you're good. I was gonna say there's some like good, simulated urbanism, but it's also surrounded by parking lots and whatnot but it overall is like way better than the land uses that were here, which was basically like a bunch of industrial I think that's the best way to describe it it's an urban simulator.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah yeah, there's also a lot of old warehouses in this area that have been turned into like brewery and like little beer shops, and where we're going right now is the Q2 Stadium, which is Austin's newest stadium. It is for our soccer team based right here, the Austin FC, and we're going to head over to the stadium where there's also a brand new train station.
Speaker 1:Yeah, here's a short clip from an Austin FC game I went to earlier this year. We are here at McCalla station with the Austin FC Q2 Stadium behind us. That's the second attempt at that. I screwed that up a couple times. But this is a new stop on the Red Line. But just to give folks an idea who don't live in Austin what the Red Line is. Do you want to explain what it is? Yeah, so the Red Line. But just to give folks an idea who don't live in.
Speaker 2:Austin what the Red Line is. Do you want to explain what it is? Yeah, so the Red Line is Austin's first commuter rail. That passed back in 2004, I believe. And the Red Line stretches from downtown right at the Convention Center. We have a nice main terminal station all the way north to Leanderander, which is sort of a far north suburb of Austin, and most of the stations from Leander to here are sort of parking ride stations. From here into downtown.
Speaker 1:It's more kind of urban stations I'd say Right and there, yeah, the stations kind of south of here, like you're saying, they're more like intentional transit oriented developments. Not all of them have been built out to their full capabilities yet, and that's kind of been an issue with the Red Line over the years. The Red Line definitely does not see crazy ridership numbers by any means. I mean it is. Things are going the right way with the housing initiatives that are being passed in the city and new development.
Speaker 2:Well, as I say, it's definitely getting better because over time, they have really focused on the transit-oriented developments where, for instance, right around here at McCullough station, there are several brand new apartment buildings that have come up. Oh, actually, here comes a red train now, oh yeah. And then also down the line, you have the Midtown station, which is the Crestview area, you have ACC Highland, which has brand new developments, and you also have around MLK and Plaza Saltillo, which is where we're headed next. Right, right, oh, that was nice Great.
Speaker 1:Oops, kind of fun, all right, so a couple things have happened. We did make it here to Plaza Saltillo. We actually just met up with Bill McCamley McCamley of Transit Forward, which is a nonprofit organization advocating for all sorts of transit related things here in Austin. We did just do an interview with him that, if you're watching this right now, is currently available if you are subscribed to our newly created Patreon. We're gonna be doing some new stuff with that. This is new to us. So, uh, we're going to be trying to do early access to episodes there. We're going to try to have access to a discord only, uh, to a patreon only discord channel, stuff like that. So if you want to help support the show, uh, please consider doing that. Only if you're able to, uh, we would greatly appreciate it. But we had that conversation with Bill and now we are about to get back on the CapMetro bike share. We're going to hop onto the trails.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're going to do a nice trail ride. Basically, Austin has Hi bird.
Speaker 1:Basically, I hope that they can see that bird.
Speaker 2:Austin has a great hike and bike trail system that does a big circle around Town Lake, which is the lake in the center of town, and we're going to go and show you some of that bike infrastructure.
Speaker 1:First, on the ride, we crossed Town Lake on the Pleasant Valley Bridge and caught a glimpse of the new Wishbone Bike and Pedestrian Bridge being built across the water. As we continued, we made a quick stop under the Congress Street Bridge, which is where bats fly out from each night during the warmer months of the year, before wrapping up our day on the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge downtown, and this is like a fun spot to just stop and look at everything too, and like you're close to Zilker Park, where we were this morning, you get a really nice view of downtown all that sort of stuff. There's always lots of people hanging out up here, sometimes people playing music up here. Call it Austin's living room.
Speaker 2:There you go. Started this episode talking about what would you do if you took the m track to austin. You got to town, then what then? How do you get around? Hopefully this inspires you to think about those things when you go to other cities. You know, look at bike share, look at the bus system, look at what trains are available. Totally, there's a lot of options out there absolutely, and obviously not.
Speaker 1:Every city has a ton of train service, austin being one of them right now, although we're hopeful after a fairly recent episode, that maybe that'll change. But you can do the same thing from an airport you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:And you know if you have to take an Uber or something here or there not the end of the world, but like, the transit options in a lot of cities might be better than you might expect and you could probably prevent yourself from renting a car. With all that being said, I think that just about wraps this episode of Austin in a Day using only public transit. If you are not yet subscribed already, please consider doing so. Like the video. If you haven't leave a comment, check out our brand new Patreon. We'll be talking more about that in the future, but otherwise thank you all.
Speaker 1:So much for watching, and enjoy the rest of your Transit Tangents Tuesday.
Speaker 2:That video y'all did with Judge Andy Brown was actually really informative. I watched the whole. Thing. I really appreciated it.
Speaker 1:Wow cool. That's hilarious. We're working on another episode right now.
Speaker 2:No, we literally just finished it. Kevin, nice to meet you Y'all too. Chris, what's your name? Kevin? Kevin, nice to meet you, Kevin.
Speaker 1:Awesome Y'all too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we appreciate that Good shit, man yeah yeah, thanks, have a good one. Yeah, yeah, enjoy your night.
Speaker 1:I'm still recording. It's so funny.