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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
Austin - Project Connect's 16,000 Page Impact Study, Part 2
This episode continues our overview of Project Connect's 16,000-page environmental impact study. We focus on station placements, expected ridership, and potential displacement of local businesses. We raise key concerns about community impact while highlighting the significance of improved public transportation for Austin's future.
• Overview of Project Connect Draft EIS and light rail system
• Discussion of north and south rail line routes and stations
• Environmental impacts and displacement considerations
• Impact on local businesses
• Expected ridership numbers and travel time improvements
• Political implications and potential threats to funding
Hey everybody and welcome back to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Chris and I'm Lewis, and this is actually a little different. It is a part two of our Project Connect Draft EIS review. In part one if you haven't watched that we went through each of the stations station by station, talked about sort of the alignment of the system and what you're going to expect once the system is built out. Now we're going to get into the rest of the document in part two.
Speaker 1:Let's pick right up where we left off.
Speaker 2:From 29th Street. If you are familiar with Austin, the road Guadalupe does make a little bit of a sharp turn as it starts heading north and kind of realigns with the Austin grid. Ut kind of offsets the whole grid. It's very annoying for those of us who are a little OCD about cities. But where it is turning into this north section of Guadalupe this is my second gripe it is taking out my favorite pho place, sip pho.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was a little sad to see that too. I was just literally had. I went there on Sunday or Saturday or Sunday, it's a delicious place, so get your pho before it's gone.
Speaker 2:But, uh, this continues up the road to 38th street. Uh, 38th street is the northern terminus of the line for now, before it gets extended up to, eventually, the north lamar transit center, but this will be the northern terminus of the phase one line. This is also going to be, uh, the northern park and ride. This park and ride is going to be at the corner of 38th and guadalupe and right now, what's sitting there is like a jiffy lube and a couple of like a car wash, a couple of small businesses, maybe an urgent care there as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a starbucks. Yes, some of it, some of it will stay, some of it will starbucks on the other side.
Speaker 2:It's fine, yeah, okay, yeah, it's just it's sort of this other development uh, right on the the corner of hyde park that is going to be a parking garage in the parking ride parking ride area the area.
Speaker 1:Right now too, there are some apartments close by. Uh, there's also a medical center right there, so I'd imagine that we'll see some decent ridership. I have a gripe with building a parking ride here only because in the future it's going to extend up a couple more stops. There's already a parking ride with a garage at the Triangle, which is where the 45th stop will be, which will be the first one being built on the next extension. You've got parking at Crestview already. You've got parking at the North Lamar Transit Center. It feels wasteful, but whatever.
Speaker 2:I mean, maybe in the future they'll be able to put something else where the parking garage is. It just seems like there's just a design in a way that the parking garage can be integrated into a TOD at some point, something I don't know. Yeah, we'll see. That brings us to the end of the blue line going north, the orange line.
Speaker 2:Blue slash orange at the top. I guess, like I said, up to the North Lamar Transit Center. If we are going back the opposite direction, we'll run right back through downtown, across the river, starting at the waterfront station. Again, this is where the Austin American-Statesman car storage facility currently is. This is where the line is going to branch off, and it's going to be only the Orange Line.
Speaker 1:The Orange Line is going to go south through town to old horse yes, um, you'll have a stop at south congress, which is kind of uh, in the. The stop is kind of at the newer part of the south congress shops and whatnot. Chris and I were just kind of saying we're surprised it's not a little bit further south, like closer to where alan's boots is, and stuff feels like it would make a little bit more sense there. But but this is a spot where everyone who comes to visit Austin is going to go to South Congress. It's a major tourist spot. A lot of good restaurants and stuff too, so locals will go there. There's some music venues, all that sort of stuff. To me, the more exciting stop is at Old Torf, which will currently be the southern terminus. There are plans to extend this significantly further down the line, but we're going to talk about Old Torf today being the end of it.
Speaker 2:We have our HEB-oriented development there.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, so the original HEB store was the original one, which, if you're not from Texas, is a grocery store was demolished and they built a brand new one on the corner, and there is significant redevelopment about to take place on one of the opposite corners, which is currently an abandoned strip mall. So we'll see a lot of mixed-use development residential offices, I believe, a hotel, even kind of all in the area.
Speaker 2:This will also be a park-and-ride part of the system which again kind of an unnecessary park-and-ride.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because, again, this will extend further. I mean, if you're in a car and you're already at old Horf, there's no freaking way you're getting out to ride to downtown. I just maybe I'm wrong, but, um, yeah, uh, I also think having the grocery store right at the stop is going to make this a popular spot. Um, I can imagine folks who live downtown who want a real grocery store and are living car free. Uh, which would be an amazing future in Austin to have it be easy to live car free. I mean, people do it. It is difficult, for sure, and I can imagine having a quick light rail line from downtown to the old Torf station being a really popular spot with the grocery store right at the station.
Speaker 2:So that is a summary of all of the stations and where the light rail is going to go all through town. So, with all that being said, how often are you going to see a train at these stations? And right now it looks like the main trunk. The trains are estimated to be every five minutes, which is really impressive and means we are definitely getting signal priority, because there's no way that's happening without it.
Speaker 1:Totally yeah. And so five minutes at peak and even off peak every seven and a half minutes.
Speaker 2:Which I would take that as well.
Speaker 1:Totally so. That means on the two kind of where it splits off down Riverside and South Congress we're looking at every 10 minutes and every 15 minutes off-peak, which is a major improvement from any bus in the city for the most part. Right now the most frequent buses in Austin are every 10 minutes and I will tell you that they're not every 10 minutes normally. So, yeah, love to see the frequencies here.
Speaker 2:This is also a big improvement on the just current travel times on the existing system. So right now, if you're going to go from 38th Street to Old Torf, which would be the extent of the full Orange Line, if you were to do this on a bus, the estimated travel time is about 33 minutes, and that's kind of generous, especially depending on what time of day it is, because traffic through there gets pretty heavy. If you were going to take 38th Street to Yellow Jacket, which is the end of the blue line, that's going to be about 45 minutes, again, highly dependent on traffic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that one requires a transfer yeah, and it would require a transfer and that's only going to get slower over time as more people move to Austin and there's more development Timing with the light rail 38th to Old Torp Street 20 minutes. Yeah, it's amazing, it's really really good. And then light rail 38th to Yellow Jacket 26 minutes.
Speaker 1:That one's like massive improvement. That means, like again, with the extension to the airport, like downtown to the airport will be quick and, like right now, the 20 from the airport will be quick and, like right now, the 20 from the airport to downtown and vice versa, which I actually do it quite a bit is painfully slow down Riverside because it stops all the time Like there's just so many people getting on and off.
Speaker 2:I'd say the times are comparable to our dream gondola system. They are probably that's right.
Speaker 1:If you go back to our gondola episode a little while ago, a a little while ago. A couple other interesting things to point out here, and also this is a bit of a shout-out to the Austin Urbanist Discord. I don't know that I'm allowed to share a link to it, but if you're interested, maybe I don't want to upset anyone who runs it, but if you're interested, send a message or something and we can get you an invite Because it's a big group. But shout-out to Parker and several other people in there, it's always really informative. There's a ton of like really good transit wonks in there. Parker was looking into the kind of lengths of the stations and caught something that I hadn't seen before. So presently the stations are not all being built to their full length, so a full length station would be about 350 feet. Currently a handful of them are only going to be about 250 feet long. To start. Um, a lot of that is to just like disrupt less traffic in some of these areas where they're interfering with stoplights and whatnot.
Speaker 2:Um and it looks like there's a lot of sections where the if you have three trains are going to be leaning into traffic a little ways.
Speaker 1:Right, they would on. Yes, they would. So you would. That would be with the 350-foot stop. So with some assumptions of what vehicles are being used, you'd only be able to do two-car long trains with the shorter stations. With that the potential capacity is to move 5,640 people per hour along the trunk line in each direction. That would go up, obviously, if the stations were extended, allowing for the third car to be added on. But again, yeah, shout out to Parker in the Discord. I met Parker a couple times doing some volunteer work for Adam over the summer. So yeah, but overall the expected ridership of the system by 2040 is about 29,000 people per day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a sizable amount.
Speaker 1:Totally. And just to give some comparison, the 801, which is the highest ridership line in the city right now, sees about 7,300 riders per day. And then the 20 is another high ridership route, but it's the area that goes along riverside. Uh sees about 5 000 per day, with the full system of cap metro being about 80 000 per day presently. So, um, this will capture a big, a big number of people and has the potential, with all the developments that we've kind of talked about, to increase significantly in time. The city's.
Speaker 2:The development is so the city's densifying over time. We have the home initiative so smaller, more development in the neighborhoods.
Speaker 1:All that's going to contribute to higher ridership as well as well as the extended sections of the line that hopefully will come soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, extended sections to the airport, to the North Lamar Transit Center and to the South Lamar Transit Center, not.
Speaker 1:South Lamar, south Congress.
Speaker 2:And to the South Congress Transit Center.
Speaker 1:And eventually even to Stassney, I believe, is the furthest build-out, but that one I'm not going to hold my breath for that coming anytime soon. We'll jump right back into the episode in just a second, but first, if you haven't liked this video or left a comment, please do so. It helps us out quite a bit and we also have some exciting news.
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Speaker 2:So we also looked at the environmental impact portion of the environmental impact study and this really focuses on changes to the natural environment, but also focuses on the human and urban environment as well, and that includes displacement. Most of this transit line is going to run through existing right of way, pretty much all on grade at street, so the natural environmental impact pretty minimal and they call that out in the document, that a lot of what we're seeing as far as changes to drainage and all this kind of stuff, all of that infrastructure already exists and that impact's already happened with the roadways. Where you're going to see disruption, it's all going to be temporary, with temporary construction sites, right.
Speaker 1:And when we look at some of the uh that would need to be displaced as part of this, um, we're going to see 27 full acquisitions, so that is uh, eminent domain being used to take 27 properties. Rest in peace sip for, yes, rest in peace info and some of the some of the spots in that area I'm less upset about. There's like a gas station that's taken, that's like not good land used to have there anyway, all that sort of stuff, and then 277 partial acquisitions. So that's we need a little bit more room to widen the light rail in the road or that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, taking a little sliver of yards or like where sidewalk exists now, just kind of extending those out a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yep, setting those out a little bit, yep, and among these kind of acquisitions and partial acquisitions, it's going to displace about 59 businesses and eight residential condo units. That one's a potentially on the condo units, but as far as the businesses go, obviously like I'm not a huge fan of eminent domain where it can be avoided, but in the case of this this is like clearly for a public good. Hated on I-35 because I just like they could have done stuff in the footprint better. Uh, there's a lot of other options there. As far as building a light rail system in the city, it's obviously going to be a net good. In time it's going to get a lot of use and all this sort of stuff. Um, we're just, you know, hopefully these businesses and I'm sure they will be well taken care of and helped to relocate when possible well, and it's also called out in the environmental impact study that we are spurring new growth and a lot of these areas too.
Speaker 2:So when you make these, these statistics on the displacement, it's really hard to then say how many new businesses are going to come in in these places, or how many new opportunities the businesses that were there, how many new spaces are gonna to come in in these places, or how many new opportunities the businesses that were there, how many new spaces they're going to have once the construction's done.
Speaker 2:And what is great about this whole process of building out the system is that there are programs that help businesses kind of bridge that gap between the construction phase and getting to a more permanent space or finding a new space. In the the environmental impact study they even call out that LoopNet shows we have like 80 plus commercial parcels available for purchase or rent, and so there are options for these businesses. They don't necessarily have to close down. There are programs out there to assist. One thing I'm really happy to see here there's not a lot of residential displacement we mentioned there's eight residential condos that you're gonna you know, maybe limit their access to parking. There's a couple of single-family homes that are gonna have to go around riverside, but for the most part the displacement is through commercial and industrial sites and very, very few residential displacements.
Speaker 1:Right, um, the other kind of major area would be where the operations and maintenance facility is going to go. Again, it isn't an area that will be well suited to find additional space, given the programs that you're talking about. It isn't an area that is already zoned as light industrial and, frankly, it seems like an appropriate use for the space. The city in the document also says they're going to make sure that they're using tracks that keep things as quiet as possible. There are some homes not super far away, but those homes are already backed up to a light industrial area as it is, so it's not going to be a significant land use change for the neighborhood.
Speaker 1:Unrelated specifically to the EIS, but related very much to Project Connect. We talked about this in the previous episode. A little bit too kind of a couple main threats, unrelated specifically to the EIS but related very much to Project Connect we talked about this in the previous episode. A little bit too Kind of a couple main threats to the project in general, being in Texas, were lawsuits, some of which have had some successful results, and or steps in the right direction. The other is the state legislature.
Speaker 2:Yes, and the state legislature has a history of creating preemption laws in the state, especially targeting Austin, where anything that we try to do as a city, the state then comes in and says you can't do that Right.
Speaker 1:So much for small government, huh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Project Connect is no different. It's also not a surprise to anybody that the Texas legislature very conservative and primarily elects leaders from parts of the state that are a little more rural, small town, that aren't huge supporters of transit.
Speaker 1:Right, and what we just saw happen in the state legislature was pretty interesting. So there were kind of two characters who were up to be elected for Speaker of the House yes, the House and the Senate are both overwhelming Republican majorities in Texas and you had two people. You had David Cook, who was more popular among kind of MAGA-style Republicans, and then you had Dustin Burroughs, who is more of like an establishment Republican character Still very right-wing.
Speaker 1:Yes, but more like traditional, I guess, conservative. There's a lot that the Democrats who have worked to elect him disagree on. But what happened was Democrats worked with boroughs supporters, essentially in the house, to elect boroughs. Who actually was elected speaker of the house with more Democrat votes than Republican votes. Um, the governor and other figures are very not happy that this happened, but essentially to get this guy elected to Speaker of the House, a lot of Democrats in the state, including members of the Austin delegation, voted him in no-transcript. But please don't mess with our local government. And when we look at there's some articles that talk about this. But local, go ahead. Sorry, you're going to.
Speaker 2:No, I was just saying he's still not. People in Austin still aren't a huge fan, right? I mean he helped pass the limitation on how much cities can tax, so it really makes it harder to add new programs in the city because it limits that. But what I was going to say is one of the most vocal opponents of project connect, which is ellen trox claire, who's a representative who doesn't live in austin, mind you, um, but is a huge uh voice against project connect and against uh the city of austin, anything they do. She was very vocal against burroughs and in support of Cook. Now she has sort of severed that tie to the Speaker of the House. So any bills that she introduces that could potentially take away funding for Project Connect or cancel the project, maybe, maybe, potentially they won't get the oxygen that they definitely don't deserve. Right.
Speaker 1:There was a great article I subscribed to. It's the Austin politics newsletter, I think Jack Craven, or Craver is the the. He's like an independent local journalist worth checking out, honestly like, uh, if you care about local journalism, finding folks like him is important, I think. But uh, the headline of his article about this was something along the lines of, like, the right, right wing, uh, uh, speaker of the house was chosen the right, right wing. I thought it was like. I was like, oh, that's a pretty good way, that's good, yeah, um, yeah. So you know cautious optimism there that you know one of the potential fires to this project has been maybe put out or at least gotten under control for a little while.
Speaker 2:Maybe there's at least a little bit of political will to negotiate. Uh, leaving it alone yeah, we'll'll see and this also goes towards the Dallas things as well. You know we look at the Plano trying to leave Dart. Maybe this also helps them Absolutely Well.
Speaker 1:With all that being said, let us know what you think about this. Obviously, this is a project near and dear to our hearts because we live here in Austin, but, yeah, it's exciting to see. Nonetheless, if you want to further support us continuing to do the show, we go all over the place on the ground at some of these places. We're going to be in Dallas actually at the end of this month. If you want to help support us directly, patreon is the best place to do so. You can also listen wherever you get your podcasts Watch here on YouTube. If you haven't liked this video already, please consider doing so.
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Speaker 1:And, with all that being said, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit Tangents Tuesday.