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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
Redesigning Austin's Transit: Preparing for Light Rail
Austin's transit agency CapMetro is preparing to adjust its bus network to integrate with the upcoming light rail system, creating connections between buses and trains while maintaining efficient service across the city.
• Project Connect light rail construction will begin in 2027 after surviving legislative challenges
• Three contractors qualified for final engineering and construction with selection coming in early 2026
• Three options proposed for busiest routes (801/803): continue alongside light rail, partially feed light rail, or become complete feeder routes
• New airport connections including extension of Route 350 to create north-south airport access bypassing downtown
• Route 300 (second busiest route) getting major redesign in Southeast Austin
• Route 30 is becoming Route 8 with increased frequency from 30 to 15 minutes
• Light rail will initially run from 38th Street to Downtown with branches to Riverside and South Congress
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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. This week on Transit Tangents, we cover how the City of Austin is planning to adjust its current bus network in preparation for its future light rail system, for planning for feeder routes, adjusting existing bus routes and even new connections to the airport. We'll dive into it this week on Transit Tangents. Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Lewis.
Speaker 2:And I'm Chris.
Speaker 1:And today we are going to be talking about a topic we've covered before, but there's quite a few updates to it. We're going to be kicking it back to the great city of Austin and talking about a topic we've covered before, but there's quite a few updates to it. We're going to be kicking it back to the great city of Austin and talking about how the city is getting ready for the beginning of construction on the light rail portion of Project Connect which is pretty exciting.
Speaker 1:And before we kind of jump into that sort of stuff, we did want to give a couple updates on Project Connect and where things stand as far as that goes.
Speaker 2:As we mentioned on the show in the past, the Texas legislature meets every other year and we were a little worried, moving into this legislative session, that there would be some bills that came out that were pretty negative for public transit across the state. We got through mostly unscathed, including our Project Connect here in Austin. There was a bill that would essentially have gutted the financial piece of the project. That did not advance in the legislature, thankfully. So we're now moving out of the summer session into a hopefully brighter future so that we can start breaking ground on Project Connect in 2027. So coming up soon, but not soon enough.
Speaker 1:Definitely definitely positive news there, and something tells me that the Texas State Legislature is going to have their hands tied, being a little bit busy doing some more devious things than trying to kill light rail projects at the moment. We'll save that for another person's podcast. They can go talk about that. We'll keep it a little lighter here today.
Speaker 2:What's more important, lewis? Is it getting Austin a nice light rail system or saving democracy?
Speaker 1:One other update here on the light rail. So there was a request for qualification process that went out earlier in the year. Three contractors were essentially chosen that they were qualified to be able to do the final engineering design and construction of this project. Right now those three different companies qualified to be able to do the final engineering design and construction of this project. Right now those three different companies, firms, are kind of putting their bids together and their actual proposals together. Those proposals need to be submitted by October of this year and by early next year it sounds like January or February the Austin Transit Partnership, the organization responsible for actually building this light rail and kind of pulling all the logistics together, will choose one of those partners.
Speaker 1:So that'll be early 2026. That way one of those partners can actually begin construction in early 2027. So it always does feel like it's getting further and further out, but this feels like some concrete progress. You know we had the draft environmental impact statements that you and I went through in depth in that two-part episode. If you are unfamiliar with Project Connect and you want to learn more, I highly recommend watching those two episodes.
Speaker 2:We literally went through station by station by station, looking exactly where all the different alignments went, but so that kind of gives you, I will say, in professionally being on this side or being on that side of the projects where you're trying to put together proposals, this is a really positive step. So I'm really excited to see that we're finally at a position where companies are able to bid on this project. That's definitely definitely good news.
Speaker 1:So, now that the city will actually be moving forward with the construction of the light rail, that leaves CapMetro, the transit operator, with a ton of decisions to make as far as actually how to integrate the light rail into the existing transit system.
Speaker 1:You can imagine, right now the transit system is obviously mostly comprised of buses, minus the commuter rail line that runs in the city, and many of those bus routes are likely going to need to be reconfigured to be able to make the light rail work, in some cases, running bus service that complements it, that feeds it, that runs alongside it.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of decisions to be made to make sure that folks can still get around the city in a effective way without kind of. You're basically like running a balancing act of trying to feed people into the light rail while also still trying to have people have as many one seat rides to their destination as possible. So every five years, capmetro puts together a transit plan. They did one five years ago, they'll do one five years from now, and they're essentially deciding what are they going to do with the network over the next five years, at the five year mark and then 10 years out. There's a lot of interesting decisions being made as we're approaching. This decision with the light rail, and the biggest one has to do with the busiest routes that the city has right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so if you want to go back to our Austin in a day using only public transit, we actually feature these two lines quite a bit. But our two busiest routes in the city are the 801 and 803 rapid routes and these two are sort of the biggest questions right now in the city.
Speaker 1:Totally and it's tricky and this affects a ton of people. Just to put some numbers to it, in the last 12 months the 801 has had 2.5 million riders, the one which is like the local version of the 801. The 801 is more of the like Express rapid route. They call it BRT. It's more like BRT light, if you will. The one which runs alongside it also had 1.2 million riders in the last 12 months. So if you add those together you're at like three and a half, almost 4 million riders on those two routes. Add into that again. Chris mentioned the 803. That one's the number six busiest route in the city. That one is 1.3 million riders in the last 12 months and then the number three bus which kind of runs along the 803, the more local version is at just under a million. So all in all I mean this is millions of people per year. Millions of riders kind of will have to live with the effects of these changes.
Speaker 2:The current plan for Project Connect is that the light rail will start in Central Austin around 38th Street, continue down south into downtown. One branch will split off on the other side of the river and head toward the airport down Riverside and the other branch will continue down South Congress Avenue to Old Torf. That central spine from 38th Street to Old Torf is really that corridor that's in question, because that is where the 801 and 803 traverse the city.
Speaker 1:To get into the details a little bit. Capmetro is proposing three different options. Option 1 includes continuing to run both rapid routes 801 and 803, as well as their local routes 1 and 3 through downtown along with the light rail. The key difference here is that those routes would now run a few blocks further east, along San Jacinto and Trinity, instead of on Guadalupe and Lavaca. In this scenario, they'd be able to take advantage of the new bus-only lanes in that corridor. However, they may need to work on some solutions with UT Austin, as the northern section through campus does not have bus-only lanes and can get pretty busy. This option is the most expensive, as it would run the most amount of service through the area. Option 2 includes running the 801 and 803 on their existing routes as they are today, but having local routes 1 and 3 feed the light rail on the northern end at 38th Street Station and on the south at Republic Square, overlapping just a little bit of the light rail on South Congress. This maintains service on the 801 and 803, but also makes it compete more directly for ridership with the light rail running on the exact same corridor through downtown. The local routes, though, would act more as feeders, adding to ridership of the light rail. Option 3 maintains the local routes through downtown but uses the 801 and 803 as feeder routes for the light rail. In the north they would connect at 38th Street Station and in the south at Oldsworth for the 801, and at Republic Square for the 803. This would be the least expensive to operate of these three options, but would likely require the most amount of transfers for riders. Those transfers, though, should be fairly quick, with the light rail in the north having service every five minutes and on the branch lines every 10 minutes.
Speaker 1:As Chris was saying, you do have a lot of a balancing act here, right? So at one hand you do want to feed ridership onto the light rail to make sure that the light rail is successful, but if you were to make it so that these routes fed into the light rail, it would be fine. If, for example, you were going from somewhere on, you know, far South Congress to downtown. You know you're now you are making a transfer, but it's not out of the ordinary. The light rail will be running fairly frequently on the branches.
Speaker 1:It'll be about every seven and a half minutes on the main trunk line. Every five minutes you would ride the 801 from far South Austin to the end of the light rail at Old Torf. Get on, your wait wouldn't be very long. To me, the issue starts to come in where, if you're trying to go further north, if you're trying to go from far South Austin to Crestview, for example, the light rail currently ends at 38th. So your journey would turn into riding the 801 from further in South Austin to Old Torf, getting on the light rail at Old Torf, riding the light rail to 38th Street, getting off of the light rail and then getting on another bus from 38th Street up to Crestview.
Speaker 2:So definitely not ideal.
Speaker 1:One transfer is not great. Two transfers is bad. To be clear, in this scenario that I laid out, depending on the option chosen, a one seat or two seat ride may still be available using either the local route or the rapid route, but not all of them. If it were the local route, it would only run every 30 minutes though, which can be hard to plan around. There's definitely quite a few arguments for both. I mean, I've seen the argument made for having it ending at the feeders. To try to. I feel like we both been pretty negative on on having them end and be like feeders. The one major positive to using it as the feeder system instead of having them run through is that the bus routes would get shorter, they would deal with going through less intersections and the schedules would likely be more reliable. So arguably, you could have a more reliable schedule. You would have less waiting at the stops initially, so you might make up some of that time of the transfer, whereas the existing 801 and 803 are extremely long routes that do get delayed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you continue with the other option, where the bus line essentially mimics the same path as the train, now you're eroding into your light rail light ridership. Not only does that affect you financially, but even politically and optically. That is going to have an impact on the line as well, with people saying, well, why are you, why did we build this, if you're just going to continue to run the bus? So there's definitely some pitfalls there as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think. Ultimately, though, what planners and and folks who are riding the bus here should be thinking about, though, is like how can we make it so that folks can get to their destinations as fast as possible and as efficient as possible? I do think that what you just laid out at the end there, like the political reality, is that it like it could look bad, but are we planning for political optics, or are we planning for, you know, for effective ridership, and I think, like the rider, we both I would say we agree on the?
Speaker 1:the answer is yes to both yeah, because, oh yeah, both. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, that is the political reality, unfortunately transit agencies are still political entities.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, unfortunately.
Speaker 1:Yep, yep, um. So that's kind of the the biggest question here. This is lewis during the edit, after having the conversation and looking at the maps, even harder putting the edit together. I really think, after thinking through this more, option two, with a slight variation, is my preferred option, meaning I would continue to keep the 801 and 803 running full routes, but I wouldn't do it on the Lavaca Guadalupe corridor. I would instead shift it over onto the Trinity and San Jacinto corridor and have the local routes just feed into the light rail. So essentially you still have through running routes that go from far North Austinin to far south austin, but it's competing less directly with the light rail as the 801 and 803 would no longer be on that levaca guadalupe corridor. There's obviously a lot of different things to think about here. So let us know in the comments down below which option you think would be best for this situation. Otherwise, we wanted to kind of jump into a couple of the routes that I think are interesting to take a peek at here.
Speaker 1:So the first kind of thing area I want to look at is at ridership to the airport.
Speaker 1:So first off, the only bus that connects to the airport in Austin right now is route 20. It runs every 15 minutes to every 30 in the off peak hours in South Austin through downtown mimics, exactly the light rail route, essentially along riverside. One exception the light rail in phase one unfortunately does not go to the airport. So, uh, the 20 will continue to go to the airport. It will then meet up with the end of the light rail, uh, at the yellow jacket station, go all the way down riverside, up, uh, into downtown austin, and now will actually end just north of the UT campus, whereas previously from there headed to the northeast towards Mueller and beyond. The Cap Metro is kind of explaining this, saying that they're going to end it there, in part because the new Rapid Route 837 kind of covers some similar terrain in that area. So to me it kind of makes sense, though, to have this line that runs along the light rail but acts more as like a local stop.
Speaker 2:I think anybody who was riding the 20 in that sort of arc back from the university area toward the Mueller neighborhood would probably opt for the 837, just for the speed and convenience. So this change makes complete sense to me.
Speaker 1:Totally. And for folks, just to you know, who might be wondering, like why would you run the 20 right along the light rail? You just put the light rail there. Well, the stop spacing on the light rail is a lot further apart than the stop spacing on a bus. So, especially for folks who aren't interested in walking very far or might not be able to walk very far think older folks or folks who might be traveling in a wheelchair having the kind of local service along the line is still really important and I like to see that they kept the frequency at 15 minutes.
Speaker 2:The other really exciting development at the airport is that we are getting a new bus that will take you from the airport back into town and that is going to be in the form of the extension of the 350. The 350 currently runs from the North Lamar Transit Center down through Crestview along airport and then ends at the East Austin bus station. This is where a lot of like Greyhound and other regional buses come into the city, but it's also a big hub for East Austin for local buses. From there it's going to be extended across the river into the airport. So now you're going to have a brand new connection that will bypass downtown and serve this sort of North Central Austin area and all their riders who need to get back and forth.
Speaker 1:Totally. I'm pretty excited about this bus. I've ridden it a handful of times from near where I used to live down towards the Springdale area and that Springdale area is seeing a ton of development. There's a lot of other development along Airport Boulevard and Chris and I were talking just before this that, like in the future, this could be a really good corridor for some good BRT infrastructure down the line, especially as more development along this corridor starts to happen. Chris really wants Airport.
Speaker 2:Boulevard. I really want light rail. Airport Boulevard is the most prime corridor for either BRT like true BRT or light rail. You have, through certain sections, an enormous center median and then in areas where the center median shrinks you have really wide right of ways that are not being utilized on either side of the roadway. So it is a massive corridor that could really see some some really incredible development and, as you said, lewis, there's so much new residential and commercial development that's starting to happen in this corridor that I'm really hopeful that gets put onto a roadmap soon.
Speaker 1:Totally this encompasses a few routes, so I'm kind of putting it into the bucket of Southeast Austin. Changes in Southeast Austin as far as transit goes, although some of these routes will extend further out. The biggest piece of this is Route 300 is getting a major change. The 300 is the second busiest route in the entire city with 2.2 million riders annually and when you look at it on a map initially it looks kind of confusing because it basically the 300 today does like a big C shape, going from Crestview in the north, over into East Austin, down into Southeast Austin and then cutting across on Old Torf, eventually hitting South Lamar and ending at the Westgate Transit Center. It is a really long route. It often sees a lot of delays but is always very, very busy anytime. I've been on it and I see it around all the time because it goes so many places.
Speaker 1:So with the the change, the southern portion of the 300 is now going to, once you get to like the Riverside Pleasant Valley area is going to, once you get to like the riverside pleasant valley area is going to merge in and go straight down south into southeast austin, kind of mirroring the end of the new rapid 800 route. It is also the end of what used to be and this we'll get to this in a second. It's like the current route seven in south austin, so it is a big change, mostly because of how many people ride it. But I actually parts of me likes this and parts of me doesn't. I'll explain the doesn't in a little bit. I'll kind of get to the other, explain the other changes and then we can kind of go from there.
Speaker 1:So what is being done with the old 300 route section that goes across old Torf is it's being turned into the new, much shorter route 331. So this new route will go from the Westgate Transit Center and we'll kind of go up South Lamar, go across old Torf and we'll eventually end at the new light rail station at Pleasant Valley. Important to note that this route intersects both the 803, the 801, the end of the light rail on old wharf and the end of the light rail on pleasant valley, as well as two hebs. So, um, a shorter route, but it it hits a lot of places essentially it's the potential of uh.
Speaker 2:It's a really good feeder route to get you into the more rapid routes that are going to take you into downtown and the places that you need to go, or, like you said, to get to heb and other like really important business centers right, yeah, and it'll definitely feed people into into those light rails.
Speaker 1:Now the thing that this kind of does for southeast austin though that I don't necessarily love is that southeast austin could get a one-seat ride to downtown on the 7 today.
Speaker 1:But now the 7 starts in republic square and still does the same section north, but it doesn't go into Southeast Austin. So now if you're in Southeast Austin in those same kind of neighborhoods that it served, you can only now get on the new 300 route or the new 800 route as well as some other more minor routes, but none of them go directly into downtown Austin. They all kind of either take you up into east austin or connect you to a feeder route or, sorry, feed you into the light rail. So it's kind of forcing a transfer in an area that didn't require a transfer before. However, it is now a transfer to rail. So definitely some you know weighing out options for folks in that area and for transit planners who are kind of trying to make those decisions. Definitely, I thought it was an interesting one to look at, and it's like it's got to be difficult to make some of these decisions when you're talking about changing the busiest bus routes in the city, you know yeah.
Speaker 2:And especially trying to figure out what is the city going to look like in 10 years. I mean, austin changes frequently. Having been here 13 years, it feels like a completely different city in some aspects. But even that area of southeast Austin is going to go through a major transformation. So you know, these things are really subject to change.
Speaker 1:There are a million different routes that you could call out in this transit plan. There's one more I wanted to talk about specifically because we did kind of an entire episode talking about one development along this route. We did an episode I forget what we called it, but it was something like how can you make better suburbs? Uh, this was right after we did an interview with street craft, um, which was this is like probably like episode five or something, which is pretty funny especially considering we're on, like I don't even know, 85 or 90 or something.
Speaker 2:Now I don't even know this episode's approaching 90, which is crazy, pretty wild.
Speaker 1:But so this time we wanted to talk about Route 30, which is actually no longer going to be Route 30. It's going to turn into Route 8, and it passes the development that we talked about, which is called the Grove, which is kind of a mixed-use development that has everything from a few single-family homes to townhouses, to apartment buildings, commercial offices, a beautiful park. And while we were talking about that episode, we were saying that you know, it was a really bikeable part of town. They were building and it's now open a great bridge that connects to a really key bike trail system in Austin along Shoal Creek Boulevard, really key bike trail system in Austin along Shoal Creek Boulevard.
Speaker 1:And we were saying that there's a lot of potential for transit because you did have a one seat ride on the then 30 to downtown but that the 30 really only ran every half an hour, which kind of sucks, if we're being honest.
Speaker 1:Like every half an hour bus is just not great. You really do have to plan around it. But with this plan, the new route eight redesigns that old route and increases the frequency to every 15 minutes. So the new Route 8 will still kind of follow the same route of the old 30 in North Austin, starting up on Anderson Boulevard, going through the Far West neighborhood and then kind of zigzagging its way back into downtown, before then kind of jutting out towards kind of into further West Austin but staying north of the river, whereas the old 30 used to just do this wild zigzag through Southwest Austin and it was an extremely long and windy route. And I don't have the statistics in front of me on what the on-time performance of the 30 used to be, but just based on how long and windy the route is, my guess is it wasn't good.
Speaker 2:Um, so if you wanted to take a tour of West Austin, you got to see everything, cause it just that is true Everything in West Austin, uh, uh, and unfortunately, this route is actually the one that's closest to my house, and it still doesn't get any closer.
Speaker 1:So, cabmetro, if you're listening, we should talk yeah, hit up, chris needs a, maybe you get a pickup zone. Yeah, there you go. But yeah, I mean again, there were a million different ways that, a million different things we can look into with this. I will say, if you're interested in learning more about that area that we were talking about on the 30, I think that was a fun episode we did earlier on on the Grove, so we'll make sure it's linked. But I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's interesting to think about the planning for cities, whether it be in Austin or anywhere, when you are doing these big infrastructure projects.
Speaker 1:Like, don't get me wrong, I'm really excited about the light rail coming into Austin, but when we're talking about phase one, phase one is not the full vision of the light rail. So you know I, in my view, you can't really start to think too much about you know, like I like to me, I think it's imperative to keep the 801 and the 803 running their full distances, just so you're not forcing so many awkward transfers. I totally understand the arguments for running them as feeders, but I think that you know I, in my example of where I used to live, both myself and my partner jerry, we used to ride down. My partner worked at ut so we were going down there quite a bit. To get from my old place just north of the triangle to ut, we would require us getting on a bus to to just to go down to 38th and then transfer to get on the light rail at 38th to go another stop, basically to ut. Like that feels pretty ridiculous, honestly. Like that doesn't? That feels clunky, extremely clunky.
Speaker 2:Well, sounds like the opportunity to break out the e-bike well, and that's I mean to be fair.
Speaker 1:we were mostly just doing the e-bike before that trip, but not everyone is going to bike, I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think that it's an interesting thing to be taking a going to change when you make such a large change or make this big addition to your transit network and the light rail is that it is a good disruption to what currently exists, and it's a fun puzzle to try to figure out. And then I'm even more excited to see, once we get past phase one, what does it look like in the future If we get to a phase two. When we get to a phase two, when to a phase two, uh, when, when? That's what I said. I crossed my fingers and said when, when we get to a phase two, uh, what that's going to look like. But seeing these, um, seeing these changes is really exciting. There may be a few growing pains along the way, but, um, I think it's a good thing for austin absolutely, uh, cap metro is looking for feedback on this.
Speaker 1:we'll make sure links to the actual maps and all the information are included below, because there was a ton more than we could include in just this video. With all that being said, though, if you have not liked this video already, please consider doing so. It helps us out quite a bit. You can also leave a comment. Let us know what you think of Transit Plan 2035 in Austin, and if you want to support the show directly the best ways to do so, so via our Patreon buy me a coffee or checking out our merch store down below, but without further ado. Thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit Tangents Tuesday.