On November 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Austin voters foolishly agreed to raise property taxes in order to build 28 miles of light rail at a projected cost of $5.8 billion. To avoid congestion, the downtown portion of light-rail lines would go through a four-mile-long tunnel.
Artist’s impression of light rail running near downtown Austin.
No one reading this blog will be surprised to know that, in the short amount of time since then, projected costs have nearly doubled to $10.3 billion. Early this week, the city’s transit planners announced a new plan that would build fewer than half as many miles of light rail.
Austin already had what the Federal Transit Administration calls a “hybrid-rail” line, which essentially a Diesel-powered light-rail line built on an existing rail line. Before the pandemic, it was carrying 1,327 round-trips per day. As of 2021, this had fallen to 387, and preliminary data suggest this increased to about 450 in 2022. The proposed light-rail lines will do a little better than that because they will go where people go rather than where an existing rail line went, but light-rail ridership certainly won’t justify the multi-billion-dollar cost.
Austin’s transit planners are offering five alternatives that trade off miles of transit for exclusive rights-of-way. An exclusive right-of-way means faster transit, but is more expensive so it means fewer miles. Either way, Austin is not going to get what voters were promised in 2020.
Instead of spending billions on a lot of obsolete infrastructure, Austin transit should rely on buses that can move more people without needing dedicated infrastructure. The advantage of dedicated infrastructure is that it can move people faster, but if high costs force Austin to give up on dedicated tunnels or elevated lines, then the streetcars it ends up with will be worse than buses because buses can go anywhere the streets go and won’t have to wait until 2029 (the earliest any light-rail lines might open) to begin operations.
One big question is why Austin officials are willing to build a system that is costing so much more than was originally promised. The sad truth is that, within the transit industry, transit agencies are judged based on their inputs, not their outputs. Transit executives who run efficient bus systems are paid less than executives who run bloated rail lines. Politicians have a whacky idea that they have to have obsolete transit systems to be considered “world-class cities.”
Austin residents should revolt against the revised plans. If they aren’t getting what they were promised, they should repeal the regressive taxes being used to pay for rail transit and direct Capital Metro to run an efficient bus system.
