Passenger rail connecting Austin and San Antonio proposed

Rail connecting central Texas cities proposed

As the state's population grows, so does traffic on heavily travelled roadways. But some say there may be another option; FOX 7's Mike Warren speaks with Travis County Commissioner's Court Judge Andy Brown for more.

AUSTIN, Texas - As the state's population grows, so does traffic on heavily-traveled roadways, but some say there may be another option.

FOX 7 Austin's Mike Warren spoke with Travis County Commissioner's Court Judge Andy Brown for more.

______________________________

MIKE WARREN: This week, you met with your counterpart in Bexar County, the county judge there, to talk about possible passenger rail connecting Austin and San Antonio. What was the nature of those conversations?

ANDY BROWN: Yeah, just that we live in a dynamic, booming part of the world, and it's one of the only parts of the world where you've got metropolitan areas the size of Austin and Travis County, San Antonio and Bexar County, close enough to each other to where you should have passenger rail. But for some reason we don't. And so we're trying to figure out how to get that as soon as possible so that people can drive, go to a Spurs game in San Antonio and see it safely, and come back that same night without having to drive on I-35.

MIKE WARREN: This sort of proposal has been looked at in the past and considered. Would it have a better shot of happening now?

ANDY BROWN: I think it would. The things that are different now about Austin and Travis County is that we have Tesla here. We've got a professional soccer team. We've got Circuit of the Americas. It has a massive race a couple times a year. And then San Antonio, of course, is growing as well. It has the Spurs. The growth that we're seeing dictates that we really need to have passenger rail, and I think the desire to have it is there. When I spoke with Judge Sakai the other day at the Austin Area Research Organization, the biggest applause that we got the whole time was when we were talking about connecting the two counties by passenger rail. And you had in that audience people from the chamber, people who are interested in different ways of getting around. You had a huge spectrum of people in that room and I think everyone agrees that we need to have this.

Austin Project Connect light rail system design finalized

Austin officials have decided on a final design and route for the $6 billon Project Connect light rail system. While this is a big step forward, the proposed railway is now only about a third of the size originally approved by voters.

MIKE WARREN: What would be the cost, and who pays for it?

ANDY BROWN: There's a lot of players in that game of getting passenger rail. So the federal government is a big one. President Biden put $65 billion towards expanding the rail infrastructure in the United States. But the Texas Department of Transportation, and even CAMPO, which helps plan transportation in the region. All of them have a role in it, as well as the counties and the cities in that area. And so, the next step for us would be to get some kind of environmental study done between Austin and San Antonio. There's a high speed rail option that Texas Central is working on, that they're trying to make it go from Dallas to College Station to Houston. And so one option could be we extend that from College Station to Austin to San Antonio, and that would be an amazing high speed option. Another one is just kind of increasing the service that Amtrak already provides, but making it better, maybe adding some rail to that service so that instead of one train each direction, each day, you'd have 5 to 10 trains on that track each day. It'd be more reliable, more consistent. And you'd know if you lived in San Marcos or New Braunfels or somewhere in between, and you commuted each day to Austin or commuted to San Antonio, you'd know that you had a reliable, safe way to get to work. And so that would help us with affordability concerns in Austin and Travis County. And just the fact that a lot of people are kind of tired of driving on I-35.

MORE TRANSPORTATION STORIES

MIKE WARREN: And talking about the price tag. Do you guys have any sort of rough estimate? I mean, millions? Billions? Trillions? How much?

ANDY BROWN: I don't know the answer to that. I think the first step that Texas Central would have us do is get an environmental impact study done to see where the train would go, what obstacles it has, are there eminent domain issues or, a question I've had all along, couldn't we do this along I-35? I'm told we can't, but some other people think that maybe there's a way to use the right of way that's already there for I-35. So, I'm no expert on the costs of construction or the cost of eminent domain. It would likely be expensive. But I've also heard of a study done where I think they said we have something like 20 million trips per year, I believe, between Austin and San Antonio that are currently done in cars. If we had a reliable passenger train service, that would take, I believe they said, one fourth of those trips off the road. So about 5 million trips a year. So it would benefit people who are taking the train. It would also benefit people who are driving because there will be fewer cars on the road. So, again, I think we're in a different place today than we were the last time that people tried this. I think there's more support potentially at the Texas legislature, definitely with the national government and definitely with local governments along that path.