AUSTIN, Texas — The first small steps toward starting a commuter rail line for Central Texas that would run from Georgetown through Round Rock, Austin, San Marcos and New Braunfels into San Antonio are being taken this week. The results won’t be seen for years, but it’s important that the area get started now, according to an editorial in the Austin American-Statesman.
Over the next two or three decades the Austin metropolitan population is expected to double to more than 2 million people — the same number, it feels on some days, as cars sitting today on the freeways at “rush” hour.
Even after accounting for expansion of the Central Texas highway system, transportation planners aren’t holding out hope that, once built, those new roads will clear up congestion.
To enable people to move, they say, will require not only the highway and road system, but rail — both light rail for local area travel and full-sized passenger trains to move between the larger cities.
On Tuesday, the Travis and Bexar county commissioners courts voted to join the city of Austin in a new rail district; the San Antonio City Council is expected to act by the end of the month.
They are not moving boldly where no city has gone before, not even in Texas. The Dallas-Fort Worth area already has the Trinity Railway Express daily moving commuter trains between the two cities’ downtowns. The railroad was projected to be moving about 6,500 people a day by now; instead, it’s moving about 7,800 a day.
It may well take a decade or two before we see passenger trains moving with dependable regularity and frequency through Central Texas. There’s no guarantee such a thing will come to pass.
But if it does, it appears the first step will involve freight, not passengers, according to local government leaders studying the project.
The idea is this: Move the 27 or so Union Pacific freight trains that rumble daily through the heart of Austin to east of the city, onto new rails that would be built along the new Texas 130, whose construction is about to begin. New, out-of-town tracks should provide a faster route for the railroad and the freight it carries, perhaps luring shippers who now use trucks to switch to trains.
But the larger, long-range purpose would be to free up the Union Pacific track through Austin for a commuter train line. Anyone who has ever had to pick up or drop off someone at the downtown Amtrak station knows that the scheduled arrival and departure times of the Texas Eagle are signs of hope, not faith, because freight trains have priority on the Union Pacific track. So, if the UP line is to be used for passengers, the freight trains must be shifted elsewhere.
That Central Texas might need a rail system at all might seem a bit strange to a community in which comparatively few of its members have ever used one in their daily lives. Most of us don’t even use a bus.
But we’re kidding ourselves if we think that more highways alone will enable us to travel routinely at 70 mph between work and home, or anywhere else, as the population doubles. This is a chance to try to get ahead of the growth — or at least keep up with it. Let’s not assume that transportation needs will, somehow, take care of themselves in time. They won’t.