I was appalled by the sticker price for a tunnel to get rail part of the way north from the Hancock Center to the Highland Mall.  This sticker price has come down: from a range of $230-290M to $220M.  But it is still truly appalling: the capital costs for that short tunnel alone would be about twice the capital cost of the entire MetroRail system which is forcing a tunnel in the first place and more than 4 times the capital cost of the entire MetroRapid bus improvements that led planners to rule out a route west of the University. It would cost more than going from Travis Heights all the way to 15th Street, including a brand new signature rail/bike/pedestrian bridge over Lady Bird Lake and tracks through dense downtown.

I wasn’t alone in being appalled. At a Transit Forum hosted by Austin Monitor and KUT, I asked a question of Council Member (and CapMetro board member) Mike Martinez on the Hancock tunnel via twitter, and he said that if we had to tunnel (as Project Connect says we must), the costs go up “exponentially.” Mayor Leffingwell has said in the press that he’d like to see the $1.4B price tag for the whole route be brought down to $1B. The Hancock tunnel is an obvious first place to cut. Many early supporters of Project Connect’s plans are now cautioning against including a Hancock tunnel on the ballot. And in project lead Kyle Keahey’s testimony, he sounded almost desperate to find a way to avoid the costs of a Hancock tunnel.  Even if decision makers hold their noses and vote to advance the entire $1.4B project, there’s little reason to believe that voters will do the same in November.

In light of this setback, we have to rethink more than just the tunnel, but rather the entire northern segment of the urban rail. Originally, Highland was sold as a low-cost segment with room for growth in the Highland Mall redevelopment, the old Concordia site, and along the newly re-zoned Airport Blvd Transit Corridor. Whatever you thought about the potential for these destinations to encourage ridership on a rail line (and I was skeptical), rail reaches none of them without the tunnel. Instead, it would merely run along a street not designated as a Transit corridor, through a neighborhood of mostly single-family homes that have largely struggled against becoming another University-adjacent density hotspot like West Campus, and then come to an ignominious end at a golf course and an auto-oriented strip mall.  Without the Hancock tunnel, the whole raison d’etre of this route goes away.

If that were all, that would be disappointing. A medium-cost, low-ridership train is not great.  But this low-ridership segment of the route threatens far worse: it could make future rail plans with higher opportunity impossible. This has happened to Austin twice already.  The low-ridership, low-cost MetroRail ended up badly hemming in this route, forcing a tunnel that cost twice as much as the system itself, something that few could’ve foreseen when MetroRail was being approved.  The low-cost MetroRapid gave planners reason to fear placing this rail route along the city’s most productive transit corridor.  A low-ridership segment from UT to Hancock could do immense damage to future flexibility in laying rail lines.  Funding a rail line that hits a hard stop before it reaches its density could end up preventing funding for parallel rail lines along more dense parts of Austin as “duplicative.”  And for what?  Unless city planners have a secret plan to get rid of MetroRail, we will face the same high tunneling costs next time we look into extending rail.  We will have essentially backed ourselves into a dead-end that will be very difficult and expensive to get out of.  Even for those who believe that rail should go to Mueller, this would remove routing flexibility from any planning efforts.

The best thing for CCAG and City Council to do is say that, in light of the new information they have on the costs of the Hancock tunnel, they will forego a vote on the more controversial, risky, poorer-thought-out northern segment of the route, advance the southern segment on its own, and come back to revisit the question of the northern route later.

When I compared Urban Rail corridors a few months back, my findings were pretty straightforward: the Guadalupe-Lamar corridor, including a growth-crazy West Campus, along with the Riverside subcorridor, would both have crazy high ridership.  Highland was middling at best, and only scored highly under the strange rules PC decided to use. Despite the main objection to it – that it would make it more difficult to come back later and ask for money for the powerhouse Guadalupe-Lamar corridor – few thought that it would in itself be a major cost driver as an addition to a Riverside-UT route.

No longer.  Project Connect has unveiled the price tags on the Highland subcorridor and they are jaw-dropping.  What was originally conceived of–and sold to the public–as a cheap project will contain a tunnel priced at either $230M or $290M in order to avoid a rail-rail intersection between urban rail and the existing MetroRail.

Cost Comparison 1

This project goes:

• 3.1 miles from Riverside and Grove to Travis Heights
• across the river on a brand new purpose-built bridge at Trinity ($75M)
• 1.4 miles through dense downtown traffic ($100M)
• 1 mile through the dense university setting
• 3 miles up Red River
• 8 blocks from Red River to Airport ($230-290M)
• A final jaunt to Highland Mall

In that long route, about half of the entire project’s cost may come from that tiny 8 neighborhood blocks from Red River to Airport.  Half for 8 blocks, and the other half for 8 miles that includes a river crossing, a major university, and a major downtown!  Madness! [See update below.]

Comparison 2

$230M (let alone $290M) is the cost of the entire MetroRapid bus upgrade ($47M) and the entire 32 mile-long MetroRail project ($120M) put together, with tens of millions to spare.  We could have dedicated bus lanes all over the city, a whole network of efficient, traffic-proofed transit, for the cost of one measly rail tunnel out in a not-particularly-dense part of town.

It is precisely because I am a transit advocate who is personally transit-dependent that I am so appalled by these numbers. It is not the fact that this project is expensive; all infrastructure is pretty expensive.  It’s the fact that the project so wastefully spends our very rare transit dollars.  $230M is real money that could be going toward real infrastructure around the city!

Two caveats here: 1) Project Connect says that these numbers are still being refined, and 2) I have yet to see a number released for what would be necessary if they ran buses instead of rail (possibly much, much cheaper, because they’re eliminating the rail-rail intersection).

But if this is what it looks like, it just looks like Austin’s rail plans have hit a major snag.  If it’s going to cost $230M+ to extend this rail line so that it hits Highland Mall, the only reasonable course of action is: don’t do it.  Connecting the new ACC would be nice for $10M.  For $30M, that’s stretching it.  For $230M, that’s crazy talk.

Update:

In the comments, Novacek and Lyndon Henry give better cost estimates.  The total cost per both of their estimates comes to just about $1B, leaving the rail tunnel to be about a quarter of the cost, not a half.  I’m still struck by how, at the beginning of the process we were told that the Highland route was the ultimate low-cost and the Riverside route the ultimate high cost.  Instead, we’re seeing that inverted.  Riverside is looking low cost, even including a brand-new bridge, and Highland very high cost.

Austin just hosted our largest annual conference / festival, SXSW.  This festival brings in many out-of-towners, as well as concentrating locals in central Austin. I think it can serve as a basic stress-test on our city’s infrastructure, to identify what issues we are like to see as our growth continues. The future will not look exactly like SXSW (I hope!), but it may well involve more and more people in our downtown. Here are my first-glance takeaways, based mostly on impressions from being downtown, rather than numbers:

• The belle of the transportation ball at this year’s SXSW was Austin Bcycle, the new bike-sharing program deployed mostly in downtown, but scheduled to expand later. They have released more exact numbers, but impressionistically, there were a lot of these bikes downtown and yet it scaled very well. I passed tons of the bike racks and didn’t see any full (i.e. it can’t accept bikes parking) or empty (i.e. no bikes to rent). I do fear that as this program expands outside of downtown, it will hit the zoning straitjacket around downtown, as pretty much every direction around downtown is surrounded by neighborhoods where zoning is unwelcoming to new development, and therefore, the possibility of expanding to new residents or workers. Bike-sharing worked so spectacularly because of the short distances between dense destinations. It may have difficulty expanding to a longer “density-only-on-the-corridors” development model, of riding bikes on either large arterial streets or small, un-dense streets. Within downtown, the planned bike lanes will help a lot.
• The other great winner was the Great Streets Program of, among other things, expanded sidewalks. This is the first year that I felt like downtown was a true walking city and the Great Streets program was a huge part of that. In part, this is simply because there’s more room to walk on the expanded sidewalks. But another of it is that there are so many more people out on the sidewalks at restaurant tables and the like, creating a much more pedestrian-friendly environment.
• The downtown transit-priority lanes were overall a positive, but with some serious downsides. The positives:

1. They really do work at getting buses moving faster.  I definitely saw buses moving past stopped traffic. Car-drivers really did follow the rules. This is only one item, but it’s a doozy.
2. By putting the buses together on one street, it gives them a “presence” they never had when spread out among many streets.  Waiting at a bus stop with 40 other people, you really do get the feeling that taking the bus is a normal and accepted activity, rather than the weird activity it may have been perceived of in the past. It also simplifies catching the bus and gives people who can take multiple routes much better frequency.

• The negatives:

1. Putting them on Guadalupe/Lavaca instead of Congress was a fundamental and large mistake. During the urban rail planning process, the mayor has repeatedly emphasized that the center of downtown is moving east, meaning that it’s moving away from the transit-priority lane. One simple and cost-free way the city could ameliorate this is simply expanding CBD (Central Business District) or DMU (Downtown Mixed-Use) zoning to the rest of downtown. Just blocks from one of downtown’s two transit stops, there’s a large corner of downtown that looks pretty much like a suburb. More residents and workplaces there will mean more people able to take advantage of walking to those stops.
2. Putting them on Guadalupe/Lavaca instead of Congress was a decision made to help automobile traffic on Congress, not to help buses. In the process, this has also made Congress a much worse pedestrian street. The buses may have slowed traffic on Congress, but slowed traffic was a positive for pedestrians. Congress is a very wide street at 6 lanes of traffic plus two lanes of parking. Without any buses to slow it down, walking along it felt less like it used to of walking along Austin’s front door and a bit more like walking along a highway. Running more transit (buses or urban rail) along the street and expanding the program to rent the current parking lane to local businesses would both make it more comfortable for pedestrians.
3. Putting all the bus lines together may have helped route simplicity and created a more intangible presence, but it also created serious bus bunching problems. In just a few visits to the area, I saw buses backed up 6 deep. I saw buses blocking intersections for a full walk cycle, preventing any pedestrian crossing. This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed and fast, if the buses are all to move to Guadalavaca.

• Parking infrastructure Austin’s parking infrastructure held up well. With tons of surface parking lots converted into concert spaces, people still managed to park. The cost of parking rose quite a bit, and this, along with the traffic, definitely induced some people to take public transportation instead of driving a car downtown. Downtown does not need more parking and, to the extent that prices rose, the private market will surely be able to decide to provision more if needed.
• The real-time signage for both the 801 and the MetroRail were major failures. I heard story after story from friends of seeing signage that was wildly wrong for both. I myself decided to pass up taking the 801 because the real-time sign said the next bus would come in 22 minutes, only to have a bus pass me walking on foot 3 minutes later. I don’t see much of a policy issue, but c’mon, Cap Metro, get your act together. If you can’t get it right, then turn the signs off; putting out wrong information is 10X worse than putting out no information.
• The MetroRail was a mixed bag. On the positive side, it ran more full than ever, including running an extra train. On the negative side: 1) the major issues that it has always been there remains: it’s just very expensive to run per passenger. In addition, it seemed to have scaled fairly poorly. The train ran late through most of the festival and many passengers at the closer-in stops were passed by as trains were already filled by the time they reached central Austin. The beauty of public transportation is supposed to be that, as more passengers ride it, it gets better, but the opposite seems to have happened with MetroRail.
• The downtown automobile lanes were pretty much a failure. They came to a standstill during many hours of the festival. Unlike the public transportation, however, the car lanes seem like pretty much a lost cause. There is no way for them to expand easily and as we hit SXSW-style densities, they pretty much fail. Seeing how colossally they failed, highway expansions seems like a very questionable goal. The idea of spending gobs of money to revamp I35 in order to speed more cars into a downtown that can’t handle them seems like true folly. Much better to focus on cross-town connectivity, so that people can make shorter bike and transit trips from the East side across I-35 and the West side across MoPac. In addition, as the city expands, it seems that we are going to need to devote a greater percentage of our downtown roads to more efficient lanes that can carry more people than the current automobile-dominated lanes, such as transit-0nly or bike-only lanes.

Admittedly, many of these impressions are not far from what I believed previously, so perhaps I only saw what I wanted to see.  What was your impression?  What did you see?

Today is the first day that the 101, 1L, and 1M bus routes have been consolidated into the 1 and 801 routes. Let’s look at the new face of service along Austin’s central transit corridor: between downtown and UT.  There’s a lot of choices: routes 1,3,5,19, and 801 all have service between downtown and UT’s Westmall, for a total of 8 buses leaving from downtown for Westmall from 1PM until 2PM today (Sunday).  Not as good as peak UT shuttle service (15 buses per hour), but certainly not bad for Sunday service. Given how frequent they are and how variable on-time performance and walk-time from home to the stop can be, there shouldn’t be any point in looking up a schedule. 8 buses per hour is past the tipping point where it’s more effective to just show up and wait for the next bus than plan which bus you intend to take.

Varying Departure Points Hurts Frequency

If I were travelling from Westmall to downtown, that is exactly what I would do.  Unfortunately, my effective frequency northbound is much lower. Of those eight buses, two of them are route #3, which pick up on Brazos.  Three of them are route #801, which pick up on Lavaca.  One each are route #1 and #5, both of which pick up on Congress.  The last one is a #19, which picks up on Colorado or further north up Congress. No stop downtown has Westmall-bound buses coming more often than 3 per hour. From 8 per hour to 3 per hour changes transit-riding from being an easy, automatic, show-up-at-your-stop-and-don’t-worry mode of transportation to a riding-is-an-art mode where you have to keep an eye on the clock and the schedule, know which routes tend to run early or late, and have lots of knowledge of which routes run where and when.

There’s no good reason

During the years of road work on Brazos, routes 1L, 1M, 3, 5, and 101 all used to travel together up Congress, creating exactly the kind of easy transit corridor I’m discussing. Disappointingly, though, Capital Metro never spent the energy promoting the ease of use of this central transit corridor at the time as they did promoting the much-less-frequented Red Line. Indeed, during most of that time, Google Maps incorrectly reported the route 3 as still running up Brazos. Eventually, the 1, 5, and 19 will join the 801 on Lavaca and the 3 will be replaced by the 803 also on Lavaca, but they easily could have moved the 1, 5, and/or 19 over sooner.  Instead they chose to move other routes (the 7 and 20) from Congress to Lavaca first.

It’s About A System

As I said, this problem will be fixed.  What I fear for the future, though, is that this reflects on a pattern of transportation planners here in Austin doing a poor job of organizing the system as a whole. In discussing the introduction of the 801 route, CapMetro CEO Linda Watson and CapMetro staff go so far in removing the 801 from the context of the bus system they start to sound simply detached from reality–CapMetro staff can’t bring themselves to call the buses “buses” and CEO Linda Watson seems to share the delusion. (For the record, I don’t dislike buses; I just like reality.) Is it any wonder that when the organization’s leadership sees the 801 as not-a-bus operating outside the bus system, the new schedule fails to coordinate it effectively with its dowtown-to-Westmall bus siblings?

Organization Before Electronics Before Concrete

Why do I care so much about this oversight, that will eventually be fixed?  Transportation blogger Alon Levy introduced me to the German idea of “Organization, before electronics, before Concrete.”  In the context of his post, he’s discussing how transportation planners in New York and Philadelphia have found it easier to spend lots of money on new tunnels than deal with the difficult political issues in coordinating different agencies.  We have had our own version of that in Austin, where transit planners argued against even discussing coordinating better with our funding partners in the federal government to better serve the central transit corridor. But if voters don’t have confidence that you are doing the most to organize with the money you have, why would they vote to give you more?