AUSTIN, Texas — On Friday, developers released new details on their plans for a new light rail and the design. Project Connect is the multibillion-dollar, voter approved initiative to revamp of the city’s transit system that will add light rail to Austin.
The Austin Transit Partnership submitted its Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the first phase of the light rail project to the Federal Transit Administration.
The comprehensive document explains how the light rail project will affect the current environment, examines the potential environmental consequences of implementing the project, and includes ways to mitigate the potential impacts.
The National Environmental Policy Act requires it as part of the federal grant funding process. The project hopes to get federal grant funding for about 50% of the capital cost, with the other half coming from local funding. ATP is in the roughly two-year process of trying to secure around $4 billion to build out light rail.
“It’s a very comprehensive document, thinking about every angle of what it means to introduce light rail into Austin, whether when we’re constructing it or when it’s operating over the long term,” Jennifer Pyne, Executive Vice President for Planning Community and Federal Programs with Austin Transit Partnership said. “We invite people to take a look at that and dive in and understand all the impacts and provide comments and feedback about what we’re thinking and studying.”
The several billion dollar light rail project will add almost 10 new miles of light rail and 15 light rail stations through the city.
The route for the first phase of the light rail runs from UT and goes on Guadalupe Street from 38th Street to downtown, and from downtown to the east along East Riverside and south on South Congress to Oltorf.
“It would be running every five to 10 minutes during most of the day,” Pyne said. “It’s a very frequent service, the kind of service where you don’t have to consult a schedule. You just know that it’s coming.”
Pyne said the system is expandable. Both the Crestview neighborhood and the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and the Crestview neighborhood are among the priority extensions that project leaders are considering, but neither is included in the first phase of the plan.
“While those are not in the environmental study, we are working on those,” Pyne said. “We’re very much coordinated, especially with the city, the airport, and TxDOT, to plan for the future of those extensions.”
In 2020, Austin voters approved a $7.1 billion bond that included bringing light rail to the capital city. The city’s plans for building out Project Connect have been contentious. The plan was drastically scaled back in 2023 after inflation and rising costs pushed its price tag past $11 billion.
Project leaders want to integrate the train with bike lanes, bus routes, urban trails, sidewalks, and park-and-ride systems.
“That it is a nature-based design is important to how people view what’s important in Austin, but also has a practical effect by providing shade and have people be comfortable whether they’re waiting for the train or getting to or from the system,” Pyne said. “We’re building light rail, but as part of that, we’re also providing new bike paths and sidewalks as part of the project so that every rider is a pedestrian at some point in their journey. We think very clearly about how all those different transportation modes connect.”
ATP released new recommended station designs as part of the documents released on Friday. Pyne said the recommendations are based on community feedback gathered in 2023.
They include elevating the Waterfront Station, extending the rail bridge over Lady Bird Lake, and moving the Faro station closer to Grove Boulevard in the East Riverside area to better serve residents of an affordable housing project on a 107-acre lot the city recently purchased.
“That station location we recommend is to catalyze that development kind of and support what the city’s trying to achieve there, but also that’s a better connection to the ACC Riverside campus up on Grove,” Pyne said.
They are also planning to add a new station at Wooldridge Square downtown.
“This was very community driven in that there was a lot of interest in having more stations downtown that then we had been showing and having closer station spacing in the downtown area, where you’ve got a lot more density of jobs and people,” Pyne said.
The plans released on Friday also include the creation of an urban greenway along East Riverside.
“We can have bike paths and sidewalks be running in the middle of the street next to light rail in a very shaded area,” Pyne said. “It helps people get to and from the train in a pleasant way, but also, in that area, there are less continuous bike paths and sidewalks, and so this remedies that situation.”
The documents include research conducted by ATP over the last year and a half on Austinite’s behavior and how they use and interact with public transportation.
“We were monitoring their stress levels and how they navigated the system. The people that participated in that research project were young, old, people with mobility constraints, and visually impaired people so that we could get a wide range of experience,” Pyne said. “That work helps us think about how the stations should be designed so that they’re accessible for everybody.”
The Austin Transit Partnership hopes to start phase one of rail construction in 2027. Pyne said they are also thinking ahead to the construction and how to mitigate some of its impacts.
They are looking to create a business assistance plan to help businesses along the corridor that might be affected by the construction activities.
“We would like to work together with those businesses on what kind of support would be appropriate and useful to get ready for construction, as well as the requirements we should have on our construction activities and contractors,” Pyne said. “Whether it’s accessing driveways, making sure deliveries get through, making sure customers know how to get into businesses.”
Community members can now offer feedback during a public comment period that will run through March 11. Project leaders will incorporate the comments and input into the final Environmental Impact Statement, which they plan to release in late 2025.
Four public meetings are planned for later this month. At these meetings, the community will receive an update on the Austin Light Rail design progress and have a chance to ask questions of project leaders.
The four meetings are scheduled for:
- Thursday, Jan. 16, at Lively Middle School from 4:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m.
- Wednesday, Jan. 22, at the Baker Center from 4:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m.
- Saturday, Jan. 25, at the Montopolis Recreation Center from 2:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
- Tuesday, Jan. 28, at the University of Texas at Austin in the Texas Union Building Quadrangle Room from 1 p.m.-4 p.m.
CapMetro will introduce and begin testing two new Rapid bus routes included in the plan this weekend. One route is the Pleasant Valley line, and the other is from downtown to the Travis County Expo Center. Both are in the route testing phase and will not pick up passengers yet. Service on these two routes will begin for customers in Spring 2025.
As state lawmakers prepare to gavel in the 89th legislative session next week, an effort is underway to restructure funding for Project Connect/
The ballot measure that initiated Project Connect in 2020 was billions less and offered significantly more routes than current plans for the project. Republicans spoke up when the city of Austin turned to taxes to make up for the budget shortfall. During the last legislative session, there was an effort to cap Project Connect’s funding to the $7 billion voters agreed to in 2020. If the project needs additional funds, it would require approval from voters again.
“This doesn’t stop the project,” State Rep. Ellen Troxclair, R-Fredericksburg, told KVUE in 2023. “It doesn’t do anything other than require them to put the project on the ballot with the correct wording with a specific amount of money so the taxpayers know what they’re signing up for.”
That effort failed, but according to the Austin American-Statesman, Troxclair plans to revive the effort this session.
Mayor Kirk Watson said he plans to continue advocating for light rail, and if a ballot measure is needed to make it happen, he expects Austin voters to pass it again.
Last month, a lawsuit to stop the city of Austin from collecting millions of dollars in property taxes for Project Connect was dismissed. Bill Aleshire, the attorney for the group opposing the project, said he plans to appeal.
Two parts of Project Connect have already been built: the on-demand rideshare program Pickup in the Dove Springs area, launched in January 2024, plus the February 2024 opening of McKalla Station on the Red Line commuter rail next to Q2 Stadium.