Every strip mall along the light rail route should be redeveloped into a pedestrian and transit friendly small shopping area with offices and apartments over the shops
@heyevizzle It's already happening via private investment in most cases. People want to live near reliable transit. A few of the projects are linked in the description of this video.
Thanks for uploading this! Absolutely LOVE the 3D layout you put on the stations I'm planning to make a video of this with drone shots when it gets warmer and make some vertical content
Drone stuff would be amazing of some of these areas! Are you Austin based? If so, reach out! Happy to work together on some related stuff if you are interested! -Louis
UT stations are gonna be interesting for sure. Lamar seems like the obvious alternate route but congestion has been an issue for a while. Lets hope ridership offsets a fair bit of car traffic in the area! Thanks for the overview, looking forward to part 2.
Transportation engineer here in ATX, very excited for project connect. I wanted to say there is a SPUI being built on 290 right now with the expansion there, so the one on I-35 won’t be THE first but one of the first
Thanks for sharing! Reach out if you have any fun projects you get to work on that you think could be interesting for an episode! Also, part II just came out this morning! -Louis
@@TheDanEdwards I’m a student in Denver that grew up in Texas. I still visit Austin multiple times a year. I feel like the biggest problem Denver has is all the major transit is focused on connecting the suburbs to the city. I could be incorrect but I believe the highest ridership corridors rtd has is mostly busses. No rail exists connecting the densest parts of Denver to the densest parts of Denver. But this lrt Austin is planning would do just that. I believe this has a lot of potential if done properly.
Two things true at the same time: 1.) People see a transit plan and immediately feel like they want more stops than it shows, because they know a particular place they’d be coming from and/or going to, and want less walking or no walking. What they don’t usually think about is how infuriatingly slow train or bus travel can be where there are too many stops on your way to your destination. For that reason, stops usually shouldn’t usually be less than 10 minutes walking distance of another, because walking 5 minutes from the midpoint is reasonable, and closer than that slows everyone else down. 2.) That said, Republic square is the one place there should be an additional stop in this plan. With the huge glut of downtown high rise apartments and condos already built on the west side, and with many more coming, only 2 downtown stops, with none west of Colorado Street, simply isn’t enough. Adding Republic square would cover “West downtown” which already has huge residential buildings like The 360, Seaholm, Independent, 501 West, The Seven, Spring Condos, Sixth & Guadalupe, The Bowie and countless more. In short, mass transit stop location selection can’t only be based on a map; it must also account for population densities.
This is the summary of the report I've been looking, for thank you guys a million, I would argue this is actually quite good journalism. my ears on the credits song tho.. Regardless fantastic vid, i look forward to the rest
We haven't really done a deep dive on the green line, but in events and statements from CapMetro/ATP, it sounds like the Green Line will come after phase 1 of the light rail at some point. They already own the tracks, and some development is underway, but it will be a while. Personally I think it would be cool to see even a short version open sooner, just stopping at Plaza Saltillo, Springdale (a ton of development happening here) and 183. Later can extend further up towards Manor with a lot of development plans in between. -Louis
🌴🌞🌴🌞🚉🚉🚉🌞🌴🌞🌴 Any strange transit alignments? *Who owns the land?* Is it buried within the 16,000 pages, or can third party researchers find the ownership links? Find that and you'll find out who's pulling strings...
They included the IHOP in the project for the tallest building in Texas, just for "The little people." If you don't have public support for a project like that, the public can shut it down very quicky.
Seems like Yellowjacket will be pretty useful, 71 coming from the East and 183 from the south are the two major highways that don't currently have a good park and ride. Also super excited for two way transit traffic on Guad no more transferring across the block to Lavaca. Very much hoping a proper downtown bus terminal is on the cards, preferably with a heated/air conditioned waiting area.
Very happy to see Austin making transit strides. But I do wish that plans included through-running of the Red/Green Line onto the UP Austin Sub. Would still be a capital-intensive project to connect Downtown station and add new tracks despite it being railroad ROW. However, it would connect to Amtrak, serve dense-ish areas in old west Austin and Zilker, as well as allow S-Bahn style services south to Kyle/San Marcos and North to Round Rock/Hutto/Taylor. At a bare minimum, the red line at least needs a branch to Round Rock/Hutto/Taylor at the junction near Howard station, which would not be capital-intensive at all.
I could see some of this happening in the future. But as far as priorities go, 2 trains a day on Amtrak isn't worth building out a ton of infrastructure to at the moment. If real plans come in for that to change with Amtrak, Brightline, something else, etc.... there will have been some sort of political shift which would hypothetically make that sort of project (extending the red/green line to Amtrak) feasible. Thanks for watching! More on this in part 2! -Louis
it seems like it is a good design for the initial expansion of this system. the most important thing is dedicated right of ways so that traffic does not affect rail service. as austin continues to grow, so too will its transportation needs and thus the rail system will continue to grow. One concern at this stage is construction delays due to lack of labor as there are so many large commercial and capitol projects that are being built at the same time. There are still numerous high rise projects that are in the pipeline and funded for instance. Keep us posted.
There certainly will be a ton going on all at once! Airport extension, convention center, I-35, plus existing towers and housing under construction. Thanks for watching.
Just a minor detail, but the “Southwest Waterfront PDA” might have stalled at council. My understanding is that this hopefully is only a change in the planning process, but not a stop to development. Instead of one large planned area, it will be a series of PUDs (smaller planning units). (I’m not a professional and all of the acronyms confuse me)
The acronyms are wild to follow haha... Some City Council wonks I have talked to around the election led me to believe that it was mostly being kicked to be post election with a few other things. We'll see. I'm confident that part of town will be developed one way or another... Part II came out today too if you're interested! Thanks for watching! -Louis
Man, It's still kinda disconnected from the Amtrak station :/. The convention center stop is just around the corner from the red line, so that's not too bad. But intercity connectivity in central Texas is still really bad :C
For now not holding my breath on increased service at the Amtrak station, as much as I'd love to see it. 2 trains a day isn't enough to make sense to connect there for now. In the future there would totally be potential to extend the red line through downtown and make the connection that way, but I fear that is a long ways off...
I think for April 1, you could release a video, saying that the city of Austin just announced a proposal to the Trump administration to build a monorail. And, they even wrote a song.
Sadly like you mentioned many people on riverside will be moved out due to future developments so the people that use public transportation the most won’t be there to use it 😢
While I think that could happen, I have faith in the city to do it the right way. There is already some construction beginning at the corner of Riverside and Crossing Place where there had been an abandoned complex since ~2020. Those units will come online before any demo starts of additional units. There are also a lot of apartments not being torn down. Add to that the Tokyo Electron affordable housing being developed by the city very close by. That Riverside development is a long way from happening, and many of these projects will happen first. There is no way the city allows these developments to happen without addressing displacement first. There is a large pot of money within Project Connect specifically for that reason. -Louis
I like the idea of Guadalupe being the 'spine' of the system - it's been begging to be made transit-only ever since they launched the RapidBus way back when. I still think that the section through downtown should have been a cut & cover tunnel, it's a shame that got cut. Makes me a little worried about OTP but hopefully the signal priority is actually worked into every step of the process. So far this whole network is really looking a LOT like Portland's MAX system.
That means a tunnel would have to be built at a future date especially if signal priority doesn't work out. A tunnel for the main trunk line would have made the light rail system into a semimetro. Still it's a big let down on what the consultants promised the politicians who then promised the public: a major subway metrorail system.
@danielkelly2210 I was hoping they would do cut & cover for this project. it's far cheaper and Guadalupe is absolutely sufficiently wide enough to accommodate
You certainly could, but the traffic crossing S 1st and S Congress would either slow down trains, or make vehicle traffic a ton worse. I'm glad that that is not currently being considered anymore. Worth pointing out though! Thanks for watching!
How about we start with building actual stations and not just glorified bus stops? If you've ever had to sit and wait for a train in the sun while sitting at a "station" you'll ask yourself why you didn't uber or something quicker than the damn train. Austin is trying to run before it can crawl on public transit and it needs to treat rail with the same tenacity it treats highway widening.
Bigger stations can be nice, but also wildly more expensive and take up space (of which there is not a ton in these corridors). The stops all will have shade, and most of the day you won't wait for more than a few minutes (we talk about frequencies in part 2). I'd much rather see the system grow faster vs having fancier looking stops that might be marginally more comfy. I agree with treating rail with the same tenacity as highway widening, but for the most part, the highway widening is being forced by the state, not the city. The city is fighting an uphill battle already trying to get this plan done while state politicians are actively trying to kill it... Just my two cents.... -Louis
Stopped watching as soon as you said the rail won’t initially go to the airport. Who is planning this and why? No rail line is legit in a world class city if it doesn’t go to the airport. Shortsighted.
The first extension it will get is to the airport. The airport is getting ready to start a large expansion project, and with that it is likely that additional funds specifically meant for airports will be able to be used to build it. In the meantime, for the hopefully brief period of time it does not directly connect, an airport shuttle could run very easily and quickly between the two points. It's not perfect, but if they qualify for the funds elsewhere I ultimately think it makes some sense.
Local history lesson: Three streets downtown differ from their Spanish pronunciations because they were originally spelled and pronounced in non-standard French (before modern French standardization) as a nod by city planner Edwin Waller to French diplomatic recognition of the Texan independence: La Baca, Brassos, and Guadaloup. You still hear people pronounce all three the old fashioned way, but Guadaloup has a much starker difference between the French and Spanish pronunciations and is therefore more catching to the ear. See original plat maps on the wikipedia page here: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waller_Plan#/media/File%3AAustin_Street_Map%2C_1839.jpg
Just a minor detail, but the “Southwest Waterfront PDA” might have stalled at council. My understanding is that this hopefully is only a change in the planning process, but not a stop to development. Instead of one large planned area, it will be a series of PUDs (smaller planning units). (I’m not a professional and all of the acronyms confuse me)
Watch Part II Now and Support The Show Directly: www.patreon.com/c/TransitTangents
Every strip mall along the light rail route should be redeveloped into a pedestrian and transit friendly small shopping area with offices and apartments over the shops
Tons of plans for that in Austin!
Paid for by whom?
@heyevizzle It's already happening via private investment in most cases. People want to live near reliable transit. A few of the projects are linked in the description of this video.
Facts
Thanks for uploading this! Absolutely LOVE the 3D layout you put on the stations
I'm planning to make a video of this with drone shots when it gets warmer and make some vertical content
Drone stuff would be amazing of some of these areas! Are you Austin based? If so, reach out! Happy to work together on some related stuff if you are interested! -Louis
@@TransitTangents Yeah, I'm Austin based! I'll give you guys a follow on IG
Happy for y’all! Ik y’all have been looking forward to seeing Project Connect for a long time!
Thankyou! Still a long way to go, but happy to see some tangible forward progress.
Thank you for the great video! Let's hope all these projects work out! 🌞
UT stations are gonna be interesting for sure. Lamar seems like the obvious alternate route but congestion has been an issue for a while. Lets hope ridership offsets a fair bit of car traffic in the area! Thanks for the overview, looking forward to part 2.
This was really helpful! My eyes were glazing over trying to read the document.
If ur hip, Guadalupe is just “guad”
remember seeing trucks carrying passenger cabins from san antonio on I35. Am excited to see this workk !!
Transportation engineer here in ATX, very excited for project connect. I wanted to say there is a SPUI being built on 290 right now with the expansion there, so the one on I-35 won’t be THE first but one of the first
Thanks for sharing! Reach out if you have any fun projects you get to work on that you think could be interesting for an episode! Also, part II just came out this morning! -Louis
Very interesting content! Subscribed!
I think North of the Pleasant Valley location is also noted as potential "Ballpark" spot
I would def elevate It over i35 because that's gonna be a nightmare lmao
Cool. Rain Man does videos!
Thanks for going over this guys!
Thanks for watching! There will be more in part II next week!
Part II Out now!
if you build it, they will come
🚋🚋🚋
Unlikely. All over the US there are cities who have tried to bring back rail but the riders just don't show up. Denver is a well-known example.
@@TheDanEdwards I’m a student in Denver that grew up in Texas. I still visit Austin multiple times a year. I feel like the biggest problem Denver has is all the major transit is focused on connecting the suburbs to the city. I could be incorrect but I believe the highest ridership corridors rtd has is mostly busses. No rail exists connecting the densest parts of Denver to the densest parts of Denver. But this lrt Austin is planning would do just that. I believe this has a lot of potential if done properly.
Part II Out now!
Two things true at the same time:
1.) People see a transit plan and immediately feel like they want more stops than it shows, because they know a particular place they’d be coming from and/or going to, and want less walking or no walking. What they don’t usually think about is how infuriatingly slow train or bus travel can be where there are too many stops on your way to your destination. For that reason, stops usually shouldn’t usually be less than 10 minutes walking distance of another, because walking 5 minutes from the midpoint is reasonable, and closer than that slows everyone else down.
2.) That said, Republic square is the one place there should be an additional stop in this plan. With the huge glut of downtown high rise apartments and condos already built on the west side, and with many more coming, only 2 downtown stops, with none west of Colorado Street, simply isn’t enough. Adding Republic square would cover “West downtown” which already has huge residential buildings like The 360, Seaholm, Independent, 501 West, The Seven, Spring Condos, Sixth & Guadalupe, The Bowie and countless more.
In short, mass transit stop location selection can’t only be based on a map; it must also account for population densities.
This is the summary of the report I've been looking, for thank you guys a million, I would argue this is actually quite good journalism. my ears on the credits song tho.. Regardless fantastic vid, i look forward to the rest
Thanks so much! A lot more to come in part 2! Appreciate the kind words 🙌
Part II Out now!
@ I already watched it, great stuff, grow grow grow
They gotta have a stop at the Amtrak Station
These are great! I’m trying to find info on the Green Line in Austin. Have you done any dedicated videos or deep dives into the Green Line?
We haven't really done a deep dive on the green line, but in events and statements from CapMetro/ATP, it sounds like the Green Line will come after phase 1 of the light rail at some point. They already own the tracks, and some development is underway, but it will be a while. Personally I think it would be cool to see even a short version open sooner, just stopping at Plaza Saltillo, Springdale (a ton of development happening here) and 183. Later can extend further up towards Manor with a lot of development plans in between. -Louis
@@TransitTangents Thanks for the reply! Appreciate what you guys are doing on this channel!
This looks amazing
It does! Part II came out today if you're interested!
🌴🌞🌴🌞🚉🚉🚉🌞🌴🌞🌴
Any strange transit alignments?
*Who owns the land?*
Is it buried within the 16,000 pages, or can third party researchers find the ownership links?
Find that and you'll find out who's pulling strings...
They included the IHOP in the project for the tallest building in Texas, just for "The little people." If you don't have public support for a project like that, the public can shut it down very quicky.
Nice run down!
Thanks! Part II came out today as well!
Seems like Yellowjacket will be pretty useful, 71 coming from the East and 183 from the south are the two major highways that don't currently have a good park and ride. Also super excited for two way transit traffic on Guad no more transferring across the block to Lavaca. Very much hoping a proper downtown bus terminal is on the cards, preferably with a heated/air conditioned waiting area.
Agreed! Skeptical of some of the other park and rides (38th, Oltorf), but this one seems to be in the right spot and I can see people using it.
Part II Out now!
Very happy to see Austin making transit strides. But I do wish that plans included through-running of the Red/Green Line onto the UP Austin Sub. Would still be a capital-intensive project to connect Downtown station and add new tracks despite it being railroad ROW. However, it would connect to Amtrak, serve dense-ish areas in old west Austin and Zilker, as well as allow S-Bahn style services south to Kyle/San Marcos and North to Round Rock/Hutto/Taylor. At a bare minimum, the red line at least needs a branch to Round Rock/Hutto/Taylor at the junction near Howard station, which would not be capital-intensive at all.
I could see some of this happening in the future. But as far as priorities go, 2 trains a day on Amtrak isn't worth building out a ton of infrastructure to at the moment. If real plans come in for that to change with Amtrak, Brightline, something else, etc.... there will have been some sort of political shift which would hypothetically make that sort of project (extending the red/green line to Amtrak) feasible. Thanks for watching! More on this in part 2! -Louis
it seems like it is a good design for the initial expansion of this system. the most important thing is dedicated right of ways so that traffic does not affect rail service. as austin continues to grow, so too will its transportation needs and thus the rail system will continue to grow. One concern at this stage is construction delays due to lack of labor as there are so many large commercial and capitol projects that are being built at the same time. There are still numerous high rise projects that are in the pipeline and funded for instance. Keep us posted.
There certainly will be a ton going on all at once! Airport extension, convention center, I-35, plus existing towers and housing under construction. Thanks for watching.
Part II Came out today!
Public transit projects mean responsible development. Hopefully, it means responsible development.
Just a minor detail, but the “Southwest Waterfront PDA” might have stalled at council. My understanding is that this hopefully is only a change in the planning process, but not a stop to development. Instead of one large planned area, it will be a series of PUDs (smaller planning units).
(I’m not a professional and all of the acronyms confuse me)
The acronyms are wild to follow haha... Some City Council wonks I have talked to around the election led me to believe that it was mostly being kicked to be post election with a few other things. We'll see. I'm confident that part of town will be developed one way or another... Part II came out today too if you're interested! Thanks for watching! -Louis
Take down parking lots, and put up paradise.
Yess!
Man, It's still kinda disconnected from the Amtrak station :/. The convention center stop is just around the corner from the red line, so that's not too bad. But intercity connectivity in central Texas is still really bad :C
For now not holding my breath on increased service at the Amtrak station, as much as I'd love to see it. 2 trains a day isn't enough to make sense to connect there for now. In the future there would totally be potential to extend the red line through downtown and make the connection that way, but I fear that is a long ways off...
I think for April 1, you could release a video, saying that the city of Austin just announced a proposal to the Trump administration to build a monorail. And, they even wrote a song.
Call it the Trumprail! 😁
Lol we are working on fun April 1 episode.... Part II of this dropped today by the way!
Sadly like you mentioned many people on riverside will be moved out due to future developments so the people that use public transportation the most won’t be there to use it 😢
While I think that could happen, I have faith in the city to do it the right way. There is already some construction beginning at the corner of Riverside and Crossing Place where there had been an abandoned complex since ~2020. Those units will come online before any demo starts of additional units. There are also a lot of apartments not being torn down. Add to that the Tokyo Electron affordable housing being developed by the city very close by. That Riverside development is a long way from happening, and many of these projects will happen first. There is no way the city allows these developments to happen without addressing displacement first. There is a large pot of money within Project Connect specifically for that reason. -Louis
More transit = Less car traffic! why would anyone be against this? Being anti-trust means you want MORE traffic. I hope Austin completes this.
We hope so too!
It would be great to here how aleshire is trying to take down transit. I have seen that he is suing but its confusing
I like the idea of Guadalupe being the 'spine' of the system - it's been begging to be made transit-only ever since they launched the RapidBus way back when. I still think that the section through downtown should have been a cut & cover tunnel, it's a shame that got cut. Makes me a little worried about OTP but hopefully the signal priority is actually worked into every step of the process. So far this whole network is really looking a LOT like Portland's MAX system.
The downtown tunnel would have been amazing. I also worry about the signal priority- but hope they are able to pull it off. Thanks for watching.
That means a tunnel would have to be built at a future date especially if signal priority doesn't work out. A tunnel for the main trunk line would have made the light rail system into a semimetro. Still it's a big let down on what the consultants promised the politicians who then promised the public: a major subway metrorail system.
Tunneling in the US costs about (literally) 10x as much as any other developed country. It's one of the reasons we go for surface light rail here.
@danielkelly2210 I was hoping they would do cut & cover for this project. it's far cheaper and Guadalupe is absolutely sufficiently wide enough to accommodate
Part II came out today if you're interested!
I would argue both lines could cross the river at the existing bridge
You certainly could, but the traffic crossing S 1st and S Congress would either slow down trains, or make vehicle traffic a ton worse. I'm glad that that is not currently being considered anymore. Worth pointing out though! Thanks for watching!
I will never pronounce it Guadaloop.
That's fair haha...
How about we start with building actual stations and not just glorified bus stops? If you've ever had to sit and wait for a train in the sun while sitting at a "station" you'll ask yourself why you didn't uber or something quicker than the damn train. Austin is trying to run before it can crawl on public transit and it needs to treat rail with the same tenacity it treats highway widening.
Bigger stations can be nice, but also wildly more expensive and take up space (of which there is not a ton in these corridors). The stops all will have shade, and most of the day you won't wait for more than a few minutes (we talk about frequencies in part 2). I'd much rather see the system grow faster vs having fancier looking stops that might be marginally more comfy. I agree with treating rail with the same tenacity as highway widening, but for the most part, the highway widening is being forced by the state, not the city. The city is fighting an uphill battle already trying to get this plan done while state politicians are actively trying to kill it... Just my two cents.... -Louis
Stopped watching as soon as you said the rail won’t initially go to the airport. Who is planning this and why? No rail line is legit in a world class city if it doesn’t go to the airport. Shortsighted.
The first extension it will get is to the airport. The airport is getting ready to start a large expansion project, and with that it is likely that additional funds specifically meant for airports will be able to be used to build it. In the meantime, for the hopefully brief period of time it does not directly connect, an airport shuttle could run very easily and quickly between the two points. It's not perfect, but if they qualify for the funds elsewhere I ultimately think it makes some sense.
Local history lesson:
Three streets downtown differ from their Spanish pronunciations because they were originally spelled and pronounced in non-standard French (before modern French standardization) as a nod by city planner Edwin Waller to French diplomatic recognition of the Texan independence: La Baca, Brassos, and Guadaloup. You still hear people pronounce all three the old fashioned way, but Guadaloup has a much starker difference between the French and Spanish pronunciations and is therefore more catching to the ear.
See original plat maps on the wikipedia page here:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waller_Plan#/media/File%3AAustin_Street_Map%2C_1839.jpg
I’ll note that even you slip into saying somewhere between “lavaca” and “labaca” without even realizing it.
Good to know! Thanks for sharing. Part II came out today as well if you're interested!
Just a minor detail, but the “Southwest Waterfront PDA” might have stalled at council. My understanding is that this hopefully is only a change in the planning process, but not a stop to development. Instead of one large planned area, it will be a series of PUDs (smaller planning units).
(I’m not a professional and all of the acronyms confuse me)