AUSTIN (KXAN) — As Central Texas continues to grow, the idea to connect Austin and San Antonio by rail continues to be top of mind for local business and regional leaders. This week, they traveled to Miami to study its transportation system, including Brightline’s passenger rail service.
This year, a new organization called the Central Texas Alliance joined the trip with the Austin Chamber of Commerce. The Central Texas Alliance is a nonprofit, public-private partnership made up of 13 Central Texas counties collaborating on civic, business and economic solutions to issues like water, education, transportation.
Founded by former San Antonio Mayor and Secretary of Urban Housing and Development Henry Cisneros, it brings together Williamson, Travis, Hays, Comal, Bexar, Bastrop, Caldwell, Guadalupe, Wilson, Atascosa, Median, Bander and Kendall counties.
“So how do we connect better from a mobility standpoint? How do we secure our energy going forward from a greater reliability standpoint? How do we make sure that we have adequate water supply going forward for this entire region, not just pockets of the region, which is important. Healthcare affordability access is another area, especially in our rural counties, that we need to kind of make that connectivity happen,” said AJ Rodriguez, leader of the Central Texas Alliance.
Rodriguez got to ride the rail line in Miami during his time with the Austin Chamber of Commerce for its annual intercity trip.
“The Austin Chamber of Commerce hosts an annual intercity visit where we take a delegation of leaders to a peer community to learn best practices, lessons learned about challenges that we’re facing all across the region, whether it’s mobility, higher education, and how can we learn from what they did and apply those lessons to the things that we’re working on here in Austin and Central Texas,” said Jeremy Martin, the president and CEO of the Austin Chamber of Commerce.
Miami has a high-speed passenger rail line that connects to Orlando called Brightline. With the passenger rail line discussion on the table that would connect Austin to San Antonio, it was a point of interest.
“There’s never been a better time than now. We’ve got 5.3 million people in this 13-county region. That’s larger than the size of Louisiana, and we’re about to have another 2.5 million, according to Texas Demographic Center, between now and 2050. It’s essentially the size of Phoenix. We don’t have a choice. It’s about connectivity, and that’s mobility,” said Rodriguez.
Though the two lines aren’t identical, Brightline filed for bankruptcy last month with $5 billion in debt, citing lower ridership than originally predicted. Recent numbers show 3.5 million rides annually bringing in $240 million a year.
“There were two key takeaways from the Brightline CEO when talking about this. One, keep it simple. The more complicated you make it, the more difficult you make it, the more delays you’re going to have. So there’s standard technology from other parts of the world. How can we apply that standard technology and not make it too hard on ourselves?” said Martin.
Martin also said the other takeaway is to tackle the project in phases.
“If you’re trying to solve for everything all at once, you’re going to set yourself up for a lot of difficulty, if not failure,” said Martin.
The passenger rail line for Austin to San Antonio will continue. At this time, a second study is getting ready to look at projected ridership and the economic impact of building a line, versus not.
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