studied two routes.<\/a><\/p>\nOne follows the Union Pacific freight line beside Interstate 35 into both\u00a0downtowns at up to 79 mph, roughly 95 minutes city center to city center, for about $2.3 billion.<\/p>\n
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The other runs the SH-130 and I-10 corridors to the airport at up to 125 mph for around $13.5 billion.<\/p>\n
The freight-line option is the place to start, landing riders steps from the River Walk on one end and downtown Austin on the other. A rail line is worth more here because of what sits at each end: restaurants and shops that surround both\u00a0downtowns.<\/p>\n
The hard part is the track, owned by Union Pacific, whose freight gets priority and whose dispatching is why the Eagle runs late. The passing track the\u00a0HNTB study modeled eases that conflict but does not erase it.<\/p>\n
Critics will be quick to say a train that takes 95 minutes is no different from the drive. A car covers the distance in 75 minutes at 2 a.m. and well over two hours in Friday traffic. A scheduled train is built around a timetable. A freeway offers no timetable to hold at all.<\/p>\n
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For the business traveler, the convention attendee or event-goer this corridor is built to serve, the difference is sharper still: On the train you open a laptop and work or relax the whole way, while behind the wheel that time is simply gone.<\/p>\n
None of this asks anyone to pretend rail empties I-35. It will not. They are complements, not substitutes.<\/p>\n
The state is spending $4.5 billion to rebuild 8 miles of I-35 through downtown Austin, work its own director says will never conclude.<\/p>\n
Rail would carry an operating subsidy, as every mile of the interstate already does. The public pays for the corridor either way. The only question is whether it buys one mode or two.<\/p>\n
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San Antonio committed to its downtown bet on a tight timeline because losing ground in a fast-growing Texas was worse than the cost. Rail to Austin is the same kind of calculation, and the payoff runs both ways.<\/p>\n
Every dollar spent downtown works harder the moment a visitor can use both ends of the corridor in one trip, when a convention in one city becomes a reason to spend a day in the other.<\/p>\n
Jakob W. Schmidt is an Austin community liaison for Texas Rail Advocates, an all-volunteer freight and passenger rail advocacy organization. The views are his own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Passengers board the Texas Eagle train in San Antonio, Texas. Passenger numbers continue to grow on this line,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-362420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}