Urban rail backer makes case to ease downtown jams

What's the problem we're trying to fix?

Talk to opponents of the City of Austin's potential $1.3 billion urban rail plan, and it won't be long before that question bubbles up. Their answer, of course, is that the real problem is traffic congestion on highways like MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1) and Interstate 35, and that streetcars circulating from Mueller to downtown to East Riverside Drive won't help that at all.

So it was surprising when I had breakfast last week with Cid Galindo, a planning consultant, downtown advocate and erstwhile Austin City Council candidate, to hear him ask that same question about the urban rail plan. In his case, however, he has an answer, one that satisfies him.

Galindo supports urban rail.

Listen to his pitch, one that echoes elements of what city Transportation Director Rob Spillar has been saying around town for a while now. It starts with the state of downtown traffic, something that to a degree is in the eye of the one beholding the steering wheel.

Simply put, Galindo argues that downtown already has a traffic problem, one that will get worse as downtown goes more and more vertical and dense in years to come. He points to certain "failed" intersections, places like Fifth and Sixth streets at Lamar Boulevard, Congress Avenue at Cesar Chavez Street, and several intersections from there to I-35. These are places where drivers would probably agree that rush hour stackups are common and frustrating.

I asked the city Transportation Department to give me a list of these failed intersections. Turns out, I was told, that they have not calculated such a thing for any downtown intersections.

Instead, I was directed to a 2009 "Central Austin Circulation Study" that said main streets (not intersections) in the city's core were at 99 percent of capacity, and have been since at least 1992. Downtown has a "ring of constraint," the city argues, because of these full-up roads.

OK. But for the sake of Galindo's argument (based on everyday experience), let's stipulate that a fair number of those intersections are, if not failed, a real hassle.

And downtown's potential growth only figures to make things worse. The city's core (bordered by Lamar, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, I-35 and the river) has about 29 million square feet of buildings now. But under current city rules, another 36.5 million square feet of office buildings and high-rise residences could be built over the next generation, according to the Downtown Austin Plan released by the city in November.

Traffic would be a nightmare if all that were built and no significant transportation improvements were to occur downtown, Galindo said. But what would really happen, he said, is that most of that would not get built because it just wouldn't make sense. People won't rent buildings or apartments mired in traffic, so developers would spend their money elsewhere.

So the city government, which now gets about 4.3 percent of its property tax revenue from downtown (which has only 0.6 percent of the city's land area), would lose out on all that development and the tax revenue that comes with it.

Spend $1.3 billion on a system to move people in and out of downtown to hot or potentially hot development areas like Mueller and East Riverside, removing from cars some of the folks trying to get into and out of downtown each day, and those failed intersections will get a passing grade even as downtown grows, Galindo said.

There's your problem. There's your solution.

But you know about the devil, and people advocating his contrary positions.

First of all, we're talking about spending a huge sum on a prospective problem.

Opponents say, hey, we have right-here-and-now transportation problems — MoPac and I-35, the Y in Oak Hill, the infernal strings of backed-up stoplights on Loop 360 and on U.S. 183 in East Austin, Texas 71 at the airport, to name a few — and the Texas Department of Transportation might be more willing to take those on with Austin throwing in the several hundred million dollars it hopes to spend on urban rail (with the other half coming in federal transit grants, in theory). Over time, maybe we'd have fewer toll roads, the argument goes, if the city spent its transportation money that way.

Beyond that, however, you have to ask if urban rail as currently envisioned would, in fact, crack that purported ring of constraint. It won't go anywhere near that Fifth/Sixth and Lamar quagmire, not under current plans or any that are even on long-range drawing boards. A lot of people hung up at Congress and Cesar Chavez aren't headed out to East Riverside but rather into South and Southwest Austin, which likewise aren't likely to get urban rail anytime soon.

So is urban rail really a solution for the problem Galindo and Spillar describe? And even if it is, should that take precedence over current transportation problems? Add those to the already substantial list of questions that voters will be asking between now and a potential rail election in November 2012.

For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.