Project Connect

Based on Wikipedia: Project Connect

A City Divided by Train Tracks It Doesn't Have Yet

In November 2020, while much of America was fixated on whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden would claim the presidency, Austin voters were deciding something that would reshape their city for decades: whether to build a proper transit system. They said yes, by a comfortable margin. What they didn't know was that the project they approved would soon become something quite different—smaller, more contentious, and tangled in lawsuits before a single rail was laid.

This is the story of Project Connect, Austin's ambitious attempt to join the ranks of American cities with real public transit. It's also a story about what happens when costs spiral, politicians disagree, and a burger joint from 1926 ends up as the lead plaintiff in a major lawsuit.

What Austin Actually Voted For

The Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which everyone calls CapMetro, put a sprawling vision before voters. The price tag: seven point one billion dollars, funded partly through federal money and partly by raising local property taxes by eight point seven five cents per hundred dollars of assessed value. That might not sound like much until you remember that Austin property values have been climbing like a rocket ship strapped to another rocket ship.

The original proposal was even bigger—ten billion dollars—but CapMetro scaled it back before the vote, hoping to calm concerns about spending during a pandemic. They needn't have worried too much. Austin is one of the most traffic-choked cities in America, and its residents were ready to try something different.

The plan called for two new light rail lines, three bus rapid transit lines, and a new commuter rail line to complement the existing Red Line that already runs from downtown up to the suburbs of Leander. Light rail, for those unfamiliar with the distinction, is different from heavy rail like a subway or commuter rail like a traditional train. Light rail vehicles are essentially streetcars on steroids—they can run on streets with traffic or on dedicated tracks, they stop frequently, and they're designed for shorter trips within a city rather than long commutes from distant suburbs.

The jewel of the proposal was a transit tunnel running beneath downtown Austin. Tunnels are expensive, complicated, and slow to build, but they're also the gold standard for urban rail because they don't have to share space with cars, pedestrians, or anything else. A train in a tunnel is a train that runs on time.

The Blue Line: From the River to the University

The Blue Line would be the workhorse of the new system. Picture this route: starting way out on Yellow Jacket Lane in the southeastern part of the city, the trains would run along East Riverside Drive, a corridor packed with apartment complexes full of students and young professionals. Then across Lady Bird Lake—the dammed-up section of the Colorado River that cuts through central Austin—to the Convention Center downtown.

From there, the line would turn west on Third Street to Republic Square, which CapMetro envisions as the hub where everything connects. Then north along Guadalupe Street, the main drag through the University of Texas campus, all the way to Thirty-Eighth Street.

The full vision included extending the Blue Line in both directions: south to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and north through the Crestview neighborhood. Airports make excellent anchors for transit lines because they generate consistent ridership and because people really, really hate paying for parking at airports.

Trains would come every ten minutes on the Blue Line—frequent enough that you wouldn't need to check a schedule, just show up and wait. On sections where two lines share the same tracks, trains would pass every five minutes.

The Orange Line: Stitching North and South Together

Austin has a geography problem. Lady Bird Lake slices the city in two, and while there are bridges, they become parking lots during rush hour. The Orange Line was designed to stitch the city together, running from Oltorf Street in South Austin, up the famous South Congress Avenue strip with its quirky shops and vintage clothing stores, across the lake, through downtown, and up to the university alongside the Blue Line.

South Congress—SoCo, as locals call it—is one of Austin's most beloved neighborhoods. It's the kind of place where you can buy custom cowboy boots, eat excellent tacos, and catch a show at the historic Continental Club all within a few blocks. Putting a light rail line through it would transform how people access this part of the city.

The Orange Line, like the Blue Line, would run every ten minutes, with combined frequency of five minutes where the two lines overlap through downtown and up to the university.

The Green Line: Reaching into the Hinterlands

While the Blue and Orange Lines would serve the urban core, the Green Line represents something different: commuter rail reaching twenty-seven miles east into Travis County and even into neighboring Bastrop County. The line would use existing freight tracks—a common strategy for transit agencies because building new rail corridors is enormously expensive and politically difficult.

The terminus would be in Manor, a small city that has been growing rapidly as people get priced out of Austin proper. An eventual extension could reach Elgin, famous in Texas for its sausage production. The Green Line would share tracks with the existing Red Line downtown, splitting off to head east where the Red Line turns north.

Commuter rail serves a different purpose than light rail. These are longer trips, often an hour or more each way, carrying people who live in cheaper suburbs but work in the urban core. The trains are typically larger, faster between stops, and run less frequently than urban light rail.

The Red Line Gets a Makeover

Austin already has one rail line: the MetroRail Red Line, which has been running since 2010. It connects downtown to the neighborhoods of East Austin, the Domain shopping district, and the northern suburbs of Cedar Park and Leander. It's... fine. Useful if you happen to live and work near its stations, but hobbled by infrequent service and the fact that it shares tracks with freight trains.

Project Connect promised significant upgrades. Two new stations would serve the new Austin FC soccer stadium at McKalla Place and a development called Broadmoor, replacing the awkwardly located Kramer Station. A new downtown station would finally give Red Line riders direct access to the Convention Center instead of dumping them several blocks away.

Most importantly, frequency would double. Instead of trains every thirty minutes, they'd come every fifteen. That might not sound like a huge difference, but in transit, frequency is everything. Miss a train that comes every thirty minutes and you've lost a significant chunk of your day. Miss one that comes every fifteen and you've just got time to check your phone.

The ultimate vision called for electrifying the Red Line, replacing its diesel-electric trains with fully electric ones, and extending station platforms to accommodate longer trains. This would take the Red Line from a novelty to a serious transit option.

The Gold Line: Light Rail Dressed as a Bus

Here's where things get complicated. The Gold Line was envisioned as a nine and a half mile light rail route connecting Austin Community College's Highland campus, along Airport Boulevard and Red River Street, through downtown, across the river, and through SoCo. It would serve the UT campus and provide access to the massive Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium and the new Moody Center arena.

But in the revised plans, the Gold Line would start life as a bus—specifically, as a MetroRapid bus service. MetroRapid is CapMetro's brand for bus rapid transit, which is essentially a bus that pretends to be a train. The buses get dedicated lanes where possible, signal priority at traffic lights so they don't have to stop as often, and stations with level boarding instead of traditional bus stops. It's not as good as rail, but it's much cheaper and faster to implement.

The idea is that the Gold Line would prove the demand for transit along this corridor, and then eventually be upgraded to light rail when money and political will allow. Transit planners call this "building the ridership" before building the expensive infrastructure.

The Tunnel That Wasn't

Remember that transit tunnel? The one that would let trains zip beneath downtown without dealing with traffic lights, pedestrians, or Texas summer heat? It was arguably the most important part of the whole plan, the feature that would make Austin's light rail competitive with driving.

By 2021, planners were already rethinking parts of it. The Orange Line's southern portal—the point where trains would emerge from underground—proved challenging to engineer near Lady Bird Lake. The terrain is uncooperative, sloping sharply toward the water in ways that would require expensive solutions.

Then came the cost overruns. By April 2022, the light rail portion alone had ballooned from an estimated five point eight billion dollars to ten point three billion. The pandemic had thrown a wrench into supply chains worldwide, driving up the cost of steel, concrete, and labor. Austin's red-hot real estate market meant that acquiring land for stations and track had become enormously expensive.

Something had to give. In May 2023, the Austin Transit Partnership—the agency created specifically to build Project Connect—announced that the tunnel was out. Instead of running underground, all the light rail lines would run on the surface, sharing a single bridge across Lady Bird Lake.

This was a significant downgrade. Surface-running trains get stuck in traffic. They have to slow down for pedestrians and cyclists. They're at the mercy of everything that makes driving in a city frustrating. The tunnel would have made Austin's light rail fast and reliable. Without it, the trains would be better than buses, but not by as much.

What Remains

After all the cuts, Austin City Council approved a seven point one billion dollar project in June 2023. This would build nine point eight miles of new light rail—significantly less than originally promised, but still the most ambitious transit investment in the city's history.

The bus improvements would proceed more or less as planned. CapMetro would continue converting its fleet to electric vehicles, with a goal of running entirely on batteries by 2040. New park-and-ride facilities would let suburban commuters leave their cars at the edge of the system and ride transit into the city.

Neighborhood circulator buses—small vehicles making short loops—would solve the "last mile problem" that plagues American transit. You can build the most beautiful train station in the world, but if people can't get from the station to their actual destination, they'll just drive the whole way. The circulators, along with a proposed electric bike-sharing system integrated into the CapMetro app, would help close that gap.

The Lawsuit

This is where the story takes a turn toward the absurd. In November 2023, a coalition of plaintiffs sued the City of Austin and the Austin Transit Partnership, arguing that the scaled-down project was so different from what voters approved that it required a new vote.

The lead plaintiff? Dirty Martin's, a burger restaurant that has been serving Austin since 1926. The original project would have demolished the building. The revised project wouldn't. But the restaurant's owners joined former politicians including state senator Gonzalo Barrientos, county commissioner Margaret Gómez, and city council member Ora Houston in arguing that the whole thing needed to go back to voters.

Their legal theory centers on how the project is funded. Voters approved a tax increase to pay for a specific project. If that project no longer exists, does the authority to collect that tax still exist? The plaintiffs argue no—that the city can't use money earmarked for the original plan to pay for something substantially different.

More specifically, they claim the city is playing financial games, using money that was supposed to pay for operating and maintaining the system to instead service debt on bonds that the Austin Transit Partnership wants to issue. If true, this could violate Texas law about how local governments handle voter-approved taxes.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, issued an opinion supporting the plaintiffs. He argued that the bond funding scheme violates the state constitution's requirements for how cities borrow money. Paxton has been a thorn in Austin's side for years, frequently clashing with the city's progressive politics, so his involvement added a partisan dimension to what was already a contentious situation.

The plaintiffs asked the court to permanently stop the city from collecting the Project Connect tax and from spending any money on designing, acquiring land for, or building the new surface-running rail route along Third Street or the bridge across Lady Bird Lake.

Politics Within Politics

If lawsuits weren't complicated enough, state legislation entered the picture. Ellen Troxclair, a Republican state representative who formerly served on Austin City Council, introduced House Bill 3899, which would have frozen Project Connect until voters could weigh in again.

The bill passed the Texas House three times but was defeated in the Senate each time. This triggered something called the three-reading rule—a procedural provision that prevents a bill from being brought up more than three times in a single legislative session. The bill was effectively dead.

But Paxton attempted to delay the court hearing on the lawsuit until after the 2024 legislative elections, apparently hoping that a new legislative session might revive something like Troxclair's bill. He also holds significant power over the project through a less obvious mechanism: in Texas, the attorney general must approve any government entity that wants to issue debt. If Paxton decided to withhold approval, the Austin Transit Partnership couldn't sell the bonds it needs to finance construction.

Moving Forward, Slowly

In September 2024, the Austin Transit Partnership announced it was proceeding with a tentative one hundred ninety-three million dollar budget, with a goal of breaking ground in 2027. Two bus lanes would begin operating in 2025, providing at least some visible progress while the light rail plans crawled forward.

Of the budget, one hundred seventy-two million comes from taxpayer funds, with the remaining twenty-one million from investments and other income. A staggering one hundred sixteen million—more than half the budget—would go toward "professional services and administrative costs." Only eight million was allocated for the bus routes, with the rest paying for environmental impact reviews and design work.

This is what major infrastructure projects look like in America in the 2020s: years of planning, design, environmental review, and legal battles before anything gets built. The contrast with other countries is stark. Spain can build a mile of subway for a fraction of what it costs in American cities. China constructs entire metro systems in the time it takes American cities to finish environmental reviews.

But Austin keeps trying. The city has been growing explosively for decades, adding residents faster than almost anywhere else in the country. Traffic has become legendary—the kind of gridlock that turns a twenty-minute drive into an hour. Something has to change.

What This Means for Austin

Project Connect, in whatever form it ultimately takes, represents Austin's attempt to mature into a different kind of city. For decades, the Texas capital has been defined by its highways, its sprawling suburbs, and its car-centric lifestyle. A real transit system would allow for denser development, less reliance on automobiles, and a different relationship between neighborhoods and the urban core.

The stakes extend beyond transportation. Light rail lines tend to catalyze development around their stations. Property values rise. Apartments and offices cluster near stops. The character of neighborhoods changes, sometimes dramatically. The decision of where to route trains is, in effect, a decision about which parts of the city will grow and change and which will remain as they are.

This is why transit projects generate such intense controversy. They're not just about moving people from place to place. They're about urban planning, property values, neighborhood identity, and competing visions of what a city should be. The lawsuit over Project Connect isn't really about bond financing technicalities. It's about whether Austin will become a transit city or remain a car city with some trains.

The answer won't come quickly. Even in the most optimistic scenario, the light rail lines won't open for years. The legal battles could drag on indefinitely. Construction costs could rise further, forcing more cuts to the plan. Or federal funding could materialize, allowing the tunnel to be restored and the original vision to be realized.

For now, Austin remains what it has been: a city where owning a car is practically mandatory, where rush hour traffic tests the patience of even the most laid-back residents, and where the question of how to move millions of people through a growing metropolis remains stubbornly, expensively, controversially unanswered.

The Broader Pattern

Austin's experience with Project Connect reflects a broader American struggle with infrastructure. We know how to build transit systems—we did it throughout the twentieth century, and other countries continue to do it efficiently today. But somewhere along the way, we forgot, or allowed the process to become so encrusted with requirements, reviews, and legal vulnerabilities that building anything takes decades and costs many times what it should.

Other cities have faced similar challenges. Los Angeles has been building out its Metro system for forty years and still has only a fraction of the coverage that cities like Tokyo or Paris offer. New York's Second Avenue Subway, first proposed in 1919, opened its first phase in 2017—and the subsequent phases remain unfunded. California's high-speed rail project, approved by voters in 2008, has yet to carry a single passenger.

Austin joins this tradition of ambitious plans meeting stubborn reality. The city's residents voted for a vision of light rail zipping through tunnels beneath downtown, connecting neighborhoods that have never been connected, offering an alternative to the endless frustration of traffic. What they're likely to get, at least initially, is something more modest: surface-running trains that will help, but won't transform.

Whether that's a failure or simply the messy reality of democracy depends on your perspective. The project continues. The lawsuits proceed. The buses run. And Austin keeps growing, waiting for the trains that may or may not come.