By the year 2020, people in downtown San Antonio and Austin will be
boarding the high speed LSTAR train for the 75-minute intercity ride
instead of sitting in cars and trucks fighting traffic on a
heavily-congested I-35 expressway.
The annual body count of 100 traffic fatalities along I-35 between
the two cities will drop as will the 9,000 accidents that occur in the
same space each year.
Dozens of freight trains each day will be rerouted to an Eastern
bypass spur, where they will run at 79 mph versus the 20-plus miles an
hour they now average.
The increased efficiency will make train freight more economical and
greatly reduce truck congestion on the interstate. Reduced traffic and
congestion should reduce carbon emissions. The new route will redirect
dozens of trains that now carry cargo, some of it hazardous, each day
through the heart of San Antonio and other urban areas.
The improved direct rails will be reserved for fast passenger trains.
Students in downtown San Marcos, shoppers at the outlet malls, and
tubers and Wurstfest lovers in New Braunfels will hop the 90-minute
“local.” Together, the express and locals will total 32 daily round
trips from San Antonio to Georgetown. The service will be especially
attractive to the 300,000 students and teachers at the 16 colleges and
universities along the “education corridor.”
Estimated cost: $1.8 billion just to build it.
Not everyone will be commuting in trains. San Antonio’s suburban
dwellers willing to carpool or pay tolls while commuting to and from
Stone Oak and points north to the Alamo Quarry Market area and inner
city jobs. They’ll travel on a widened Tx. 281, speeding along
designated “managed lanes” while other drivers hold to the free lanes.
Estimated cost: $458 million just to build it.
State transportation planners, meanwhile, expect to be farther along
with their own massive project to establish high speed rail from the
Dallas-Fort Worth area north to Oklahoma and south to San Antonio, with
eventual spurs extending to Corpus Christi, Laredo and across the border
to Monterrey on rails built for where Mexico’s anticipated high speed
trains.
Estimated cost: Not available.
Those three transportation scenarios were presented as future realities by three different entities to the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, the regional transportation authority, at its well-attended Monday meeting.
The three presentations were impressive in scope and detail and cost.
As one presenter told MPO board members, “We are here today to help you
visualize.”
See a comprehensive animation of the future Tx. 281 improvements at www.411on281.com.
“Visualization is one thing, realization is another,” quipped MPO
chairman Ray Lopez, who is the City of San Antonio’s board
representative and District 6 City Councilman. Lopez is one of several
council members who has signaled his intention to seek the mayor’s
office if Mayor Julián Castro is nominated by President Obama to become
the next becomes Secretary of Housing & Urban Development as
expected.
Lopez was, perhaps, dampening expectations after a lot of
presentation pizzazz by rightfully noting that the rail projects lack
funding, while the toll road project will require the Alamo Regional
Mobility Authority to borrow at least $230 million, which it will repay
with toll collections.
You can view all three presentations by clicking on the links below:
- The Lone Star Rail presentation by the Lone Star Rail District
- The Texas-Oklahoma Passenger Rail presentation by the Texas Department of Transportation
- The Tx. 281 presentation by the Alamo RMA
are failing to plan for a future integrated mass transit system, but no
one can say where the funding will come from, either, except to say it
will require federal, state, local and private sector funding and
massive loan guarantees to make it happen.
*Featured/top image: HIgh speed light rail in Zurich. Photo by Flickr user Matthew Black.
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