Austin at Large: The Cost of “Whatever It Takes”

For 30 years, Austin civic leaders and scenesters negotiated among themselves, and then with the larger community, within a frame of scarcity where mobility investments were concerned. (Well, really, where lots of things were concerned; it's a big reason why all sorts of big ideas have taken decades to become real.) We obviously need the best transit system possible to unlock the gridlock that has been torturing the city and region since the 1990s – that is, possible with whatever money was left over after the road network used by private car owners driving alone was built out to everyone's satisfaction. That wasn't enough money to actually meet the needs of the traveling public, so it was easy for critics to torpedo such plans, on several occasions, with slogans like, "Costs too much, does too little." Even the town's biggest transit boosters had to at least tacitly agree with the second part, as long as there was no way to guarantee that incremental progress toward a complete transit system was going to continue, and not stall out for a decade as it did after voters approved the Capital Metro­Rail Red Line in 2004.

In 2019-20, Project Connect turned this dynamic inside out and was negotiated instead from a frame of abundance. Austin has just gotten richer as it's gotten bigger; our metro area population has more than quadrupled (from 466,000 to 2.18 million) since Capital Metro was formed in 1985 with a mission to build out high-capacity transit. During that same time frame, Travis County's median household income tripled, while cumulative inflation was only around 50%. Growth did not just fragment a fixed-size pie into little crumbs of resources, which is the lens many Austinites used back in the day to look into the future. We can and must scale up our ambitions from "the best we can do" to "whatever it takes." And the voters agreed, in a 2020 landslide.

Property-Value Engineering

Hence the fairly restrained reaction so far over the last week to the revelation that the cost of Project Connect has already grown by around 40%, to more than $10 billion for the (very large) first phase. Because of the way it's being funded, with a dedicated tax rate rather than a bond program, a cost increase makes the buildout take longer rather than become smaller, although it's likely that the Austin Transit Partnership (the joint venture of the city and Capital Metro that's building out PC) will want you to know about its cost-constraining efforts – what the pros call "value engineering," which sounds a lot better than "cutting corners." But with Austin property values rising even faster than population and income, it may not take too much longer to bring in the revenue required.

This is not great news for a major public works project with a built-in corps of detractors ready to cast such things in the worst possible light. But as we scratch the surface, we realize that precious little of this new spending represents things that the ATP could or should have done differently or better or even sooner. We have become depressingly acquainted with part of what's to blame: overall inflation, but especially the cost of land (see above re: property values) and construction materials, and mitigating against the increasing risk of flooding due to our climate crisis, for which Project Connect is about the best big thing Austin can do to avert greater calamity. That's stuff we really can't get too upset about now, although similar cost overruns would have been disastrous if not fatal to either the 2000 or 2014 rail plans, had they been voter-approved.

This graphic from the Austin Transit Partnership shows how the protected Capital View Corridor along South Congress has made Project Connect's best option, in the view of planners, going underground all the way to just north of Oltorf Street (Courtesy of Project Connect)

Building Bigger Better

The other big cost drivers raising the PC price tag are major changes to key design elements of the Orange and Blue Lines and the central-city subway tunnels that will connect them underground. These include extending Dean Keeton Street one block west to San Antonio (next to, not through, the Hole in the Wall) to allow the Orange Line to have priority over cars on the Drag; reconfiguring the Lady Bird Lake bridge to perhaps allow buses, and not just the Blue Line, to use it, a major demand of equity advocates; adding a Congress Avenue station and a full-length pedestrian concourse to the cross-Downtown subway between the Convention Center and Republic Square; and most expensively extending the South­side tunnel carrying the Orange Line all the way to Oltorf, with two more underground stations (see above).

This last enhancement, while operationally a net plus (old hands remember the vocal opposition of SoCo merchants helping tank the 2000 plan, which lost by about 1%), is also being necessitated by the anachronistic, already mostly busted, yet still ironclad Capital View Corridors that plague our city. As the graphic above from PC shows, the train itself, and especially the catenary standards (basically big light poles) that will power vehicles in the all-electric system, will "ruin" a view that, given the ice-cold state of relations between our city and the Statehouse, is something a lot of Austinites would like to see and think about less often in any event. But good luck getting the Legislature to see it that way.