Austin at Large: Making Good Trouble on I-35

Mod-Alt-3 looking south at Eighth Street: Without the caps, TxDOT's new plan is already a huge improvement on the status quo in terms of connectivity, safety, and the built environment. With the caps, those depressed mainlanes disappear entirely from view, underneath what are currently tantalizing green blank slates. (Courtesy of TxDOT)

Two of my big wins as a campaign operative – the 2006 Central Library bond and the 2012 Central Health/UT Dell Medical School tax rate election – were collabs with my old pal, mentor, and hero Lynda Rife, a true genius of civic engagement. It was at that very same Central Library on Tuesday that Rife, having taken on the toughest gig in town – allowing the Texas Dept. of Transportation to show that it did, in fact, hear what we had to say about its plans for I-35 through the heart of Austin – demonstrated a central element of that genius: telling people what they didn't want to hear and making it OK. At TxDOT's latest Capital Express Central listening session – in person, for several dozen of us mobility die-hards, and online for hundreds more – Rife was directing her empathy at Heyden Black Walker, who with her father Sinclair Black has championed the Reconnect Austin vision for I-35. To most people paying attention, that long-running effort is synonymous with "cut and cap" – burying I-35 through the city center and building over it. The ultimate motivation for Recon­nect, though, is for that "over it" (or alongside it) to be developable land that grows the tax base and helps pay for the urban design intervention of going below grade; otherwise, it's just an amenity. TxDOT has decided that it does not want to go there, hence Rife's breaking the bad news to Walker. But it's totally game for the cutting and capping part, which is a somewhat mind-blowing amount of progress since we last got up in the state's grill about I-35 in August.

Say Hello to “Mod-Alt-3”

One of our main complaints back then was that the two remaining alternatives being studied as TxDOT prepares the federally required environmental impact statement for CapExCentral, the 8-mile stretch from U.S. 290 East (Koenig Lane) to U.S. 290 West (Ben White Boulevard), were barely distinguishable from one another. The former Alternative 1, which has been dragged behind TxDOT's barn, was the one where the whole deal got tunneled, including the new "managed" lanes, to deliver on the "no wider and no higher" promise made by both the city and the Texas Transporta­tion Commission. We were not shy at the time about castigating TxDOT for deciding doing I-35 properly was just too hard, and that a mildly retooled roadway that took out "only" 150 properties (including the Chronicle offices) would be a good enough way to dispose of a multibillion-dollar investment in one of the nation's most-used roadways through the center of the nation's fastest-growing metro area.

I don't know this for certain, but I suspect that in her own genius way, Lynda Rife convinced TxDOT that we were not overreacting and that they needed to show some more effort. So they did. Perhaps their professional pride was at stake; certainly, younger generations of engineers, even at TxDOT, all see how much opportunity cost the agency was incurring by trying to keep its Austin-skeptic bosses happy. What is now "Modified Alternative 3" is functionally not that different from the Alternative 1 schematic. It's all at or below grade from 51st Street to the river and again to Ben White, eliminating silly over-under grade separations near Hancock Center, Holly Street, and Woodland Avenue. The frontage roads from 38th Street to the river would instead be a boulevard running along one side – which delivers about two-thirds of the urban design benefits of both the Recon­nect and Rethink I-35 visions to unbuilding the highway. The Downtown portion of this could be capped with 20 acres or more of public space: four times the size of Dallas' Klyde Warren Park, and maybe six times what TxDOT had called its "cap and stitch" provisions in previous iterations.

Most importantly, the cut-and-cap-and-stitch component, which TxDOT had tried as hard as any state agency can to make not its problem or mandate – that was all going to be "local enhancements," for which the city of Austin has no money to spare – is now acknowledged as a central part of the package, some of which will be paid for by TxDOT, and for which the state will partner with the city to go find a bag of cash with Austin's name on it in Mayor Moneybags Pete Buttigieg's vault.

No Ponies, Just Trade-Offs

The CapEx Central remains imperfect, but the means to fix those problems lie well above the pay grade even of TxDOT District Engineer Tucker Ferguson. It remains true that the federal environmental review process should be the place where honest discussion of trade-offs can take place. Does the enhanced mobility, if any, that the project will provide to Central Texas outweigh the harm being done by I-35 as it exists now, dividing and depressing Austinites by color and class and harming their health and safety in the bargain? Do the benefits of the Mod-Alt-3 cutting and capping ameliorate those harms? Con­sid­er­ing how hard it was for Congress to pass even its bipartisan infrastructure framework, rewriting the National Environ­mental Policy Act is a generational project, but it's probably as important a project as President Biden can get done and done well.

Rethink35, as of press time, was not ready to make nice – they protested outside the Central Library but did not attend the meeting – but some other stakeholders are having the same reactions I did. "The entire Austin community should be proud of the high quality, detailed input submitted," Heyden Black Walker wrote in a Wednesday press release. "This historic level of community engagement illustrates the generational importance of this project to people affected daily by I-35. The Modified Alternative 3, shared today by TxDOT, reflects progress towards our common goals."

Learn more about TxDOT’s new plans at my35capex.com. There’s no deadline for feedback; the agency expects to be ready to finalize the EIS in about 12 months.