Project Connect Orange Line: Unique Purpose and Potential
26 October 2019
Project Connect’s Vision Plan map shows proposed Orange Line alignment from Tech Ridge (north) to Slaughter Lane (south). Annotated by ARN.
Commentary by Dave Dobbs
The following summary proposing urban rail for Austin’s Orange Line corridor is adapted and edited from a previous Email commentary by Dave Dobbs, Executive Director of Texas Association for Public Transportation and publisher of LightRailNow.com.
Running in the Guadalupe-North Lamar and South Congress corridors between Tech Ridge and Southpark Meadows (see map at top of post), the 21-mile Orange Line will be Austin’s north-south electric urban rail transit spine. It must be fed by an east-west grid of timed-transfer buses that will provide a viable alternative to the private automobile, thereby increasing affordable, sustainable mobility for all, regardless of income or circumstance.
Regionally, large park & ride facilities at the ends of this “anchor” line, and rail connections at Crestview, will give Central Texas commuters real alternatives to the congestion on IH35, MoPac (Loop 1), and US183, thereby insuring high daily ridership on both trains and buses. Catalyzing station-area economic development will follow, with “alternative downtowns” and dense, mixed-use housing opportunities for a wide range of incomes and for a far larger number of Austin’s citizens – thus providing affordable living space to address the acute housing shortage in Austin for lower and middle-income families.
Every Austin taxpayer, transit rider or not, will benefit from the large commercial tax base created. Revenues from property and sales taxes uniquely generated by the Orange Line urban rail investment will more than pay for the capital and operating and maintenance (O&M) costs of the urban rail itself as shown by the experience of a number of new U.S. light rail transit systems installed since 2001. Examples of cities where documentation is available of these catalytic, massive urban rail economic development effects include: Portland, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Houston, and Kansas City. (Also see: Methodological Considerations in Assessing the Urban Economic and Land-Use Impacts of Light Rail Development.)
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_______________Austin Rail Now 
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