Welcome to Austin Rail Now
28 March 2013
Simulation of Austin Urban Rail line with electric light rail transit train running on Guadalupe St. downtown.
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Welcome to Austin Rail Now — representing the views of Austin-area public transportation advocates and professionals who envision better mobility choices for urban rail and rail passenger service in Central Texas.
Our most immediate and urgent priority is to achieve a restructuring of the current official Urban Rail plan to focus priority on Austin’s Lamar Blvd.-Guadalupe St. corridor for the starter line of an electric light rail transit (LRT) system. While the the City of Austin (COA) currently emphasizes a proposed Urban Rail route from downtown to the Mueller (old airport) development site — basically non-existent as a major travel corridor — Lamar-Guadalupe is the “Missing Link” in their plan. Ironically, COA has also been emphasizing that Lamar-Guadalupe is the primary local traffic corridor in central-city Austin, and even identified this corridor in the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) scoping meetings, held throughout Austin in spring 2012, as being at maximum capacity for over the past 2 decades.
Any truly adequate and justifiable rail transit investment must serve this crucial corridor. Austin’s limited resources must be invested to yield the maximum ridership — initially, a rail connection between the Crestview Red Line MetroRail station, the West Campus, and downtown. In addition, we favor a plan that technologically integrates COA’s Urban Rail and Capital Metro’s MetroRail on the basis of electric light rail transit (LRT).
_______________Austin Rail Now 
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