Waller Tunnel Has Some Thinking Subway
As the Waller Creek area gets reshaped, discussion of an Austin subway has been stirred up. Photo by KUT NewsAudio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
By Lindsay Patterson
Austin is always changing and one of the latest big changes is happening underground.
A huge tunnel is under construction to divert Waller Creek and prevent flooding. That will allow new development to take place along Red River Street. But as the tunnel gets closer to completion, some Austinites are wondering: What if we could do more below Austin’s surface? For StateImpact Texas, Lindsay Patterson went looking for answers.
During the tour, I overheard discussions of people saying, why don’t we have subways in Austin? For a lot of us who have been following transportation, that’s a decade- or two-decade-old discussion of why don’t we. Well, we don’t because everybody believes it’s prohibitively expensive.
Podcast: Download (4.3MB)
The main reason is the huge anti-transit lobby in Austin. The real estate moguls, the road industry and their well-heeled allies fight tooth and nail to prevent any travel money except road funds from being allocated. They fight buses, they fight trains, they even fight the tiny percentage of funding spent on for bicycles and pedestrians. What Austin needs is an upsurge like the SOS movement to force political “leaders” to quit spending a fortune on roads and spend the money on transit.