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Window Closing on Urban Rail Comments

This is a portion of the proposed route for the urban rail line the City of Austin. The rail line would start at the Mueller neighborhood, run through downtown and end at the airport.
Map courtesy of the City of Austin.
This is a portion of the proposed route for the urban rail line the City of Austin. The rail line would start at the Mueller neighborhood, run through downtown and end at the airport.

The official comment period for a proposed environmental study on a proposed urban rail system for Austin is closing this Friday.  It's the first step toward building the 16.5-mile line, projected to cost around $1.3 billion.

From a city news release:

The 16.5 mile alignment serves Downtown Austin, the State Capitol Complex, and the University of Texas, with extensions to the Mueller redevelopment and to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. It also provides connections to Capital Metro’s current and future rail and bus-rapid-transit services, as well as to the planned LSTAR regional rail service between the Austin metro area and San Antonio.   Five recent community meetings held in Downtown Austin, Mueller redevelopment, the University of Texas campus, Central East Austin, and on the East Riverside corridor drew roughly 400 registered attendees.

You can still comment on the proposed environmental study for the project at AustinUrbanRail.com.

Ian Crawford joined KUT as News Editor in 2008, after spending over four years as a reporter/anchor at KLBJ Radio in Austin. He began his broadcasting career while still in high school in Southern Oregon. During high school and college at the University of Oregon, he worked at times as a reporter, news anchor, sports play-by-play reporter, music host and commercial producer before moving to Texas in 2003.