Bus Odd-yssey to SoCo

Left for Guadalupe Mountains this morning, I'll try to autopost articles over the next few days, until I get back on Tuesday.

Anyways, a couple weeks ago I went on a bus odyssey, as I like to call them, with a friend; plans were to take the 983 express from Lakeline P&R in NW Austin downtown, and then transfer to the 1L/1M, which goes across the river, and get off on South Congress and wander around. But that didn't happen. We botched meeting up; she got on the northbound right as I arrived, and so had to get off at an unplanned stop, and we missed the southbound.

Our route:


View Trip to SoCo in a larger map

Still determined to take the bus, we drove down to Pavilion P&R to catch the 983 southbound there. It wasn't there yet when we arrived. So we hopped on the 392 eastbound to take all the way to N. Lamar, and there hop onto the 1L southbound all the way to South Congress. Which we did. And it took more than an hour just on the 1L, since it's an all-stops workhorse route, one of the reasons I love riding it. You can do some awesome people-watching on that bus. People from all walks of life ride it: homeless people, day-laborers, wage-earners, businesspeople working downtown, college students, teens...


(Photo by chix0rgirl on Flickr)

We got off near Guero's Taco Bar, which is more or less the northern end of what's truly the little Main Street that is South Congress. The storefronts look more like they belong in some small town in the Hill Country than a state capital. That is except for the crazy paint-jobs and signs.

South Congress Ave:





There's places like Uncommon Objects, a sort've hipster version of a thrift store/flea market with awesome vintage stuff (it really spans all definitions of "stuff", too!), Tesoro's Trading Co., a market-like store that sells goods from all over the world, mainly Latin America, Africa and Asia, and cool, hole-in-the wall record stores that only sell vinyl: Friends of Sound (all of which we went to, ate at Homeslice Pizza, across from Guero's). There's something to whet almost anyone's whistle! It's an amazing place, right next to the lucky kids at St. Ed's too. Didn't do much other than scratch the surface.

West Campus (UT):



We had to wait forever to board the 1L north at the south end of the strip, especially since we had chosen to try and board at a stop that the limited-stop 101 skipped. We took that up to West Campus (of UT), where my friend got off to meet family, and I boarded (wrongly) the 987 express north, wrong because it skipped Pavilion P&R on it's way north, where I had parked. So then I had to get off at Northwest P&R, and wait for the southbound 383; 30 minutes of doing nothing, as there's nothing around the P&R. Then another 30 minutes of wandering around the suburbs in a bus before we made it back to Pavilion. I was so tired, and glad to see my car.

MetroRail Article I'd Never Seen

Maybe it's just that I'm extra jaded today, but I thought this article (Metro Jacksonville), an overview of CapMetro's MetroRail Red Line, and the development around it, is relatively naive. Never seen it before, either.

MJ is advocating a Red Line-style DMU line as a replacement for Jacksonville's proposed BRT lines. They put it forward as

>...an affordable alternative for a traditional light rail plan that was rejected by Austin voters back in 2000.

Ha.

How Will MetroRail's Viability Be Affected By ASA Rail?

I went looking around at information about the Austin-San Antonio Commuter Rail District, and after finding this (PDF) presentation on their website, I started thinking about how the construction of a rail line between Georgetown and San Antonio, that connected with the MetroRail Red Line at McNeil, would affect usage of the CapMetro commuter rail line.

Due to the range, and having, at least initially, to run on a moderately-heavy traffic, single-track freight railroad, the ASA line would probably use the established method of separate engine and cars. Maybe something like the MPXpress and those Bombardier double-decker cars? A definite contrast to the Stadler DMUs used by CapMetro!

But how would the establishment of the ASA rail line affect usage of the Red Line? Any commuters from Leander and Cedar Park could now travel direct to San Antonio and San Marcos, etc, as well as Round Rock and Georgetown (though rail might not show a significant advantage over car travel in the Leander-Georgetown trip, due to a much longer distance via rail). This could increase the viability of the commuter rail on the northern end of the rail line, but also eliminate part of the need for the Red Line south of McNeil, maybe, as the ASA stop at downtown Austin would actually be closer to the core office area, not the convention center, like the Red Line.

But at the same time, if you look at the people that rail is sold at attracting, the "choice commuter", who doesn't oft like to transfer (and how hard would it be to transfer at McNeil?), then this might not be relevant at all, at least for Leander?Cedar Park-Austin travel. And I have no idea how many people actually commute from Northwest Austin to San Antonio...

But if ASA RAil removed the demand for the Red Line south of McNeil, could the A&NW right of way be used as planned in the 2000 light rail plan, at least in the best possible outcome?