You might remember Austin’s light rail boondoggle, which is now scaled back, behind schedule, and very possibly illegal. (For the current status on that project, see here.)
Now more Austin elites, in the form of the Travis County Commissioner’s Court (an organization so far in the shadow of the Austin City Council that I didn’t previously have a tag for them) has funded the study of a high speed rail line between Austin and San Antonio, the price tag for which would be a staggering $13.5 Billion.
A high-speed rail line between Austin and San Antonio would cost about $13.5 billion to build, according to a recent feasibility study commissioned by Travis County Commissioners Court.
The study conducted by HNTB Corporation assessed the potential of a high-speed rail route between Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and the Amtrak station in San Antonio along State Highway 130 and Interstate 10.
Running from an airport in one city to an Amtrak station in another? Who the hell is this line for, tourists who want to save money traveling to San Antonio? It certainly doesn’t seem geared for the benefit of actual Travis County residents, especially now that the theoretical Project Connect light rail link to Bergstrom has been cancelled.
Also, if you’re going 130 to I-10 to San Antonio, you’re missing the bigger I-35 cities like Kyle, San Marcos and New Braunfels in favor of smaller cities Lockhart and Seguin. I guess the plan is to keep it high speed because almost no one will want to visit the smaller bergs on the train line.
The proposed route would run at about 125 miles per hour with a travel time of about an hour between the two cities.
Sure it would. Pretty much no U.S. “high speed rail” services hit their theoretical maximum because they stop too often and the track’s not straight enough to maintain top speed for long.
Travis County approved $125,000 to fund the feasibility study in October 2025.
The proposed 89-mile route presents challenges because of the many cross-street overpasses and an existing right-of-way that has minimal space to accommodate the rail route. These challenges contribute to the $13.5 billion price tag by requiring much of the route to be elevated.
The high-speed rail would also cost $190 million to operate and maintain annually, according to the report.
That works out to some $520,000 a day in ongoing operating costs paid by the taxpayers.
The feasibility study did not include ridership or fare estimates for the proposed high-speed rail line.
Acela serves just under 9,000 passengers a day. Even if the proposed Austin-San Antonio leg got that many (it won’t; even a thousand a day is probably too many), that results in a cost of over $4,000 per passenger per day over the first year in fixed costs alone. At 1,000 riders, it’s more like $36,000 a passenger per day the first year. For that price you could buy every rider their own Honda Civic, and save the taxpayer gobs of money over the other 364 days of the year (and 15-20 years more to boot). Including the ongoing costs adds a $520 taxpayer subsidy per rider per day.
The actual Austin Amtrak ridership in 2025 was 47,030. Not per day. Not per week. Not per month. That’s the total yearly ridership to all destinations.
Maybe my 1,000 estimate is way too optimistic.
There’s also this: “A separate TxDOT study found expanded passenger service on existing tracks could cost as little as $800 million.” Even that is too much for how much such a line would actually be used. Intercity passenger rail is a money loser everywhere it’s run, and only sorta, kinda works in the northeast because of a much higher population density. Even there it’s heavily subsidized, and even the fastest train, Amtrak’s Acela, only saves just over an hour over a car trip between D.C. and New York City.
Leftists everywhere love rail because it’s an endless source of graft in the planning and building stages, and a superior means of surveilling and controlling the population. How are you supposed to inflict socialism on the peasants if they can just climb in their car and drive away?
All this is a boondoggle in search of a problem, as low cost mass transit between Austin and San Antonio already exists in the form of buses, with fares starting at as little as $11. But that’s not a desirable form of transportation for liberal elites, because riding a bus doesn’t show how smugly superior they are over ordinary people. Plus they have to rub shoulders with both the peasants they disdain and the illegal aliens they’ve inflicted on them.
This proposed train project makes zero economic sense, benefits very few Austinites, costs taxpayers dearly, will be an endless source of graft, and, like California’s Train to Nowhere, will never actually be built.
For all those reasons, expect Austin Democrats to keep pushing for it.
