Come on, Austin. Get it together. You constantly cry about our city’s soul-crushing congestion and, like any properly progressive city, you rail against the environmental negligence fueling global climate change. Yet you neglect the one public entity capable of both freeing up road capacity and significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions locally.
In your defense, Capital Metro does kind of suck.
That’s not necessarily a knock against the people who run the agency or drive its buses and trains. Pretty much since the dawn of the automobile, Austin has gone out of its way to prioritize cars over all other forms of transportation. The city’s built environment doesn’t seem to reflect popular desires. Even though roughly four out of five Travis County residents (to say nothing of neighboring counties) drive to work every day by themselves, polls suggest they’d overwhelmingly prefer other options.
It’s unfortunate then that Capital Metro has failed to reach its fullest potential. Annual ridership (the total number of rides taken) on the agency’s 82 fixed routes hovers around 30 million, down from more than 34 million in 2013. Some of that drop can be linked to lower gas prices or the economic displacement of transit-dependent riders, both beyond the agency’s control. But Capital Metro has also suffered setbacks of its own making, thanks to unproductive policies, programs, and services—not least of which is the agency’s monomaniacal obsession with its very own Spruce Goose, that telegenic money pit on steel wheels known as MetroRail.
Yet a change in course is in the works. Freshly appointed CEO Randy Clarke took the reins at Capital Metro in March, inheriting two major programs—marketably named Connections 2025 and Project Connect—that promise to transform Austin transit as we know it.
While those big, sexy initiatives are nothing to scoff at, Clarke would do well to focus on a mélange of more mundane issues that have hobbled the agency’s appeal and contributed to its hemorrhaging of regular riders. By focusing on low-hanging fruit aimed at enhancing customer experience while also reimagining the agency’s regional role and adjusting priorities, Clarke could get Capital Metro off its schneid and give this town the broadly appealing mobility alternative it so badly needs.
“Ridership’s one metric. That doesn’t mean it’s the only metric,” Clarke told reporters in late January, just after Capital Metro’s board of directors voted unanimously to approve his five-year contract (annual salary of $285,000, plus potential bonuses and $25,000 a year in deferred pay). “Connecting someone to education or health care or a potential job is, to me, much more valuable of a metric.”
While that might sound like he was hedging right off the blocks, there’s little reason to doubt the sincerity of his commitment to making Capital Metro a top-flight transit provider. Before taking his new gig, he worked at Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and then did time with the Washington, D.C.–based advocacy group American Association of Public Transportation. Both of those coastal cities afforded him the opportunity to be a daily transit rider.
Reassuringly, upon moving to Austin, Clarke leased an apartment downtown, the center of Capital Metro’s transit universe.
“I’m a student of the industry and a practitioner of the industry,” he told me over the phone in February. Just as a restaurant owner would be foolish to not try his own food, Clarke reasons he’d be remiss in not riding his own buses.
Counting the agency’s head executive as a fellow passenger is itself a major coup for any rider who has experienced the torture of navigating CapMetro’s clunky, battery-sucking app only to watch their bus inexplicably sail right past a poorly sheltered stop under the blistering August sun.
It’s a special hell that—call me a sadist—I hope the Canadian-born Clarke gets to experience. I have no doubt that, at the very least, it could lead to a fast-tracking of the agency’s plans to oh-so-gradually plant shelters and benches at its most heavily trafficked stops, plans that right now have a brutal timeline measured in years (or, more accurately for riders, summers).
Of course one way to protect riders from the elements without investing in capital projects is making sure they don’t have to wait at any given stop for long. That’s where Connections 2025 comes in. The agency’s board adopted the 10-year service plan in early 2017, and its most substantial component will be delivered this month when Capital Metro pulls the trigger on a historic overhaul of its bus network.
At the core of this change is frequency. The new system will increase from six to 14 the number of routes with buses that arrive every 15 minutes or less during daytime hours, a vast improvement over the typical wait of 30 minutes. The idea is that riders will be able to ditch the eye-blurring timetables, show up to their stops, and be on their way before the hell-sun turns them into piles of melted flesh and soggy clothes.
On paper this sounds super great. The rub is that the agency had to sacrifice geographic coverage in order to support faster, more reliable, and more direct service along the city’s denser corridors. This means folks in outer-edge neighborhoods with existing service, such as north and northeast Austin, might be on the short end of Connections 2025’s stick.
Capital Metro’s board of directors caught flak over that potential scenario during its multiple discussions about the changes during the past two years. To its credit, the agency made adjustments to mitigate the effect on some of the city’s most economically vulnerable residents.
What Clarke and the agency need to keep in mind is that while the suburbanization of poverty is happening in Austin, the fact remains that there are still plenty of low-income households near the central city and along Capital Metro’s frequent routes. These folks, who will wake up one day in June to find their transit experience drastically improved (agency staff assured us they number in the thousands), likely didn’t feel the same urgency to show up to speak at board meetings as did riders who stood to lose service.
Clarke needs to keep these riders in mind and remember that Capital Metro can play a huge role in Austin’s affordability crisis by providing first-class, frequent service that gives residents the option to shed the checkbook-choking burden of car ownership.
The agency’s other big-ticket program remains a work in progress, but it promises to have a far more lasting impact than Connection 2025. Project Connect, the long-gestating effort to build regional high-capacity transit, is on track to deliver a proposed system that features enhanced commuter rail operations, expanded bus rapid-transit service, and that elusive unicorn of Austin transit planning: light rail.
Given the heart-stopping price tag of that combined package (early estimates run as high as $8 billion), along with state and federal governments often hostile to public transit, enacting Project Connect’s proposals will be a herculean task. When it comes to rail, Clarke should learn from Austin’s past mistakes and not take the path of least resistance. In other words: Cool it with any major new investments in MetroRail.
Capital Metro launched that service after voters in 2004 approved a 32-mile commuter line connecting downtown Austin to Leander. The $60 million package purchased trains and retrofitted existing freight track that, as freight track tends to, avoided all crucial commercial and residential centers of town.
Five years after the vote, the agency promised 17,000 daily trips on the Red Line by 2025. Yet eight years after it opened in 2010 (past due and over budget), the service is stuck at just over 3,000 weekday trips. That qualifies it as Capital Metro’s 10th-most-popular route as of last spring. Also, according to agency data, 70 percent of MetroRail’s mostly suburban riders are white, a stark contrast with the 36 percent of MetroBus riders who fit that description. These numbers are especially eye-popping in light of the huge sums that Capital Metro has committed to MetroRail during its young life.
Between major investments that will lead to trains running every 15 minutes throughout the week, station overhauls including the grand redesign of the downtown terminal, the construction of new storage warehouses, and the installation of federally mandated safety controls, Capital Metro is using money from Uncle Sam, the state, and its own pockets to beef up MetroRail to the tune of more than $180 million over the next five years. That’s a five-fold increase over the agency’s original request and represents about three-fourths of its entire 2018 operating budget.
In February, before he’d moved to Austin, Clarke conceded that MetroRail has its flaws. “I think, in retrospect, there are probably elements of that rail line that maybe could have been built a little differently, in a way that would have created a different dynamic than we have right now,” he said. “But what was done was done, and our job is to turn that into the best performing railroad it can be.”
Of course there’s no reason to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and the current round of planned and largely irreversible investments in the Red Line should be good enough for now. Project Connect’s vision of spending even more money on the Red Line and eventually building the long-anticipated Green Line to Manor or even Elgin (a route whose initial projected ridership numbers are uninspiring) needs to be put on the back burner. The agency must return its focus to the central city routes that have the highest potential return on investment.
This would make up for the disastrous mistake Capital Metro committed with the rollout of the service known as MetroRapid.
Launched in 2014 and touted as a form of “bus rapid transit”—a bus line designed to mimic light rail in every way but cost—MetroRapid overcame its hyperbolic marketing and managed to step on every rake it could find. After the new No. 801’s visibly arresting bendy buses were introduced, ridership on the city’s most productive transit corridor—Guadalupe-Lamar in the north and South Congress to the south—cratered, and it wasn’t difficult to see why.
Planting stops few and far between, slashing the frequency of the complementary No. 1 local service (the busiest of Capital Metro’s routes, no less), and instituting a higher “premium” fare for MetroRapid backfired. Despite all of the branding lipstick, riders still figured this pig to be a bus that wasn’t that much better at the margins to merit the extra effort and money.
The board has since eliminated the premium fares, and unsurprisingly MetroRapid ridership has skyrocketed. Although, along the 801 route, the numbers still haven’t reached pre-2014 levels.
The agency’s plans to fill in the gaps between the existing stops will likely go a long way toward attracting more passengers, but once again its bizarre fixation on branding over service is mucking things up. Rather than immediately set up temporary signs at the identified locations, the agency has opted to keep bypassing these rider-rich areas (Guadalupe Street’s Wheatsville Co-Op and South Lamar’s iconic Broken Spoke, to name a couple) until the money is available to install the permanent and expensive MetroRapid–branded stations.
One of the cheapest words thrown around in virtually every corner of 21st-century society is “innovation.” I could put on a tie, walk up to a random stranger, and let loose a whiz-bang incantation like “New technologies are proactively innovating new paradigms” and end up as a keynote speaker at South by Southwest Interactive by lunchtime.
Clarke gets it, though. When I caught him dropping the i-word on me, I pled with him to affix some semblance of meaning to it. “Most people think of innovation, they think of technology. And I don’t,” he said. “Innovation to me is new methodologies of trying to solve problems and a willingness to not be just doing the same thing.”
That’s just broad enough to give me hope that Clarke won’t futz around with this lingering devotion to branding above all else. There’s no reason to stay married to insisting that MetroRapid is anything other than a bus (Capital Metro’s commitment to this Orwellian notion reaches outright absurdity in the onboard recording that asks MetroRapid passengers to refrain from crossing in front of the “vehicle” rather than the bus).
In other words, the greatest innovation Clarke can bring to Capital Metro is a nimble flexibility that breaks the agency out of its sclerotic rut.
It should go without saying that Clarke’s got his work cut out for him and that while it’s easy to dump a gigantic to-do list in his lap, the man will have a tough enough time simply managing the day-to-day business of a $419 million organization with 350 full-time employees, a legion of unionized drivers technically employed by two contracting firms, a fleet of fragile buses and trains, communities across the region demanding more service, seven board members breathing down his neck, and a Legislature and federal government that seem to make a sport of torturing transit providers.
But there’s no small chance that he has what it takes to get Capital Metro’s act together. If this city is truly serious about how much it hates traffic and how much it loves the environment, folks would do well to give Clarke a little support. What better way to do that than with informed input? So get out there, Austin, get serious for once, and get on the damn bus.