Austin Rail with Trail

I've wrote a little about my trip to Austin already and put up some photos. It's become a much more bike friendly town then it was when I went to school there, but it still has a sprawl problem that encourages car reliance. [It was fun riding around places I used to ride (old apartments to school or to places I used to work) and seeing how much shorter it is than I remember. My old apartment to my old job: 15 minutes].

One project in the works is to build a trail along the soon to open MetroRail Commuter Line.

Capital Metro has begun planning for pedestrian and bicycle connections along the entire Austin to Leander rail corridor. Capital Metro has already committed over $7.2 million of its transit sales tax to trails development over the past six years.

Fully implemented, this system of connecting trails, on-street bikeway connections and pedestrian pathways encompasses approximately 30.9 miles of paved multiuse trails, 1.7 miles of improved, more walkable and fully accessible sidewalks, and 8.4 miles of improved and well marked on-street bikeways. At an estimated cost of $54.3 million (not including the value of any right-of-ways), the fully built out nonmotorized connections will make these MetroRail public transportation terminals truly intermodal.

The feasibility study makes it look as though work should've already started, but I can't find any evidence of that. It wouldn't all be done until 2019. The trains, however, will have bicycle racks conveniently located near the doors.

It would be nice if the Silver Line had included some planning for a parallel trail - which admittedly would run in the Dulles Toll Road ROW - or if Metro would use the outer Silver Line, the part that runs on it's own tracks, as an experimental, bikes-allowed-on-at-all-hours line. But I'm not holding my breath.

Comments

[James]

Isn't the W&OD kinda a parallel trail? Tysons Corner just need better bike access routes.

[Washcycle]

yeah, they are parallel, but a trail in the ROW would connect to the airport, Wolf Trap and Tysons Corner. At points the two are as much as two miles apart, so it's quite a detour for someone from the south. And a trail along the rail line would work to feed cyclists into the stations. In Reston, where the two are so close the trail can do this, but elsewhere a trail would have been a nice amenity. Cost effective? I don't know.

[Allen Muchnick]

The Dulles Connector Road (inside the Beltway), the Dulles Toll Road (from the Beltway to Dulles Airport), and the Dulles Greenway (from Dulles Airport to Leesburg) should all have a parallel shared use path within the highway right-of-way, but the Silver Line will have no stops for many miles between Tysons Corner and Wiehle Ave in Reston.