Commentary: Austin has plenty of highways. That's the problem
June 12, 2026 - Austin American Statesman -
Building more highway lanes won't solve Austin's congestion. The city also needs a transportation mode — light rail — that doesn't depend on roads.
By Jakob W. Schmidt , Guest columnist:
Austin is among the nation’s most congested and fastest-growing cities. It is not short on highways.
Interstate 35, MoPac Boulevard and Loop 360 run north-south and share the same problem. When demand surges, they back up at once. Austin has a redundancy of roads and little redundancy of mode. That is the gap the $4.5 billion plan to rebuild eight miles of I-35 through Central Austin does nothing to close.
A second mode of transportation is valuable precisely because it is not tied to theroads. The case for Austin’s light rail is not that it empties the highway. It is that it will give the city a way through its densest corridor that is not tied to the freeway.
Texas should keep building roads; it must also build what roads cannot replace, as history shows the new lanes will fill. Texas has run the road-widening experiment for 70 years with one result. Driving expands to fill whatever capacity is added.
Houston widened the Katy Freeway to more than 20 lanes; within a few years peak travel times were worse than before. A rebuilt I-35 will fill the same way because demand outruns any one mode.
Why does rail keep losing the argument? Critics divide the price by the projected 33,800 daily trips for 2045. The road wins that division, but nobody evaluates a highway that way. A road moves goods, serves people who never drive it, and underwrites the economy around it. A rail line is no different. The per-rider ratio is a category error.
Rail underperforms when it is built cheaply, and Austin ran that experiment. The Red Line runs 32 miles of freight track from Leander and leaves riders at the edge of downtown, still a bus ride from the University of Texas, the Capitol or South Congress.
A train that cannot finish the trip is not a second mode, and neither is a bus stuck in the same traffic. In good systems, buses feed rail. That gap is why commuters who could ride the Red Line drive instead. A frequent light rail line through downtown willclose that gap, allowing the Red Line to function as part of a larger transit network.
The new light rail planned for Austin is the opposite of the Red Line experiment: It will bring new track through the city’s densest and fastest-growing corridor, where downtown, Riverside and South Congress are filling in with thousands of housing units.
Austinites are paying for the right corridor instead of the available one — the difference between rail that works and rail that does not.
Yes, the line has shrunk from 20.2 promised miles to 9.8, after construction costs spiked for roads and rail alike. The deferred miles are now priority extensions waiting on a working transit spine.
The line is expensive. With financing, it tops $8 billion. The federal share remains uncommitted, and the attorney general’s challenge to its bond financing is awaiting a trial court ruling.
But cost is the one objection that transit critics never apply to their own position. The Texas Department of Transportation does not pause highway expansion until prices fall; the need for rail is just as real. Right-of-way only gets costlier as a city grows.
The environmental review that stalls projects like this for five to seven years is done. Austin finished within the federal two-year deadline, a first among major transit projects. If cost is the worry, building now is the frugal choice.
None of this requires pretending the train will erase traffic. Roads and rail are two parts of one system, and Texas will keep building highways because it has to.
Both are scheduled to open in 2033, the rebuilt I-35 and Austin’s light rail. When I-35 is congested again within a decade, the value of the second mode will not be that it emptied the freeway. It will be that it never depended on the freeway at all.
Jakob W. Schmidt is a downtown Austin resident and Austin Community Liaison for Texas Rail Advocates. This piece reflects his personal views.