San Antonio, Travis County and Mexico officials urge Legislature to fund passenger rail next session

Monday morning saw a bevy of local – and international – officials come together on one issue that unites all who must traverse Texas: its nightmarish traffic. Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and San Antonio City Council Member Melissa Cabello Havrda rode an Amtrak train to Austin along with Emmanuel Loo, deputy secretary of economic development for Nuevo Leon, Mexico, meeting Travis County officials to hold a press conference on the need for investment next legislative session in high-speed rail travel in Texas, particularly along the Interstate 35 corridor.

The U.S. company Texas Central – working in partnership with Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train masterminds, Central Japan Railway Company – has been planning for high-speed rail in Texas since 2009. The Federal Railroad Administration had already approved Texas Central’s environmental plans in 2020, but by 2022 land acquisition all but stopped due to a legal battle over eminent domain. Last summer, the project was revived due to a partnership with Amtrak, which is said to be taking the lead on the project, though there has been no public update since. 

“The reality is that I-35 is going to be further congested, so the more trucks coming out of Mexico, up to San Antonio, up to Austin, up to the Canadian border, people are going to just get fed up, and they’re going to look for alternative transportation,” Sakai said. “I think we live in a world now where time is money, so I think it’s just going to be the natural market situation that will encourage and really require people to take the rail. If we stay status quo, it’ll be gridlock.”

The current proposed train route includes stops in Fort Worth and College Station, but Travis County Judge Andy Brown and San Antonio officials want to see it extend to Austin as well. The travel time between Houston and Dallas is projected to be as fast as 90 minutes, and Brown hopes the commute from Fort Worth to Austin could be the same. Officials in Monterrey and Nuevo Leon have also expressed interest in connections along the same route, and Sakai noted that trade and economic partnerships between Mexico and the U.S. could be increased through the I-35 corridor: “That’s why the capacity for freight and passenger rail in between our communities is so important.”

Amtrak’s senior vice president for high-speed rail development programs, Andy Byford, told Bloomberg earlier this year that the 240-mile Dallas-to-Houston corridor is ideal for high-speed rail, saying “the potential ridership is huge.” And though the local political will is there, getting the Texas Legislature to pony up funding for it might be difficult.

Federal funding is there, with $66 billion in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act set aside specifically for rail projects across the country – but Texas must pony up 20 percent of the cost to access it and has already missed out on $19 billion in federal funds because the Legislature hasn’t put a system in place to match them, Brown said. In 2017, the Legislature passed a law banning state funds from being used for “high-speed rail operated by a private entity,” and the Texas Department of Transportation seems set on a car-centric future – several state constitutional amendments stipulate that transportation funding has to go toward roads. 

That means funding might have to come from a mix of different private investors, strategies which members of the Texas Passenger Rail Advisory Committee – started by Brown and Sakai, and bringing together rail advocates and local officials – discussed on the train ride to Austin. Still, Brown urged during the press conference that the cost to the state would be worth it, saying that “by reallocating a small portion of our state budget surplus, we can modernize our transportation system to give our commuters another option here in Texas and make it safer, more efficient and more reliable to travel. There’s going to be 8 million people in this region by 2050. If we don’t have great passenger rail service by then, we’re going to be walking.”

Photo by Lars Plougmann, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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