On Wednesday, Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority board members expressed an interest in making free rides for K-12 students a permanent feature. On June 8, the day after Capital Metro overhauled its service network with the controversial redesign known as Cap Remap, it launched a service pilot called “Summer Sun, Late Nights and Family Fun,” which expanded […]
Capital Metro
The city’s urban transportation system.
Posted inTransit
New Project Connect plan has ambitions for 2020
Once again, Austin has been reminded of the importance of public transportation, in photos that surfaced this week of the Crystal City metro system that sits right beneath the Amazon headquarters in Crystal City, Va. “As we plan and plan again, our peer systems are investing,” Scott Morris of the Central Austin Community Development Corporation […]
Posted inTransit
Project Connect: Cap Metro insists everything is on the table
Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Randy Clarke insists that nothing is set in stone. He has cautioned the community to view the vision document for Project Connect, the long-term plan for high-capacity transit that Capital Metro released last week, as nothing more than the starting point of a lengthy community conversation about how to bring […]
Posted inTransit
Cap Metro: Key to high-capacity transit is dedicated right of way
The Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority is still a few months away from announcing what modes of transportation it plans to propose for Project Connect, the long-term plan to bring high-capacity public transit to the Austin metropolitan area. Potential solutions include light rail, bus rapid transit, a dramatic expansion of existing MetroRapid bus service, or even […]
Posted inReporters' Notebook
Reporter’s Notebook: The meatloaf index
Don’t tell your constituents… During a Cap Metro board meeting at the Austin Convention Center attended by City Council members, transportation consultant Jeffrey Tumlin bemoaned the current state of transportation planning in most American cities, which prioritizes minimizing “vehicle delay instead of people delay.” The result, he said, is a situation in which the person […]
Posted inRadio
Austin Monitor Radio: Cap Metro’s Randy Clarke
This week, Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority CEO Randy Clarke sits down with Austin Monitor freelancer Caleb Pritchard and editor Elizabeth Pagano to talk Remap, ridership, apps and Project Connect. To hear it all, tune in below. Austin Monitor Radio is produced in partnership with KOOP 91.7 FM. The Austin Monitor’s work is made possible by […]
Posted inTransit
How free ride-sharing could make it easier to catch the bus in Austin
The number of partnerships between public transit agencies and private ride-sharing companies like Uber has been booming. Since 2016, at least 27 such programs have sprung up across the country, including one in Central Austin. Joseph Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University, said more transit agencies are trying to […]
Posted inTransit
For game-changing public transit, Austin needs the feds to chip in
Austin and the surrounding metro area needs a transportation game-changer, and it’s not going to come from more roads. And to build it, we’ll need some help from Washington, D.C. That was the message that officials from Capital Metro delivered to a joint meeting on Monday of the Capital Metro board and City Council over […]
Posted inTransit
Capital Metro eyes a zero-emissions future
The Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority is getting ready to bring electric buses to Austin. But they still have a lot of details to work out. At the agency’s July 30 board meeting, Dottie Watkins, vice president of bus operations, discussed some of the first steps the agency is taking on the road to a zero-emissions […]
Posted inTransit
Capital Metro attempts to reverse falling college student ridership
In a bid to get more college students to hop on the bus, the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority is making several changes to its subsidy agreements with the University of Texas at Austin and the Austin Community College system. Both schools will transition to a flat annual fee to pay for transit service, and ACC […]
Posted inTransit
Capital Metro gives green light to Green Line
On Monday, the board of directors of the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted to study a hotly debated commuter rail line that could stretch from downtown Austin to as far away as Elgin. The Green Line would be very similar to Capital Metro’s existing MetroRail Red Line that runs from downtown to Leander. Like the […]
Posted inTransit
County’s new transit plan includes buses, other odds and ends
The Travis County Commissioners Court on Tuesday approved a three-year transit development plan that aims to bring a variety of transit and transit-adjacent services to parts of the county where no buses currently operate. The 10 transit gap zones identified in the plan, which was a year in the making, sit outside of the Capital […]