Lone Star Rail District Minimum Viable Service

After much work the first publicly readable draft of the Lone Star Rail District, Minimum Viable Service, is readable here.

It’s a dropbox link; perhaps someday I’ll upload that to this site to host, but the hosting service takes a long time to accept a file, so for now its dropbox.

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So what is this? It’s a plan for rail service between San Antonio and Austin. The Lone Star Rail District is a state-created plan for rail service between these two cities originating in the 1990s, but has never amounted to actually running any trains. The Minimum Viable Service is a plan to create this rail service by starting small, with the least possible system that still meets some basic requirements - specifically:

• Provide service between San Antonio and Austin more than once per day

• Provide a city-to-city travel time that is competitive with driving

• Provide local service within each city (mostly by having multiple stops in each city and good connections to existing public transit in each one)

The plan is about 50 pages plus 100 pages of appendices, but the Executive Summary, which summarizes things (executively) is only 1 page. So don’t be intimidated.