July 9, 2026 - AustinChronicle.com, Jakob W. Schmidt -

Texans will be paying to move people through this corridor either way. Why not invest in better rail options?

I ride the Texas Eagle out of Austin, so I know what little it offers: one train a day, at an hour nobody wants, chronically short on cars. It is the only train serving both Austin and San Antonio. Even so, its ridership rose over 14% last year, part of a record year for Amtrak nationwide, and the corridor’s stations together moved more than 100,000 boardings and alightings in fiscal 2025.

That is the appetite one badly timed train produces.

The demand for movement in this corridor is not a mystery. The Texas Department of Transportation counts 266,000 trips on a typical weekday between Austin and San Antonio. That’s more than six times any other city pair in the Texas Triangle (spanning Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin), none of which exceeds 43,000 trips a day.

Read more: https://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/opinion-austin-lets-get-serious-about-rail-to-san-antonio/

Jakob W. Schmidt is a Downtown Austin resident and Austin community liaison for Texas Rail Advocates.  

Photo credit: Austin Amtrak Station, Texas Rail Advocates