If you think the service is going to be so popular by itself, you wouldn’t need to cut these express bus trips – would you?

Those who think it’s ridiculous to even consider that Capital Metro’s doing this for the reasons I stated should look harder at the graphs in my link above. Don’t you think a few people are going to notice after a few days that, yeah, the train gets you to the MLK station pretty quick, but then you have to spend 5 minutes transferring to a shuttle and 10 minutes getting back to UT (at best)?

My guess is that the commuter rail will end up being too popular, i.e. the cars will be full way before the end of the line, and they’ll have to restart this service to take up the slack until they get enough rail cars to meet demand. However, until that plays out it seems foolish to compete with yourself.

CM is planning on cutting some express bus trips despite the fact that the commuter rail ‘alternative’ is going to be much slower for anybody in Austin, and slower-to-almost-competitive for the farthest out folks in Leander.