CapMetro Celebrates 40 Years, Plans for Future Growth Amid Challenges

Like the city it serves, Capital Metro has seen a lot of change over the past 40 years.

When the transportation authority launched service on July 1, 1985, it served fewer than 700,000 residents and provided about 7.5 million rides every year. Now, CapMetro serves a population of more than two million and provides more than 26 million trips annually across several modes of transit including trains and bikes.

At a media event Tuesday to celebrate CapMetro’s big four-oh, a stable of local officials touted the agency’s successes in the face of rapid growth and political headwinds. They also designated July 1 as CapMetro Day.

"We’ve weathered challenges that would have derailed lesser organizations, experienced economic downturns, natural disasters and the global pandemic that fundamentally changed how we move," CapMetro President and CEO Dottie Watkins said at the event. "But we adapted, we persevered and we’ve emerged stronger together."

The anniversary celebration comes a month after the culmination of a state legislative session where Republican lawmakers unsuccessfully targeted Austin’s Project Connect, a multibillion-dollar transit package voters approved in 2020. While light rail is its main feature, the project also includes some CapMetro expansion priorities.

State Rep. John Bucy, a Democrat who represents parts of Round Rock and North Austin, called the legislative incursion "anti-democratic."

"What outside lawmakers tried to do this legislative session was an attack on our community, an assault on our values and an affront to the rule of law and democratic governance," Bucy said Tuesday. "We must continue to grow and invest in our transit system and not let partisan attacks delay or deny the progress our community wants and deserves."

Addressing some of the transit authority’s other challenges, Watkins on Tuesday noted the agency has had to adapt to growing public safety concerns. The transit authority launched its own police department last month, just weeks after a fatal stabbing on one of its buses.

Watkins, an Austin native who began working at CapMetro in 1994 as a bus driver, said the transportation authority is facing other challenges head-on, Austin’s rapid growth in particular.

"The thing about growth is it is a good problem to have," she said. "But it is a problem nonetheless, because as our community grows, both in numbers, but also geography, we have to change the way we approach what we do."

CapMetro is working to finalize a comprehensive strategic plan that will lay out upgrades to the system over the next decade with the aim of increasing capacity to accommodate three million residents.

Transit Plan 2035 is on track to be completed by the end of the year.

"The next 40 years will be even more transformative (with) all the work we’re doing to redefine transit in our communities," Watkins said. "There is still a whole lot more that we’re going to accomplish together."