Wow, I'm glad Austin is considering a downtown tunnel. It's hard to provide decent crosstown service if your trains are crawling through downtown on an at-grade alignment... that's the biggest problem with Portland's system, and why Dallas is now considering a subway as part of DART's next expansion phase.
Looks like a complicated configuration for the tunnel though. Gold Line is BRT, so will it share the tunnel with light rail vehicles or run on the surface along 4th St? Then you've got an underground junction at 4th/Guadalupe where the Blue and Orange Lines diverge.
Also, Guadalupe/Lamar is not a wide street... neither is S. Congress. Both only 80' wide. They're not wide boulevards with median space to spare. You'd probably have to run trains in mixed traffic, I can't see Texans sacrificing travel lanes.
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la forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d'un mortel...
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