The Dallas City Council’s last-minute opposition to the proposed downtown high-speed rail route to Fort Worth won’t stall the critical federal environmental process that’s already underway.

That’s a big deal. It keeps the current environmental analysis on track to wrap up next March, which, once approved by the feds, will allow the North Central Texas Council of Governments (COG) to begin pursuing funding and more in-depth engineering. The COG delivered the news during a meeting of the 45-member Regional Transportation Council on Thursday afternoon. The project itself is expected to cost $6 billion and shuttle riders between Dallas, Arlington, and Fort Worth within 30 minutes.

The COG began producing the Environmental Impact Statement last March, which triggers a 12-month deadline. Michael Morris, the transportation director for the COG, said he expects it to cost another $1.6 million to produce 30 percent of the new alignment’s design. Planning for the environmental statement has already cost the agency $12.1 million.

The end product from this analysis generally establishes the alignment for major transportation projects, so when the Dallas City Council passed a resolution in June opposing elevated rail lines through downtown—pending an economic analysis—the COG was concerned that it could delay its planning by a year or longer. It had to design a new route through the most complicated part of the entire 30-mile line: downtown Dallas.

On Thursday, regional transportation planners said they received permission from the federal government to plan for two separate downtown alignments. Each would shuttle trains about seven stories high to the federally approved high-speed rail station in the Cedars, about a mile south of Reunion Tower. The older alignment has the tracks just east of the Hyatt Regency, splitting between the forthcoming $3 billion convention center overhaul through the heart of southwest downtown. The newer alignment misses downtown entirely, running just west of Interstate 35E along Riverfront Boulevard on its way to that Cedars station.

Morris said the alignment that misses downtown would likely result in losing a connection to Eddie Bernice Johnson Union Station, where Amtrak, Trinity Railway Express, and DART lines converge. But it wouldn’t require any maneuvering around skyscrapers. (Hunt Realty plans to build a $5 billion mixed use development in the corner that would house the other alignment. It contends its plans cannot coexist with the line.) Morris said the agency designed the first downtown route to include a “lobby” or a people mover that could shuttle riders to and from the Cedars station into the convention center and downtown’s Union Station.

If Dallas chooses the western alignment, the COG would no longer pay for that connection, he said. But Morris said it would still investigate ways to link the high-speed rail station with the convention center. Amtrak, which has taken over the separate Houston-to-Dallas high-speed rail project, has concerns about getting riders into downtown if Dallas picks the western alignment, said COG program director Brendon Wheeler.

“I think you’re gonna have your hands full trying to make that same connection in such an easy and graceful way that the high-speed rail system creates for you,” Morris said during Thursday’s meeting of the Regional Transportation Council.

Morris is no stranger to attaching big-dollar adjacent projects to his preferred plans. The city of Dallas has “paused” its support for the downtown alignment until an economic analysis can be completed, which is expected in October. Then it will establish its preference. But for now, the Council was nervous about sewing a high-speed rail line into its downtown.

“I believe in placemaking, and we certainly wouldn’t put a highway for cars through downtown,” said Councilman Chad West, one of the members of the Regional Transportation Council. “This is very different obviously, but it still creates some challenges when you look at that whole area … that it would cut off. There is no perfect solution, as you point out, and we still must work through that.”

While some Dallas officials have questioned the need for a high-speed rail connection to Fort Worth, the COG believes the federal government envisions this corridor of North Texas as a nexus for rail travel. A separate line from Houston to Dallas is already federally approved, and extending the line to Fort Worth would open up possibilities that could run rail to Central Texas and the western United States.

That’s all a long way away. Amtrak has taken over the Houston project, but still has land to acquire, designs to complete, and funding to secure. The federal plan for a nationwide rail network is still a draft. But the COG is getting its house in order, preparing just in case this all comes to fruition and big buckets of money come available.

Dallas’ job is now to determine whether the tradeoff of connectivity between the Cedars and downtown is worth the risk of how an elevated rail line affects development near the convention center. It made a stand, and it didn’t derail the project.

2:00 AM on Aug 9, 2024 CDT