The largest-ever expansion of Interstate 35 through Central Austin officially kicked off Wednesday as the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) held a groundbreaking ceremony on top of a six-story parking garage at UT Austin's baseball stadium.
The windswept roof of the parking garage offered panoramic views of the highway set to undergo its most transformative change since opening in 1962, a time when the federal government was encouraging states to build freeways through city centers even if it meant severing neighborhoods and displacing residents.
More than six decades later, TxDOT plans to increase the size of I-35 from Ben White Boulevard to U.S. 290 East by 32 lane miles, including two high-occupancy vehicle lanes in each direction. Lanes will be narrowed from 12-feet-wide to 11-feet-wide to cram them all in. All east-west bridges will be reconstructed. Sidewalks will be installed along the entire length of the interstate on both sides.
The highway will be lowered up to 40-feet below ground level from Holly Street to Airport Boulevard. The City of Austin and UT Austin could cover acres of the sunken lanes with giant decks, effectively tunneling the interstate for blocks at time. The city's construction costs are estimated above $800 million, not including tens of millions of dollars in annual maintenance expenses.
"The third-most congested chokepoint in the entire state of Texas, we're going to do something about that," said J. Bruce Bugg Jr., a banking executive appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2021 to chair the Texas Transportation Commission that oversees TxDOT.
"We've got to prepare Texas not only for today, but also for tomorrow," Bugg told a crowd of government transportation officials seated on rows of folding white chairs. "The highways, the bridges, our road structure, it all has to keep up with our population growth."
To grow the footprint of I-35 through Central Austin, TxDOT is expropriating 54 acres of land. More than 100 homes and businesses are being forced to relocate, including the Austin Chronicle, Nature's Treasures, Progress Coffee and a popular Spanish-immersion pre-school.
Holding the groundbreaking ceremony on top of a parking garage ensured the attendees from the City of Austin, UT Austin, CapMetro, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization and other government agencies were almost out of earshot of several dozen protestors chanting on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
"If you widen a roadway that's congested, it just encourages more people to drive on that roadway," said Miriam Schoenfield, an organizer with the group Rethink35, which has lead a grassroots political campaign against the highway project. Rethink35 helped orchestrate a lawsuit claiming TxDOT ignored environmental harms and a civil rights complaint alleging the expansion is discriminatory.
"You need to give people congestion-free alternatives," Schoenfield said. "We're a city of a million people, and we don't have that much space, so not everyone is going to be able to get around in a metal box."
The multibillion dollar expansion is being subdivided into several smaller chunks. The first piece will be reconstructing the Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard bridge over I-35. Signs have already gone up indicating construction has started.
The next major phase of construction will be from Holly Street south to Ben White Boulevard, including reconstruction of the I-35 bridge over Lady Bird Lake. Drivers won't begin to notice that construction likely until mid-2025.
"That will be done in phases, because we need to keep traffic moving," Tucker Ferguson, a TxDOT Austin district engineer, told KUT News. "We've got to keep I-35 open."
TxDOT has vowed to keep at least three travel lanes open in each direction for the duration of the project, with the exception of some closures that would generally be scheduled overnight or during off-hours.
As for when the upper decks will come down, Ferguson told KUT News that contract won't be put to bid until 2026. Construction could start the next year, but it will depend on when the contractor schedules it.