Planners expect the series of multi-acre caps that will eventually cover portions of a reconstructed Interstate 35 to feature compact two- and three-story buildings that could support retail, arts spaces or limited amounts of housing to serve the downtown area.…
Building actual buildings on top is going to be crazy expensive. Yeah caps would be nice, but the cost is astronomical and the city needs to be paying for other more important things.
There’s also the annual cost of maintaining these caps. I’ve seen it quoted as $44 million a year. Austin does not need to be paying for that when it can’t even keep existing city roads paved and maintained.
Building actual buildings on top is going to be crazy expensive. Yeah caps would be nice, but the cost is astronomical and the city needs to be paying for other more important things.
There’s also the annual cost of maintaining these caps. I’ve seen it quoted as $44 million a year. Austin does not need to be paying for that when it can’t even keep existing city roads paved and maintained.
https://communityimpact.com/austin/south-central-austin/transportation/2023/11/07/austin-lining-up-800m-plan-to-bridge-an-expanded-i-35/
Yeah there is actual machinery and utility usage involved. It is a nontrivial engineering problem even to keep them properly vented.