"On the weekends it's very congested. There are a lot of cars out here," Rainey Street resident Faisal Raza told KXAN this month, describing the two-lane roadway that carries most of the district's foot and vehicle traffic between the roundabout at its entrance and the towers stacking up along the water. Austin Police Department Commander Christopher Juusola told the same reporters that the department is now actively discussing how to improve flow on the street, citing the difficulty of getting emergency vehicles down a narrow road lined with new high-rises.
A block away, on the same September evening, a different kind of movement was happening. Runners and dog walkers were crossing one of three new lattice bridges over Waller Creek, part of a 13-acre park that opened in June without a single car in sight. Rainey's growing pains and its newest amenity turn out to be the same story, told from two different vantage points: one measures the street in cars per hour, the other in a car-free route that didn't exist a year ago.
The Roundabout Nobody Has Widened Yet
The congestion Raza describes in KXAN's report isn't new, but the stakes around it are rising with each finished tower. Little Griddle owner Drew Majoulet, who runs his business near the entrance to Rainey Street, pointed to the roundabout as the actual pressure point, telling KXAN that hotels and constant car traffic converging there choke off the street on either side. Juusola's comments came out of the Downtown Austin Alliance's monthly Downtown Safety Forum, where he laid out the problem in blunt terms: a narrow roadway built for a quiet residential block now has to carry emergency access for a corridor of high-rises. As of this reporting, APD has not announced specific changes, and the department told KXAN it was still waiting to hear back from the City of Austin on any formal plans.
That uncertainty matters for anyone who already lives here. The traffic conversation is real and ongoing, but it's a policy discussion, not a finished project. Which is what makes the timing of Rainey's other big infrastructure story worth paying attention to.
A Second Way In, Built Without a Single Traffic Light
While the roundabout debate was heating up, Waterloo Greenway finished its second phase. The Confluence opened to the public on June 6, 2026, a 13-acre stretch of restored Waller Creek running from 4th Street to Lady Bird Lake, built through a $91.5 million public-private partnership between the city and the Waterloo Greenway Conservancy. It added roughly a mile of new off-street trail connecting the Lance Armstrong Bikeway, Palm Park, Rainey Street, and the Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail, along with three pedestrian bridges over the creek and an 800-foot boardwalk that lets walkers bypass the intersections at Red River and Cesar Chavez entirely.
That last detail is the one that matters if you live on Rainey and have ever tried to get to the lake on a Saturday afternoon. The Confluence doesn't feed into the roundabout. It runs underneath and around the same chokepoints that back up car traffic, giving pedestrians and cyclists a route that never has to merge with the street APD is worried about. One caveat worth keeping in mind for anyone routing a regular dog walk through the area: the City of Austin has scheduled a reroute of the Butler Trail's north shore section near the Confluence and the Austin Rowing Club building starting this past June and running through March 2027, while Austin Energy installs underground electrical infrastructure along the lakeshore between Brazos and Trinity streets.
What Opened Along the Way
The same year that delivered the trail also delivered a noticeably different crop of businesses than the ones that defined Rainey a decade ago. Modern Bar opened April 10 at 90 Rainey Street, on the ground floor of the Modern Austin residential tower, from the team behind Codependent Coffee + Cocktails. Founder Kevin Burns described the concept to Austin Monthly as something closer to a neighborhood institution than a stop on a bar crawl, saying he wanted "a space where it's like Cheers and the Bulgari Hotel Milano lobby bar come together." Bar director Gabe Ford built the drink program around techniques borrowed from Mexico City and London's cocktail scenes, while keeping the room itself unpretentious enough for a Tuesday night.
Alteño, a restaurant from Fonda Fina Hospitality's Johnny and Kasie Curiel expanding their Michelin-recognized Denver flagship into Austin, is part of the same wave, built around chef Johnny Curiel's fire-driven approach to Mexican cooking and an agave-forward bar program. Both openings track with what LV Collective's Matt Wolski, a longtime Rainey operator, described as the shift underway on the street: coffee and groceries and people walking dogs during the day, the same late-night energy still running after dark.
First Thursday, the monthly street festival that used to call the South Congress Hotel home, has also relocated to Rainey. With that hotel under renovation, the free monthly event now runs out of Hotel Van Zandt, giving the street a reliable, recurring reason for a crowd that isn't strictly a Friday or Saturday night crowd.
The Anchors That Didn't Move
None of this displaced what was already working. Banger's Sausage House and Beer Garden has anchored the street since 2012, and its dog-friendly patio and hundreds of beer taps are still there. Half Step and Stay Put, the district's brewpub, are still pouring. The Rainey House still operates out of the same home, run today by owner Joe Regalado and his sons.
Two new residential towers have also started showing units along the same stretch. The Travis, at 80 Red River, began tours in July, and the Waterline, now the tallest tower in Austin, started its own tours in August. Both sit within a few blocks of the Confluence entrance, close enough that the new trail functions less like a park amenity and more like a second front door.
Living With Both at Once
None of this resolves the roundabout. The traffic conversation APD opened this month is still just that, a conversation, and anyone weighing a Friday night departure by car should expect the same congestion Raza and Majoulet described. But the calculus has changed for anyone on foot. A walk to the lake, a run along the Butler Trail, an evening headed toward the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center or First Thursday at Hotel Van Zandt no longer has to cross the same bottleneck that backs up on a weekend night. The choice on a busy Friday is simple: sit in the car line at the roundabout, or take the bridge over the creek instead.
If you're weighing what a home on this stretch of Rainey Street actually looks and lives like day to day, from the new trail connections to the towers still finishing their first leases, Mary Anne McMahon can walk you through the Rainey Street Historic District block by block and help you figure out where the next six months of change are headed before you decide to schedule a private consultation.