41% of Travis County Houses Are Within a Half Mile of a Bus

Of the 289,582 one-family houses on the Travis Central Appraisal District's 2026 file, 118,863 sit within a half mile of a CapMetro stop that has weekday service. That is 41 percent. The other 170,719 houses, 59 percent, are farther than that from every bus stop and rail platform in the agency's schedule.

The split is mostly a matter of when the house was built. Among houses built before 1960, 93 percent are inside the half-mile line. Among houses built in 2020 or later, 17 percent are. If you are moving here and expect to ride a bus now and then, or would rather not buy a second car, the year a house was built tells you a lot before you ever open a route map.

How close houses are to a stop

We took every Travis County property the appraisal district classifies as a one-family residence with a recorded living area and measured the straight-line distance from the center of its lot to the nearest stop in CapMetro's published schedule feed. The feed lists 2,308 stops with weekday service across the agency's network. Of those, 748 have a scheduled departure at least every 15 minutes during the morning and afternoon peaks, counting all routes at the stop together. We call those frequent stops below.

Why a half mile? The Federal Transit Administration uses it. In a 2011 policy statement the agency set a half mile as its standard walking catchment around a stop or station, on the reasoning that it is about a fifteen-minute walk, and it measures that half mile as a simple radius. We did the same. A quarter mile is the stricter test, half that walk.

Read the second row carefully. Fewer than one house in four is within a half mile of a stop where the wait at rush hour is 15 minutes or less. Being near a stop and being near a bus you would not have to plan your morning around are different things, and the feed lets us tell them apart.

The year a house was built predicts most of it

The drop between the 1960s and 1970s houses and the 1980s and 1990s houses is the steepest step in the table: from three in four to just over one in three. The appraisal file records when a house was built, not why the bus does or does not reach it, but the pattern is plain: most of what was built after 1980 went up beyond the streets the fixed routes run on. We showed yesterday that one in four Travis County houses sits outside every city limit, and that 41 percent of the houses built since 2020 do. The two counts point the same way: the newest houses are the farthest from city lines and from fixed routes.

The frequent-stop column does something the other does not: it ticks back up after 2010. Houses from the 2010s are more likely to be near a frequent stop (13.3 percent) than houses from the 1980s and 1990s (9.7 percent).

Sixteen ZIP codes, from every house to none

ZIP codes are mail routes, not neighborhoods, but they are how most people search. These are sixteen Travis County ZIPs with at least 3,000 houses on the file, listed from the highest share within a half mile of any stop to the lowest. It describes where the stops are. It is not a ranking of places to live.

Two things stand out. In 78749 two houses in three are near a stop, but fewer than one in ten is near a frequent one. And 78660, the Pflugerville ZIP, has more houses than any other on the file, 32,499, with 1,716 of them inside the half-mile line.

A fixed stop is not the only service. CapMetro also runs Pickup, an on-demand shared shuttle you book by app or phone inside twelve zones, including ones named Manor, Lago Vista, Leander, Dessau and North Oak Hill. Pickup has no stops, so it is not in these counts. If a house you like is outside the half-mile line, check whether it is inside a Pickup zone before you write transit off.

The Red Line: 3,792 houses within a half mile of a station

The Red Line has ten stations between Leander and Downtown. Counting Travis and Williamson counties together, 3,792 houses are within a half mile of one and 15,835 are within a mile. Each house is counted at its nearest station.

Crestview and MLK Jr. are the two stations with more than a thousand houses inside a half mile. Kramer and McKalla have none, and Downtown has 59. That is a limit of the count, not of the stations: this is one-family houses only. Condos, apartments and anything else the district classes differently are not in it, so the number of homes near a station is higher than the number of houses.

What changes on January 10

The schedule we measured runs through January 9, 2027. CapMetro's January 2027 service change starts the next day, a Sunday, and three items matter to anyone choosing a house by its bus:

• Rapid 803 (Burnet/South Lamar) goes from a bus every 10 to 11 minutes to one every 13 minutes on weekdays between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. By our count 8,685 Travis County houses are within a half mile of an 803 stop.
• Route 337 (Koenig/Colony Park) goes from every 15 minutes to every 20 on weekdays between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. There are 10,069 houses within a half mile of a 337 stop. Where 337 is the only frequent route, those stops drop out of our frequent group on the new schedule.
• The Red Line moves to a train every 37 minutes on weekdays, in place of gaps CapMetro describes as running from 25 minutes to more than an hour. The agency says there will still be no midday trips to Leander. We covered the October timetable in detail.

Fares rise the same day. The CapMetro board voted on September 28 to raise a local single ride from $1.25 to $1.50 on January 10, 2027, and to $2.00 in January 2029, Community Impact reported. The page lists no stops added or removed, so the distances in this piece carry over; the frequent-stop figures will shift a little.

What this means if you're buying, selling or renting here

• Buying. Check the stop, then check the schedule. Two houses the same distance from a stop can have a bus every ten minutes or one every hour. CapMetro's own count is 14 high-frequency routes out of 69. Walk the route to the stop once, too: our half mile is a straight line, and a creek, a highway frontage road or a street without a sidewalk can double it.
• Buying at the edge of the county. CapMetro says it is funded in part by a 1 percent sales tax levied by the members of its service area. Whether an address is inside a member jurisdiction is worth confirming with the agency before you count on a route reaching it. Where the table shows no stop within a half mile, budget for the car trips and look at the drive times alongside the tax rate.
• Selling. If your house is a short walk from a Rapid stop or a rail platform, say so with the route number and the walking distance you measured. It is a checkable fact about the property.
• Renting. Leases outlast schedules. A 12-month lease signed this month spans the January 10 change, so look at the new timetable, not just today's.

How we counted

Houses are properties with state class A1 (one-family residence) and a recorded living area on Travis CAD's 2026 roll, one record per property, loaded into our research database on October 7, 2026 and placed by the center of the parcel (parcel layer refreshed November 5, 2026). The Williamson County figures in the rail table use Williamson CAD's 2026 roll the same way. Stops come from CapMetro's GTFS schedule feed dated August 26, 2026, valid through January 9, 2027, which we loaded on September 30; weekday figures describe Wednesday, September 2. The feed covers CapMetro only. It predates the October 12 Red Line timetable, which changed train times but not station locations.

Distances are straight lines from the parcel center to the stop, not walking routes, so real walks are longer. "Frequent" is our label for a stop whose scheduled peak departures, all routes combined, are a median of 15 minutes apart or less; it is scheduled service, not on-time performance. Percentages are our arithmetic. This is general information about housing and transit records, not advice about any one property.

Want this run for a specific address, with the flood, tax and utility district layers alongside? Start with our research tool.