The reason it's longer is because they're routing it via Austin and San Antonio. In their vision, San Antonio functions as an intersection for the lines from Da

The reason it's longer is because they're routing it via Austin and San Antonio. In their vision, San Antonio functions as an intersection for the lines from Dallas and Houston, as well as another from Laredo. Not sure why they went for this configuration. Leaving Laredo out of it and adding a direct Dallas-Houston branch to complete the triangle would make more sense to me. There is also this competing high speed rail project, which seems more realistic to me: http://www.texascentral.com/ http://www.texascentral.com/