AUSTIN, Texas — Austin is about to get a whole lot busier as the Austin City Limits Music Festival kicks off this weekend.
Every year, ACL brings in an influx of music lovers into the “Live Music Capital of World,” which brings about road closures and traffic in and around Zilker Park.
If you are planning to attend the festival either during the first or second weekend, the City of Austin’s Transportation and Public Works department has created a mobility guide for how to get around the area.
Road closures start Thursday along Stratford Drive and Barton Springs Road and will last until early Monday morning both weekends. Other roads around Zilker Park will close at 11 a.m. on Friday and remain closed through the weekend. A complete list of all the road closure is available in the mobility guide.
Parking will be sparse anywhere within a mile or two of the festival as there is no parking at Zilker Park or in the surrounding neighborhoods, but there are some parking options nearby if you are willing to pay. ACL has a list of parking options on its website, with most of them requiring a reservation ahead of time.
For people planning on using a rideshare service to get to and from the park, the guide has designated two streets as no-go zones for pick up and drop off–Azie Morton Road from Barton Springs Road to Barton Hills Drive and Barton Springs Road from Sterzing Street to South 1st Street.
The mobility guide also lists multiple areas around the park for bicycle and scooter parking.
If you want to take a ride in a pedicab, there will be two staging areas, one on Barton Springs Road at the intersection of Sterzing Street and the other on Azie Morton Road near the Umlauf Sculpture Garden.
CapMetro, the city’s public transportation authority, has a couple of bus routes that go directly to Zilker Park and several routes that have stops within a block of the official ACL Shuttle site at Republic Square at the corner of 4th and San Antonio streets.
The festival shuttles are free to use and will start running at noon on Friday and 11 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. The shuttle will drop you off outside the Barton Springs West festival entrance.