Posted on 10/28/2007 3:20:06 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
During this year's legislative session, Texas had an "oh, wait, hold on, don't do that" moment on privately funded tollways. Fair enough, but now it's time to figure out what the state should do, including how to pay for what the state's highway czar calls a $100 billion shortfall in money needed for essential highway projects.
Ric Williamson, the Weatherford businessman who is chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission, says "the entire future of the state transportation system" depends on potential revenue from private toll road investors. Without it, staffers with the Texas Department of Transportation told commission members at a meeting last month, the state soon will have only enough money to maintain existing roads, with nothing left for new highways to relieve congestion.
In May, the Legislature -- bowing to a buildup of constituent outrage against private toll road proposals and the thought that some of those projects could go to foreign companies -- slapped a two-year moratorium on new toll partnership contracts. There were a few notable exceptions, including the Texas 121 tollway planned for Denton and Collin counties.
Lawmakers also said a legislative study committee should be named to determine whether heavy reliance on private toll roads is a good idea. The committee is to have nine members, with the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker each appointing three. Five months later, only Speaker Tom Craddick has made his appointments.
Come on, Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. This problem is not going away on its own. Even after members are named, legislative study committees are often slow to start their work and slow to move forward. This one will have some heavy lifting to do before writing its required report for the 2009 legislative session.
There's no time like now to get this committee started.
How we got here
It's clear that private toll road advocates have done a terrible job of selling the idea to fellow Texans. Now it's in deep trouble. If the concept is to be salvaged, the legislative study committee will have to gather the right data and sell the whole thing anew -- in a way that constituents can believe is independent of political pressure or influence from those who want to make money from toll roads.
Perry was the first to push private toll roads in 2002, when he proposed a 50-year plan to build the 4,000-mile, $175 billion Trans-Texas Corridor. That February, as if to emphasize the point, Fluor Enterprises of Sugar Land submitted an unsolicited proposal to build one of the corridor's priority projects.
By 2003, the Transportation Commission was touting the potential of public-private partnerships to build new roads, saying investors would be willing to pay billions upfront for contracts to build new roads, then collect tolls and share that revenue with the state for as long as 50 years.
The Legislature climbed on board in 2003, passing House Bill 3588 -- a massive rewrite of state transportation law that authorized private toll road contracts, which it called comprehensive development agreements (CDAs).
The Transportation Commission also adopted the Texas Metropolitan Mobility Plan, changing the way it distributed money for highways. For decades, construction projects had been selected and funded one at a time from Austin. The new plan was to allocate money by region and let regional mobility authorities, created under HB 3588, decide how to spend it.
Where things went wrong
In effect, local officials who were named to positions leading those regional mobility authorities (in Dallas-Fort Worth, it's called the Regional Transportation Council), were left to solve their own problems. At the same time that they were given the freedom to spend transportation dollars, it became clear that there were far from enough available.
Highway construction in Texas traditionally has been funded primarily from motor fuel tax revenue. But more and more of that money is needed to maintain existing roads. And Williamson says that costs for labor, asphalt and related materials, right-of-way and engineering work have escalated 65 to 70 percent in the past 10 years. Meanwhile, legislative leaders refused to raise the tax.
And the state's congressional delegation continues to have a hard time increasing the state's share of revenue from the federal motor fuel tax. Texas only gets back about 90 cents out of each fuel tax dollar that it sends to Washington.
It's almost as if local decision-makers are being pushed down a funnel that leads to only one source of money to meet future needs: private toll road contracts.
Opportunity or nightmare?
Williamson says that in 2003, the transportation commission had identified 56 projects in the state's highway plan that private companies would be interested in bidding on because of their potential toll revenue. That number has grown to 87.
Toll roads clearly don't work everywhere. They work best in heavily populated metropolitan areas such as Dallas-Fort Worth. But Williamson and others are saying that the money that investors are willing to pay upfront for toll road contracts, plus the portion of the annual toll road revenue that they would be willing to share, is the best source of money for other new roads.
If that's the case, so be it. But Texans clearly still need convincing.
Shouldn’t the colors on that map be reversed?
My point is that most ‘highway funding’ goes for most anything but highways.
Secession has not always been offensive to me...
I’ve seen roads in other states that are way more gnarly than a lot of roads in Texas...
So I am ok with a few bumps and chipped windshields...Nothing is perfect...I just don’t want this “near paradise” to be ruined by companies and former elected officials making money off of this, and not make it any better...
“Standing pat is not an option!”
Without illegals here in Houston, traffic would decrease signifigantly, and at least 50% of all accidents would never occur.
I disagree with your statement, FRiend. The white voter base is forced to move further into the fringes in order to maintain their standard of living, keep their families safe, and avoid the icky ghetto people that ruin the quality of life for everybody.
I have nothing against people who want to live in the country. What I object to is people who want to live in the country but who insist on dragging the city with them, plowing under zillions of acres of beautiful farm and wilderness land and replacing them with ugly housing developments, strip malls, and concrete deserts. If people would move to the country and live a country lifestyle, that would be fine, but to destroy the little natural beauty we have left in the name of sprawl is a waste and a crime.
The cycle of sprawl is well-established. Like a plague of locusts, white-flighters abandon their city to the ferals, descending upon some country town where the people are too poor to turn down the developers' money. They then transform the town into a wasteland of concrete, with acres and acres of cheaply-built "homes", big-box retailers, and fast-food joints held together by rivers of asphalt. They then raise one generation of alienated kids in this environment of isolation, sell their now-shabby homes to those who can afford them, then abandon the whole thing in place. As they leave, the suburb is taken over by feral humans, completing the transformation of a once-beautiful country town into a slum. The rings of decaying 1950s-1990s suburbs around every major city in America are the result. Meanwhile, the kids of the white-flighters, now adults, are invading the next little country town, 20 miles further out, to begin the process again.
Read Aristotle. Man is a social animal, meant to live in cities, not isolated strip-burgs connected by freeways. The very word "civilization" is based upon "civitas"; no cities, no civilization. Suburban sprawl is bad for the human race because it goes against these core ideas of civilization. It is also ruining the land and bankrupting the public coffers.
Fortunately, it is also economically unsustainable over the long term. Fifty years hence, God willing, the suburbs will be gone, the countrysides will once again be the sole province of farmers, ranchers, and wild animals, and the money we as a society now waste on running away from the problems of living together will instead be spent on solving those problems.
Don’t ask me. The entire concept is based on just about everybody commuting between city jobs and suburban homes, a traffic flow pattern that doesn’t really exist anymore.
In Jacksonville, the light rail “system” I’m most familiar with, it winds up costing something like $20 per passenger mile, besides burning more fuel per passenger mile than transporting the same number of people in a car. Quite often it runs completely empty. Very bizarre.
OTOH, in Sacramento it works fairly well, but provides only limited alternatives to auto transport.
What about people who already lived in the country? Do you think they like the idea of *civilization creeping towards them?
An unfortunate aspect is living in country but, having to commute to cities to carry on your business (we aren’t ranchers although we are farmers in a sense). You can’t wait to get home.
It’s definitely a conundrum.
The Detroit ‘People Mover’ light rail is a total failure. Runs a loop in downtown only, around the abandoned buildings. 80% Fed built and maintained.
Here in the DC metro area, people sprawl all the way to the regional shooting ranges—then lobby to shut them down because they are too loud, same with small airports.
As I said, I have no problem with people who choose country life over city life. What I object to is the rape of the landscape by city people who move to the country while insisting upon city conveniences. If people want to get away from the smelly crowds, let them accept well water, septic tanks, general stores, clotheslines, and slow driving on two-lane roads in return.
In retrospect, the smart thing to do would have been to change land-use laws back during the ‘50s, when the Interstates were built. Instead of allowing white-flighters to infest and consume the towns on the periphery of the cities using the Interstates, we should have made it a federal mandate that a fifty-mile-wide belt around the corporate limits of each Interstate-served city be zoned “No New Contstruction”. New construction and renovation building permits would have been limited to only those living in the greenbelts already, and all land in the greenbelt could be used only for genuine farming, ranching, and wildlife preserve. That would have prevented the hollowing-out of our cities while preserving the logistical and national security benefits of the Interstate system.
As it is, the only limit to Sprawl is the retail price of gasoline. (The cost of new roads is no limit; the Sprawlsters will insist that the rest of us pay for their big, expensive commuter freeways.) As soon as gasoline reaches the $6-$10/gal. level, the Sprawl will begin to die. Once the era of Cheap Gas is over, people will return to the cities. My guess is that the abandoned sprawlscapes will become “surface mines” to be stripped of usable materials and returned to nature by city-based teams of reclamation workers. The debuilding of Sprawl will be a lucrative industry for future generations.
Precisely what I mean. They want to escape the city, but they insist on bringing “the city” with them. It’s just insane.
Seems like a *rat in a cage* scenario.
Since most of the people who work downtown sit in a cubicle all day, the solution might be for them to work from home, limiting the amount of cars that commute each day.
Before the red/blue map became so iconic (to the point of labelling certain regions “red-state America”— or, more amusingly, “Jesusland”, would it were so), the incumbent (or the candidate from the ineligible incumbent’s party) was always indicated by blue and the challenger by red regardless of party.
It seems simple enough to me: if one wants the conveniences of living in a city (24-hour grocery, dry cleaning, access to entertainment), one must be prepared to accept the limitations of city life (high-rise housing, noise level, occasional contact with undesirables). If one wants the benefits of country living (detached housing, quiet, solitide), one should be prepared to live with the limitations of country life (no shopping, services, or entertainment destinations).
In the case of Austin, it’s too late. People move there because they “love Austin”, but they refuse to live with the limitations and inconveniences that are part of Austin life. They want the charm, quirkiness, and natural beauty of Austin without giving up the fast-food lifestyle of Dallas or Houston. The result: suburbanization. The entire county north of 183 is being strip-mined, bulldozed, and plowed under already in order to build locust-hive suburbs. In the process of “loving Austin”, its residents are destroying everything that made it special; ten years from now, the Austin area will be just another version of Dallas/Fort Worth, with strip malls and subdivisions stretching from the city limits to Pflugerville and beyond. Twenty years from now it’ll be a decaying core surrounded by a ring of shabby suburban slums. Meanwhile, the nouveaux riche locust plague will be strip-mining and plowing under Lampasas. Forget the creeks, the wildflowers, the red-tailed hawks, the little farms and ranches — make way for an endless desert of Tyvek dwelling-boxes, six-car garages, and a SuperMegaHyper-Mart on every corner.
Unless, of course, gas goes up to $10 a gallon, or becomes rationed, or becomes “for national defense and emergency use only”.
Which it will, sooner or later.
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