The Central Texas toll road plan – recalls and audits and pickets aside – continues to roll toward construction, but its most controversial segment, the William Cannon bridge over South MoPac, may be roadkill. At its meeting last week, the Texas Transportation Commission, the state panel whose funding mandates spawned the toll road craze and all the chaos that has followed, gave local leaders its informal blessing to go back and remove the bridge from the toll plan approved by the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization in July.
The TTC did not actually vote on the matter, and has indeed not yet voted to accept the region’s plans and allocate Central Texas’ anticipated share of the Texas Mobility Fund. But the five commissioners were receptive to appeals from state Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos (the chair of the CAMPO board), Austin Mayor Will Wynn, and Travis Co. Commissioner Karen Sonleitner for funding to finance improvements along the MoPac corridor – such as sound walls to protect the adjacent neighborhoods – without relying on tolls from the bridge. (The CAMPO board amended the toll plan to earmark bridge revenues for MoPac projects when it approved the whole deal this summer.) “If CAMPO is going to amend this plan … we’re going to say we’re your partners, if that’s what you want,” TTC Chair Ric Williamson told Wynn.
The mayor, of course, is facing a recall drive thanks to citizen anger over the toll plan, a point not lost on the TTC. “It’s safe to say that all five of us have grieved for you because you have gone through this,” Williamson said, decrying the “unnecessary and wasteful criticism” levied by toll road foes. The CAMPO board’s next meeting is Nov. 8, and Barrientos indicated he would entertain a motion to amend the plan to take out the bridge.
In the meantime, the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority board last week approved the agency’s draft toll policies, which can be found at
www.ctrma.org
. The CTRMA is taking public comment through the end of this month; there will be a public hearing on Wednesday, Nov. 10 at the Norris Conference Center (on the back side of Northcross Mall) at 5:30pm.
Under the draft policy, drivers who use toll tags will get up to six months of free and reduced tolls on each toll road. Those who fail to pay a toll – CTRMA would prefer to call them customers rather than the less friendly “violators” – could be slapped with a $25 fee per infraction, but only after a month’s grace period. And those who agree to use a toll tag and keep a minimum deposit in a toll-tag account could be entitled to a 10% discount, or possibly a frequent-user flat fee.
Compared to the battles royal over the multimillion-dollar road projects themselves, toll policies sound trivial. But these decisions will be a lot less frivolous once the toll roads are open. For instance, the North Texas Tollway Authority’s “no mercy, no freebies” policy for those who don’t pay – they snap a picture of your license plate as you pass through the toll plaza and mail it to you immediately for payment, with fees – has led to a lot of grousing among drivers. (Luckily, NTTA has added an online “Violation Processing Center” for those who bypass a tollbooth.) The Harris County Toll Road Authority is a bit more lenient on scofflaws – the first violation comes after three offenses and is only a $5 fee – but the “no toll booth, EZ Tag only” policy on the recently opened Westpark Tollway has earned mixed reviews from drivers.
These are decisions that will impact each of the quite-a-few toll roads the CTRMA expects to open in the future. Last week, the CTRMA board also approved a construction contract with Hill Country Constructors to build the U.S. 183-A toll bypass in the Northwest Corridor, for a cost of $178 million; ground breaking is expected early next year. The board is expected to approve final toll policies on Dec. 8 and present those policies to CAMPO on Dec. 13.
This article appears in November 5 • 2004.