Public offers toll lane feedback
Input will be used to help pick option for South MoPac.
The thought of adding up to four lanes to South MoPac Boulevard — four toll lanes — isn’t easy for Peter Geranios to accept. And the array of options for how to do that, laid out on giant maps at the Palmer Events Center, was a lot to digest Tuesday afternoon.
But with the growth that has happened, and will happen, the Whole Foods worker and South MoPac commuter said he’ll just have to adjust.
“It’s tough to consider the change this represents to the city,” Geranios said as he left an open house where the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority presented six options for adding tolled express lanes to the highway south of the river. “But with the growth, there’s no way around it. I’m not a huge fan of tolling. But if it gets the job done, it gets the job done.”
Tuesday’s open house was part of a month-long process to get public reaction to the design options. The authority on Oct. 21 began a virtual open house on www.mopacsouth.com, and the public can comment online through Nov. 20.
Some of the options would add two toll lanes to each side of South MoPac from Lady Bird Lake to north of Slaughter Lane, others one lane. And they differ in how they connect to West Cesar Chavez Street for downtown commuter, as well as cost: $275 million to $350 million for construction alone.
As of Tuesday morning, 215 people had commented online. About three hours into the open house at Palmer Events Center, about 155 had shown up to peruse the maps, renderings and lists, and to offer their comments as well.
The month of public input will lead to the mobility authority devising a recommended option. Then the authority will aim to issue a draft environmental report in the spring, hold a final public hearing next summer, and then issue a final version for approval by the Texas Department of Transportation.
Agency officials don’t foresee construction until well into 2017, at the earliest. Construction would take three to four years, they said.
On Monday evening, in anticipation of Tuesday’s open house, about 150 people showed up at Austin High School, at the instigation of Travis County Commissioner Brigid Shea and a group called Keep MoPac Local, run by SOS Alliance executive director Bill Bunch, to hear and applaud arguments against building any of the mobility authority’s six scenarios.
The toll lane options on the table, Shea said, “lock us into a last-century model.” She has suggested South MoPac is wide enough that a high-occupancy vehicle lane could be added simply by restriping the road.
But thinning the lanes through restriping “would not provide a safe alternative for drivers,” mobility authority spokeswoman Dee Anne Heath said Tuesday. As for high-occupancy-vehicle lanes, particularly just one on a side, they tend to be underused initially and then ultimately over-used, Heath said, leading to the same sort of congestion now found in South MoPac’s free lanes during peak periods and undercutting the lanes’ utility for transit bus routes.
The variable toll rates that the mobility authority has in mind, on the other hand, would be designed to keep traffic — and buses — moving at 45 mph or more.
Shea said that the mobility authority is proposing toll lanes on South MoPac not because that approach is necessarily the best solution, but because what the agency does is build toll roads.
“If you’re a hammer, everything’s a nail,” Shea said.
Austin City Council Member Leslie Pool, who also attended the Keep MoPac Local meeting on Monday, called the South MoPac options “troubling” and said that the project, along with the construction of Texas 45 Southwest from South MoPac to Interstate 35 sometime in the future, would put 35,000 more vehicles a day onto the westside highway. Shea had earlier put that figure at 30,000 to 44,000, and a Keep MoPac Local flier prophesied 60,000 a day. Bunch said traffic would “literally explode” on South MoPac.
Mobility authority officials, based on a traffic analysis, say the effect of extending Texas 45 Southwest to I-35 would be “minimal,” only a few thousand vehicles a day.