I-45 project proceeds despite objections
TxDOT gives itself go-ahead on $7.5 billion rebuild, while critics urge ‘smarter solutions’
Texas highway officials Thursday gave themselves the green light to rebuild Interstate 45 in Houston, a crucial step in the process, despite lingering concerns from critics that the proposed $7.5 billion widening project is out of step with the region's future needs.
The record of decision, essentially a declaration that the project met all the steps laid out in federal transportation rules, clears the way for construction of the revamped freeway, but also allows for changes, Texas Department of Transportation officials said.
In a statement, Houston District Director for TxDOT Eliza Paul said the decision “is a necessary step in moving into the detailed design phases of project development, which is where we will have the opportunity to fully explore many of the project refinements requested.”
Those proposed changes, which critics have sought for more than three years as the project moved through its environmental process, include significant revisions in more than a dozen neighborhoods.
“‘Refinements’ is a blatant mischaracterization of the critical changes requested by Harris County, the city of Houston, and other elected officials representing the people of the directly impacted communities,” said Oni Blair, executive director of LINK Houston, an advocacy group that has worked with local neighborhoods to oppose the project.
Nearly 1,100 homes — most of them apartments and public housing — and more than 340 businesses, five churches and two schools, along with dozens of other properties, will be displaced or affected by the freeway rebuild as currently proposed.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, via the city’s planning department, has asked for the project to focus more on transit investment as opposed to the current plan for managed lanes.
“There has been a lot of community engagement and input provided to TxDOT, which I hope the agency will take into consideration,” Turner said in a statement Thursday. “I also believe a lot more work is required.”
Other local leaders were more forceful in their denunciations of the decision to proceed, including Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who issued a statement critical of the project.
“We’re very disappointed in the I-45 plan as it is currently presented,” Hidalgo said. “It displaces vulnerable people unnecessarily, won’t mitigate traffic over the long term, and ignores the need for meaningful investments in smarter transit solutions.”
Hidalgo recently wrote to federal officials, urging them to re-evaluate the environmental process and supported the county hiring a law firm to explore challenging TxDOT.
Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia said calling the decision disappointing is an understatement, noting myriad comments TxDOT received urging changes.
“So far, the record shows TxDOT has chosen to ignore stakeholders’ concerns,” Garcia said. “Why should we trust that will change? The decision to move forward shows a lack of commitment to listen to residents most affected by the current plan.”
TxDOT has spent most of the past two decades preparing to rebuild I-45 between downtown Houston and Beltway 8 near Bush Intercontinental Airport. After years of analysis, and with support from local officials at the time, highway officials in 2015 proposed adding two managed lanes in each direction, as well as widening or adding frontage roads in some segments. The project includes a near-total redesign of the freeway system around the central business district, realigning I-45 to follow Interstate 69 on the east side of the central business district and Interstate 10 near Buffalo Bayou before resuming the existing path.
The rebuild would remove the elevated segment of I-45 along Pierce Street, but retains access to the west side of downtown, turning a portion of the existing freeway into a road similar to Spur 527 that connects I-69 and Midtown.
“The future of transportation is changing and the infrastructure in the nation’s fourth largest city needs to change with it,” TxDOT officials said in an announcement of the approval. “Parts of the I-45 North corridor have not been updated since being built over 50 years ago.”
TxDOT officials said the project comes with numerous benefits, citing projections that estimate traffic will move faster — leading to fewer idling cars and trucks — while providing safer entrances and exits.
“It also prepares for the future by improving resiliency to weather events and providing safer, more efficient travel that could accommodate the transition to electric and self-driving vehicles,” officials said. “It also will increase the opportunity for transit and highoccupancy vehicles as transportation choices for those traveling.”
Through an agreement with the Federal Highway Administration, Texas is able to self-certify that it followed federal rules for addressing property displacements, flood mitigation and environmental effects. The record of decision allows officials to move forward to construction, even as they work to solve some of the problems critics have raised, Paul said.
“TxDOT will continue to do all we can to help make the (project) a success,” she said.
Critics, however, said months of urging TxDOT to reconsider seem to be having no effect on what officials plan to build.
“The very act … of issuing the record of decision at this time and on the birthday of Rosa Parks and Transit Equity Day, demonstrates the agency’s true intentions,” Blair said.
Susan Graham, an organizer of Stop TxDOT I-45, a group formed to oppose the project, said the two sides simply are divided on whether a wider freeway achieves anything.
“It will not ‘fix’ congestion or make it safer to move about our city,” Graham said. “This $8 billion project will destroy neighborhoods and repeat the harms of past freeway projects by continuing the history of systemic racism.”