Get your quarters ready.
A massive long range transportation plan rubber stamped by the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization's Transportation Advisory Committee features as its centerpiece an $880 million project to expand Loop 1604 from Bandera Road to I-35 on the north side largely by building toll lanes where the existing grassy median is now, News Radio 1200 WOAI reprots.
The MPO says these would be 'managed lanes,' where car pools, high occupancy vehicles, and other government-approved vehicles could drive for free, but people commuting to work alone in their cars would have to shell out big bucks.
"It is our strong hope that once completed, the Loop 1604 project will serve as a true managed lane project that encourages transit and carpooling, while still tolling single occupancy vehicles to pay for the added infrastructure," MPO member and San Antonio City Councilman Ray Lopez said.
"It has long been the desire of the AAMPO Transportation Policy Board to see a system of HOV Lanes established throughout the region."
The MPO concedes that the proposal for Loop 1604 might be a hard sell.
"Toll revenue is not sufficient to finance 100% of the costs," an MPO report concludes. "A shortfal of approximately $362.5 million exists based on the current data and financing assumptions."
The MPO staff points out that guidelines attached to the two largest sources of state money for highways, voter approved Proposition 1 and Proposition 7, both forbid the use of those funds going to toll lane construction.
The MPO says expansions of Loop 1604, however, are essential in the coming decades, predicting that traffic volumes on the north side of the city will jump from 144,000 vehicles a day today, which is already over capacity, to more than 240,000 per day by 2040, which would put the existing lanes more than 140% over capacity.
The Loop 1604 proposal is part of a $1.5 billion wish list of highway projects.
Also included is $33 million to look into extending Wurzbach Parkway westward to I-10 and possibly into the Medical Center, and funding expanding U.S. 281 widening north of Stone Oak Parkway by adding HOV lanes.
In fact, the MPO project is chock full of trendy social engineering projects, involving HOV lanes, bike lanes, pedestrian lanes, and other questionable projects.
A 2003 University of California Berkeley study, which is considered the definitive research project on HOV lanes, concluded that they do absolutely nothing to either speed traffic or, as seems to be Lopez' goal, to encourage people to utilize public transportation.
The MPO report reveals that engineers studied several ideas for easing traffic flow, even considering 'contraflow' lanes, which would change direction depending on the time of day, making a road inbound during morning rush hour, for example, and outbound during afternoon rush hour.
Also studied were allowing buses to travel on the shoulders of highways, and controlled expressway lanes. These are common in Southern California, where traffic signals are installed on the entrance ramps of Interstate highways, to prevent motorists from driving onto the highway in times of traffic congestion.
The MPO Transportation Planning Vote is just the first step in a long process, and the MPO plan expects that most of the projects will not begin work this decade.
Many projects don't have completion dates until the 2030 to 2040 time frame. The next step, for the Texas Transportation Commission to review the plan, is set for March.
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