State officials approve first HOV lanes for San Antonio

(By: Katherine Blunt - https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/State-officials-approve-first-non-toll-HOV-lanes-7948269.php)

Plans to expand two major San Antonio highways without tolls received the official stamp of approval Thursday after some debate over whether other projects would be delayed as a result.

Parts of U.S. 281 and Interstate 10, originally slated for tolls, will now be expanded with high-occupancy vehicle lanes instead. The Texas Transportation Commission approved the switch at its meeting in Austin, where more than 20 officials and planners from San Antonio appeared to express their support for the projects.

“For 15 years I’ve had the anti-toll people ready to string me up, and I’m glad we won’t have any (of that) today,” said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.

HOV lanes are reserved for transit vehicles and cars with more than one occupant, usually two or three. They’ll be built in place of the toll lanes once planned for I-10 between La Cantera Parkway and Ralph Fair Road and U.S. 281 between Loop 1604 and the Comal County line.

Now, the Texas Department of Transportation plans to expand that part of U.S. 281 into a six-lane freeway with one HOV lane in each direction. And it will widen that part of I-10 by adding one HOV lane and one general purpose lane in each direction.

The change in plans illustrates a statewide shift in perspective on toll lanes following two legislative sessions that focused heavily on finding more funding for highways. State lawmakers capped the Texas Mobility Fund, the state’s last source of highway bonds, and voted to stop using some gas tax and vehicle registration fee revenue for projects other than road building.

They also created Propositions 1 and 7, two ballot measures that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2014 and 2015, respectively. Both established new funding streams for non-toll highway projects.

Starting in 2018, Prop. 7 will add about $2.5 billion to the State Highway Fund each year, and after 2020, it will add a projected $430 million in vehicle sales tax revenue. Prop. 1 is expected to add $1.1 billion in severance tax revenue to the fund this fiscal year, but future payouts depend on the cost of crude oil.

The promise of more funding moved the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization to rethink the use of tolls for the U.S. 281 and I-10 expansions, both of which are partly unfunded. At last month’s meeting, Transportation Commissioner Jeff Austin cautioned that if San Antonio chose to fill those gaps with its Prop. 1 or Prop. 7 allocations, it might have little new funding left for other projects.

He expressed particular concern about the I-10 project, which the commission discussed at length.

“If everything goes in on just this one project, what’s going to happen to the other projects down the road?” he asked.

Commissioner Jeff Moseley said he supported the new funding structure for the I-10 project, but he echoed Austin’s words of caution. He said he hoped residents in San Antonio and other areas of the MPO’s jurisdiction understood that other projects could be impacted by the shift away from tolling.

The MPO has enough funding to expand U.S. 281 between Loop 1604 and Stone Oak, which will cost about $228 million. But it lacks the $300 million needed to fund the expansion to the county line.

It approved the non-toll plan for the project last year in the hope Prop. 7 dollars could close the funding gap. In January, the Transportation Commission offset some of that cost by allocating about $81 million for right-of-way acquisition on the northern half of the project.

The non-toll I-10 expansion won’t require any new funding sources — yet. The MPO has enough money to pay for the four new lanes, which will cost about $70 million.

But it has just over half of the funding needed to build direct connectors between La Cantera and Loop 1604, a $130 million undertaking included in the original toll plan. The HOV plan eliminates that shortage by removing the direct connectors from the project, enabling the MPO to fund the new lanes without tolls.

The director connectors are now included in a plan to expand Loop 1604 between Texas 16 and Interstate 35 on the North Side, a project currently slated for tolls.

“While the types of funding have changed over the years, it does not remove tolls from the toolbox,” said Bexar County Commissioner Kevin Wolff, vice chairman of the MPO. “They’re still there, and we might have to use them one day.”

Until then, several San Antonio officials emphasized that HOV lanes are needed to help mitigate congestion, incentivize transit and carpool use and improve air quality in a rapidly growing city that is poised to breach federal ozone limits by the end of the year.

“We cannot build roadways long enough or wide enough to build our way out of congestion,” said Hope Andrade, who chairs VIA Metropolitan Transit’s board of trustees. “I must say, HOV lanes are long overdue for the city of San Antonio and Bexar County.”