Before I offer a few common sense solutions, we all need to know what unaccountable freeway tolls are. No city in the country has ever shifted a public highway to a tollway. That's just highway robbery.
TRADITIONAL TOLLS
vs.
FREEWAY TOLLS
Traditional toll roads are designed and built as whole new routes or highways. Freeway Tolls privatize and toll our public highways.
Traditional toll roads are financed with investor dollars while freeway Tolls are financed with our tax dollars.
Traditional toll roads are an ALTERNATIVE to our public expressways while freeway Tolls PERMANENTLY take public expressways away from drivers.
Traditional toll roads are promised to be free roads after the road is paid for while Austin's Freeway Tolls will never be removed.
Traditional toll roads cost 9 cents a mile while freeway tolling authority (CTRMA) documents show a cost of our freeway tolls at 44-64 cents per mile. The Comptroller's report found one toll at the rate of $1.00 a mile.
Revenue from traditional toll roads pay for the road you are driving on. Revenue from a freeway toll in Austin will go into a slush fund controlled by Williamson County.
Smart Solutions
1) Use our gas tax dollars to finish building the roads we've already paid for, and open them up as freeways NOT tollways. Tolling roads we've already paid for with gas tax dollars is immoral. Sending Austin's toll revenue to Williamson County is obscene. Stop the Double Tax.
When our freeways are tolled, the enormous cost of maintaining those roads will shift from being paid with state gas tax to us locally - forever.
2) Consider pass through financing (www.dot.state.tx.us/publications/tta/pass_through.pdf), as dozens of other cities in Texas are doing, for key sections of highways that are not already funded with our tax dollars.
3) Texas has more sprawl than any other state in the country. Zone for denser development in urban and suburban areas so people don't have to drive as far for needs. Texas passed a law to STOP building wasteful frontage roads that only Texas has produced. Freeway tolls force the frontage roads waste to continue.
4) Build more arterial road lane miles and less highway lane miles. Phoenix, AZ produces more arterial lane miles that usually cost 70 - 90% less than highway lane miles.
5) Just like our families learn to live within a budget, TxDOT needs to get a hold of it's expenditures. And, we need to get rid of the TxDOT good old boy network and graft that causes our roads to cost much more than other states. The General Accounting Office report of state highway construction shows the median cost of a road lane mile in the US to be $1.6 million per lane mile. Tollway 130, east of Austin, the most expensive road project in the country, will cost a whopping $7.6 million per lane mile.
6) Some states realized that the smartest way to stop the political blame game of considering to raise the gas tax every two or four years (to keep up with inflation) is to index our gas tax. Texas needs to index the gas tax.
7) Reversing the flow of traffic in one or more lanes during peak periods.
8) Variable speed limits can help move traffic and cut serious accidents by 10-20%
9) Stop Secret Deals! Comprehensive Development Agreements (CDAs) are road and land development contracts that hand over our tax dollars, our public highways, our right of way, and our private property to private corporations for profit. These wastefull NO BID, Secret, Corporate Welfare contracts must be stopped.
10) Remove Special Interest Politicians who ignored the 93% of the public feedback that opposed the freeway toll plan.
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