Council Gets Briefed on Controversial I-35 Expansion Plans: Let the road rage commence – News

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Interstate I-35, looking south from 12th Street Overpass (Photo by Jana Birchum)

Opposition to the Texas Department of Transportation’s plans to expand I-35 through Central Austin – a 13-mile stretch between US 290 East (the Manor Expressway) and US 290 West (Ben White Boulevard) – has new one this week City Council attention attracted. At Tuesday’s working session, TxDOT and the Austin Transportation Department briefed the council on the latest alternatives being considered for what the state highway agency is calling the Capital Express Central project, adding two “managed” (but not tollable or just for transit, at least not yet) lanes that TxDOT District Engineer Tucker Ferguson conceded wouldn’t do much to improve travel times on what is currently the most congested freeway in the state.

Ferguson’s open admission came in response to a question from Mayor Pro Tem Natasha Harper-Madison: “How long do you think it will be before the new I-35 is as congested as the existing I-35 with our current growth projections? ? “It is widely accepted among city planners that the expansion of highways creates additional travel needs that will absorb any new road capacity.

“We’re not pretending to say that the expansion we propose will pave our way out of congestion,” admitted Ferguson. Then why is TxDOT planning to spend nearly $ 5 billion on the CapExCentral (up from $ 8 billion for the entire Capital Express project, which includes northern and southern segments that extend in both directions to the circular line) when eminently domain necessary and bind I-35 for a decade with extensive road works? Ferguson said the project is about “moving more people than vehicles” by creating new lanes for high-traffic vehicles as an alternative to buses and carpooling, and bicycle and pedestrian mobility through a shared path along the road Front streets are improved and the east-west intersections of the motorway are better.

Community coalitions such as Reconnect Austin, which has been in existence for more than a decade, and the newer Rethink 35 have proposed alternatives that would instead downsize the existing freeway that TxDOT considered in its latest analysis but now almost entirely discarded. Either alternative would force too much traffic on the local roads, Ferguson said; he did not now address the security threats created by I-35. According to city reports, 40 pedestrians and cyclists have been killed trying to cross the main or access roads of the motorway in the past five years; another 20 were seriously injured.

While councilors felt that leaving I-35 untouched was not really a viable option, they raised a number of objections to TxDOT’s alternatives. Kathie Tovo, whose District 9 includes most of the land that would be claimed as new right of way, noted that they include a number of local businesses that “employ many people in this community and serve a great cause” – including the Stars Cafe, Place One Wednesday press conference by opponents of the TxDOT and Chronicle plans.

Tovo’s colleagues raised several additional concerns, including the fact that the I-35 is an instrument of racial segregation in Austin and an increasingly untenable way of moving people. “Our community has announced that it wants to ensure that the project is not only geared towards mobility needs, but also economic justice and climate change,” said CM Paige Ellis, Chair of the Council’s Mobility Committee, calling for the working meeting. Harper-Madison contrasted the negligible control Austin has over the CapExCentral project with the similarly sized Project Connect transit plan, which has been drawn up with Austinites for years and validated through a citywide vote and contains specific mitigation, not cause, measures, Shift. While advocates at TxDOT have successfully campaigned to extend its current public comment deadline to September 24th, this will be the last real public engagement until the agency publishes its draft environmental statement in two years.

Local officials have no real control over how TxDOT decides to carry out the project, despite being entirely within the Austin city limits. “It is up to [TxDOT] to ultimately decide if it did a good job and if it should move forward, “Harper-Madison said of the process, referring to a long-term agreement between the agency and the Federal Highway Administration.” That’s the kind of top Down process, infrastructure investments get a bad rap for their track record in community fragmentation and displacing the underprivileged. “

Ferguson said TxDOT had already responded to local concerns by going under the downtown area in what the Downtown Austin Alliance and Urban Land Institute have proposed as a “cap-and-stitch” solution to create a new public space above the sunken area To create road. However, the agency says the CapExCentral budget doesn’t cover a cap-and-stitch budget, so locals have to pay for it upfront before the project goes into procurement. That “doesn’t seem right,” said Mayor Steve Adler, adding that “it might be worth waiting four or five years” to find more funds to ensure caps are an integral part of the project – as the environmental assessment might require it to be – and not an additional “extension”.

Houston is also fighting a TxDOT highway extension to I-45 that has already received final approval but has been put on hold by the FHWA, citing civil rights concerns that were also the focus of a March Harris County Judge Lina approved lawsuit are available to Hidalgo. In a bold move, the Texas Transportation Commission set a deadline for federal agencies – it warned at the panel meeting on August 31 that the FHWA had 90 days to complete its review of the negative impact of I-45 on blacks and Latinx- Communities, or else the Commission could pull the plug on the project for at least the next few years. This move, enacted just in time for the serious start of the 2022 election cycle, would be very unpopular with the Harris County suburbs who have been clamoring for I-45 to be rebuilt, even if it harms the colored boroughs. The same level of I-35 rebuilding activism doesn’t really exist in upstate Austin.

Individuals can participate in the Capital Express Central project online through September 24th.

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