Path of I-35 twin a mystery

MALONE — On this particular morning, fog has Texas 171 socked in for the whole 15 miles east from Hillsboro to this tiny German farm town. While you can tell that the winter-bare black loam is mostly flat moving toward the invisible horizon, you can only guess what might lie beyond.

Barger Geltmeier and Benny Mynar and their fellow Hill County farmers have a pretty good idea, however, what might be forming out in the fog near Austin and heading their way, and they don't much like it: the Trans-Texas Corridor.

"Ninety percent of the comments you hear about it are negative," says Geltmeier, who lives here and farms about 48 acres a few miles to the east. The rumor mill in Hill County has it that the Texas Department of Transportation, which has a broad canvas on which to paint the future path of the toll road alternative to Interstate 35, is looking at running what will be called TTC-35 right over FM 308 and on past Malone. The agency in a few weeks will announce the tentative 10-mile-wide swath that eventually, after a couple of years of more detailed study, will yield a specific route.

What makes TTC-35 unique is the tremendous freedom that the state has in deciding where it goes. Unlike virtually every major highway built by the state Transportation Department in its almost 90-year history, this one has no definite point A and point B at each end. Just "somewhere in Oklahoma near I-35" to "somewhere along the Rio Grande." It could go east of I-35, perhaps near Malone, or west of I-35 where the road might skirt, for instance, President Bush's ranch near Crawford. The road could hug I-35 — probably so, according to the state's top transportation official — or stray out 10 to 20 miles into the frontier.

The state, after stirring myriad environmental, sociological, economic, engineering and political factors into a pot and tossing in a heaping helping of public comment, will decide.

The most likely path of the road, however, is east of I-35 from near San Antonio to east of Dallas, which just happens to contain some of the most fertile farmland in the state, according to the American Farmland Trust, an advocacy group that works for the preservation of farmland against development pressures. And that has cafes buzzing from Bartlett to Malone.

Geltmeier serves on the City Council of Malone, home to 278 people, the Frogbranch Saloon and the Wild West Steakhouse Saloon II, where Geltmeier, Mynar and some friends usually have their morning coffee. The toll road, its sponsors say, will de-congest I-35, helping everyone who drives the state's main vein and boosting the Texas economy by easing the movement of goods. But in Malone, all they see is a stretch of state-owned right of way up to 1,200 feet wide eating up rich cotton and sorghum land, dead-ending county roads they use every day and bifurcating acreage.

So, if nine out of 10 of Geltmeier's neighbors hate the proposed road, brainchild of GOP Gov. Rick Perry, who are the other 10 percent who like it?

After the fog lifts later in the morning and after some research, it is obvious why this part of Hill County would be a road builder's dream: gently rolling country, with few creeks, utilities or other obstructions, and, compared with subdivided rural tracts found near Texas cities, relatively few landowners to haggle with over right of way. And land costs are low, at least according to the Hill County Appraisal District; the market value is less than $1,000 an acre.

Contrast that with the money set aside for buying right of way along Texas 130, the toll road rising east of Austin: More than $100,000 an acre. Given those figures, it makes sense when state transportation officials say they can build a brand-new road in the sticks cheaper than they can expand I-35.

Unfurl a detailed map of Texas on a table, and it doesn't take long to figure out where an I-35 twin shouldn't go.

"There are some environmental constraints you can see from 30,000 feet," says Doug Booher, environmental manager for the turnpike division of the state Transportation Department and the guy shepherding the TTC-35 federal approval process. He has a 4,000-page report, still confidential, currently under review by the Federal Highway Administration. That "Tier I draft environmental impact statement" contains the 10-mile-wide recommended swath everyone is waiting to see.

Stay away from towns, of course, even the tiny ones. West of I-35 between San Antonio and Austin is probably a bad idea, what with all those hills and environmental concerns about the Edwards Aquifer. You'd certainly want to miss the enormous expanse of Fort Hood west of Belton; Waco Lake west of Waco and Tradinghouse Creek Reservoir about six miles east of Waco; Whitney Lake and Aquilla Lake west of Hillsboro; and Navarro Mills Lake northeast of Malone. And, in the real world, ranchland northwest of Crawford is probably off-limits.

"I imagine Bush told Perry, 'You keep your (butt) on the east side of I-35,' " says Mynar, who farms land near West.

And then there's Texas 130, the Central Texas toll road due to open next year that almost surely will be connected to TTC-35. It's east of I-35.

But even with those arguments in favor of a path east of I-35, you still don't have an answer to the question on everyone's mind: How close do you put the road to the interstate?

"The vast majority of people in Hill County want it to follow I-35 as closely as possible," says Kenneth Davis, the Hill County judge. "We don't want ghost towns made out of places like Hillsboro," which now depends on the businesses that slowly grew up along I-35 after it bypassed the city in the early 1960s.

The reality, state officials say, is that TTC-35 will take no more than 15 percent of I-35's cars and trucks, given that it will cost at least 10 cents a mile to drive on TTC-35 and I-35 will remain free. And with that traffic volume growing quickly, those Hillsboro interstate service stations and hotels will not lack for business. But Davis and his neighbors have other reasons for wanting TTC-35 within three miles of the interstate, not out near Malone.

"When you get from Bynum to Malone, that is premium land," Davis said. "Why cover up more of that good production land when they don't have to?"

It's that kind of detail, well known to the people who live in the Blackland Prairie east of I-35, that Booher says he wants to hear. And despite suspicions that some small corps of people in suits is making all the decisions about where to put the road, Booher says the local folks can make a difference.

"The worst thing that can happen from my perspective is if the public doesn't comment," Booher says. "I love piles of public comment."

What people have had to say — the state has gotten about 4,000 comments and held almost 120 public meetings on TTC-35, with more to come — may or may not have made a difference. But the put-it-near-the-interstate crowd should be reassured by what Perry's best transportation buddy has to say.

Ric Williamson, chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission and the state's No. 1 salesman for the Trans-Texas Corridor, says that even he doesn't know what's in Booher's opus on TTC-35. But when he talks about where the road might be, you pay attention.

"I think it will be pretty close to I-35," Williamson says. "But not for economic reasons. There's a reason I-35 was built there. It's flat, the river flows are containable. The soils are stable. It's not underlain by shale and sand and gravel that shifts. The closer you are to the perfect spot, the better off you are."

Those details were in the proposal by the toll company CINTRA that the state accepted for this corridor. However it rarely gets reported by the media or the anti-toll groups. The agreement is actually available to the public, but I don't remember where right now. If you search these toll threads from last summer and fall, I posted a link to the agreement back then.

This article is pretty slanted and leaves out much of the pertinent information. Basically this corridor (and the future I-69 corridor) is experiencing big growth, both in population and trade. But the cost of expanding I-35 (and Hwy 59) enough to meet the future growth is far more than to build a parallel road (with connections along the way) that runs through low population areas. It will move a lot of the truck traffic around cities instead of through Dallas, Austin, San Antonio (and Houston.) The same concept as building a loop freeway for traffic to bypass congested downtowns, but on a statewide scale.

A lot of the numbers thrown out ($400 billion, 4000 miles, etc.) are based on a conceptual design of what might be built by 2055. In reality only the I-35 and I-69 corridors (about 1200 miles) and a few short connections will be built within the next 20 years, because those are where the demand will be in the next 2 decades. Bits and pieces might be built elsewhere, for example while a road might not be needed from central to west texas, the electric and pipeline portions of the corridor concept might be built if there is a demand for that. Rather than have as many as a dozen different electric, gas, oil, water, road, rail, etc. corridor strips of right-of-way between 2 areas, the Trans-Texas Corridor concept combines them into a single (albeit wider, but cumulatively much smaller) ROW, so less areas are affected.

Much of what is written here about it is pure bunk. I'd recommend researching both sides.

You can always chose to use the pre-existing free roads, that may be longer or slower or more crowded, but they are free.

And guaranteed to stay crowded and longer so that government can take tax money from tolls collected and not spend the money on public roads. The example of the 91 freeway toll lanes in California was breathtaking, where they actually blocked side roads in order to force people to either sit in traffic, or paid tolls. After all, who would pay tolls if the free lanes weren't jammed?

And your claim of a 'virtual monopoly for travel between city A and B' is nonsense.

No one is stupid enough to pay tolls unless free roads are kept jammed and decrepit. That gives a "virtual" monopoly to a private company to operate the sole decent road from city A to city B.

Only the new routes will be tolled, or new mainlanes that don't exist right now.

"New" mainlines. Isn't that a genuine monopoly?

But if you want to legally drive at 85mph, you'll have to pay a toll.

You could drive 85mph legally tomorrow if they changed the signs. Many, perhaps most, do it illegally today, so what's the difference?

Hardly oppressive to have choices.

A choice between a deliberately screwed up public road and a private road isn't a choice, and I guarantee you public roads will be screwed up either deliberately or by benign neglect. No doubt money is already being allocated away from public roads right now to prepare the sheep to pay the money.

Bottom line, I suppose I should like this idea. Oklahoma, where I come from, and France have had way too many toll roads for decades that have screwed up their economies. It's high time Texas screwed up their economy too.

I certainly hope that TTC-35 will take more than 15 per cent of the traffic off of I-35. I've read about how much of a b*tch that road is.

I bet it takes a much higher proportion of truck traffic. The ability to avoid local traffic in major cities, separated passenger car and truck lanes, and higher speed limits will allow truckers to cover more miles per day. Every truck taken off I-35 is worth several cars worth of congestion, and greatly decreased wear and tear on the road.

While you can tell that the winter-bare black loam is mostly flat moving toward the invisible horizon, you can only guess what might lie beyond.

Dumbass author looking to use a flowery phrase.... Dumbass editor shoulda slapped him for trying to fob off such a lame sentence on the rest of us.

Anybody who's been there can tell you "what might lie beyond:" It's more and more "mostly flat" all the way up to the f***ing north pole. The dirt changes color occasionally, but that's about it.

[where they actually blocked side roads in order to force people to either sit in traffic, or paid tolls.] This is the first I've heard of it.

Ok, so I'm assuming that this was the reason. The old highway, 4 lane undivided, was closed completely sometime before I started commuting on the 91.

Whatever the reason was that they closed it, it was far easier for them to allow building toll lanes that returned taxes than to reopen the old road. It was very telling that of all the "free"ways in California, the ones that got toll lanes were the ones that had natural choke points with no alternatives. I understand they've sold the toll lanes back to the government now, but it was an outrage to me that a private company was allowed to build in the center median of a public road in the first place.

There are a few things that government is the right entity to do a particular job. Providing for the national defense, maintaining a stable currency, and providing good navigable roadways and waterways are a few of them. If the government is screwing up that job, then we should pressure them to fix it, not turn it over to a ragtag bunch of private companies with even less accountability than government is today.

Once a private company has a virtual monopoly on travel between two points, there's even less incentive for them to provide good service than government. And that's pretty bad now.

Let me ask you something:

How would you replace the Tappan Zee bridge in New York? It's a crumbling behemoth that's over 50 years old and needs to be replaced or repaired. If they merely give it a makeover, that will cost 500 million dollars. If they replace the bridge entirely, that will cost them (supposedly) 14 BILLION dollars. I suspect that's larger than the entire transportation budget of New York state in one year. But if you want to keep the crossing "free", you're going to have to raise taxes somehow. I suspect just sealing off the transportation fund from legislative raids won't do it.

However, I suspect that private investors could provide the capital for a toll replacement bridge. Knowing that you loathe toll facilities, how would you handle the Tappan Zee?

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