BIKE: Talking points for agenda #5 tonight

[Roger Baker]

Comments on CAMPO agenda Item #5 (including toll roads)
                         by “Road scholar”, Roger Baker; Sept 13, 2004

As many of you know, I’ve been watching the CAMPO planning process for 
a long time, several decades in fact, and during that time I’ve seen it 
get more political as the money has run short. And I’ve watch the CAMPO 
planning get more unaffordable and more unworkable, especially over the 
last decade. At the current time, the CAMPO planners can’t get their 
long range plans to work even on paper, regardless of cost.

Here is how Mike Aulick puts it in his Sept.1 memo on agenda item #5;   
“...Anticipated toll revenue will play an important part; however, this 
revenue alone will  not be able to make up the entire $5.8 billion 
shortfall identified in the first draft plan...”

This shortfall is the result of trying to make a huge future toll road 
network to serve decades of future suburban sprawl be the basic 
framework for all the other transportation planning -- which is really 
what the 2030 long range CAMPO plan amounts to.

By making the CAMPO planning toll-road-centric, a huge addition cost is 
placed on Austin and Travis county to build a secondary network of 
arterial road expansion projects to handle the traffic generated by the 
toll roads; much of the shortfall implies raising property taxes enough 
to build these unfunded local roads.

Strip the current planning down to its policy basics and it proposes to 
borrow billions from both the federal government and Wall Street to 
build the roads to serve decades of future sprawl development, but the 
politics driving the process insists on doing it now, and getting the 
revenue stream largely from current drivers.

A key question or issue that most clearly reveals the political nature 
of the CAMPO transportation planning process is to ask why it is 
necessary to approve the borrowing of billions of dollars by an 
unelected group, the CTRMA, to build toll roads to serve decades of 
future hypothetical sprawl development RIGHT NOW -- rather than 
approving a toll road or two now, and the next ones five ten years from 
now, as they are needed. The short answer is that CAMPO’s toll roads 
and their associated land uses are primarily designed to make the 
special interests happy; largely the road contracting lobbies like AGC 
and real estate lobbies like RECA.

As a last comment, remember how a few months ago you were promised that 
immediately approving lots of toll roads would solve future congestion 
problems. Now AFTER the toll roads have been approved, CAMPO director 
Mike Aulick admits that this just ain’t so!  An article Aulick 
approvingly attaches to agenda Item #5 states in conclusion,  
“Peak-hour traffic congestion in almost all large and growing 
metropolitan regions around the world is here to stay. In fact, it is 
almost certain to get worse during at least the next few decades...” 
  
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