The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority is moving forward with two toll projects despite a significant roadblock put up by the Texas Transportation Commission last year. On Wednesday, the CTRMA’s board of directors voted 6-0 to start the bidding process for three new flyovers at U.S. Highway 290 and State Highway 130 in East Austin. […]
Roads
Posted inRoads
Stuck in park, the CTRMA looks beyond tolls
The agency primarily known for building toll roads in the Austin region is spitballing some new ideas as state policy keeps its activities largely in a holding pattern. Last week, board members of the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority briefly discussed the effective prohibition mandated by the Texas Transportation Commission against building new toll projects. […]
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Travis County looks to tap CTRMA to fast-track bond projects
Travis County and the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority have both signed on to negotiations that could leverage the CTRMA’s prodigious road-building capabilities to boost priority safety improvements in the southeastern quadrant of the county. On Wednesday, the CTRMA board of directors unanimously voted to enter into negotiations with the county on an interlocal agreement […]
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Transportation Department defends ‘speed cushions’
Transportation Director Robert Spillar showed up at a meeting of the Public Safety Commission on Monday to defend “speed cushions,” the traffic-calming devices that have infuriated motorists across the city, most notably in a Northwest Austin neighborhood that successfully campaigned to have them removed. “We hate to put them out there, but the other side […]
Posted inBonds & Propositions
City unveils proposed Corridor Construction Program
The long-awaited proposed Corridor Construction Program, the road map to Mayor Steve Adler’s Smart Corridor Plan that he’s now touting as potentially “genius,” is finally out of the stable. The city’s Corridor Program Office has been working to develop the program voters approved in the record $720 million mobility bond in November 2016 that set […]
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Austin’s new ‘speed cushions’ spark outcry
Susanne Paul worries that Jester Estates, the affluent Northwest Austin neighborhood where she’s lived for nearly 20 years, may be broken beyond repair. What was once an “extremely friendly” community is now fraught with political divisions that many of her neighbors believe may make it impossible to ever return to the “happy innocence of what […]
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State officials steamroll toll lanes out of I-35 plans
The Texas Transportation Commission drove the Capital Express into a bar ditch on Thursday morning. Despite a full-court, bipartisan press from local political and business leaders, the commission voted unanimously to strip from the Texas Department of Transportation’s 10-year construction program the recently debuted plans for four tolled express lanes on Interstate 35 in Austin. […]
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Traffic volumes increasing on MoPac
The MoPac Improvement Project, originally sold as a congestion relief initiative, has driven up the number of drivers on parts of the roadway, with some sections seeing an increase of nearly 30,000 vehicles per day. “The traffic has returned,” Jeff Dailey, deputy executive director of the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, told his board of […]
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Final Guadalupe plan hits the streets
At long last, the city’s shortest corridor has its plan. The Austin Transportation Department today released the much-anticipated Guadalupe Corridor Plan, a 66-page document that calls for a multimodal revolution along the Drag. As expected, the document recommends the conversion of two car lanes into bus-only lanes on Guadalupe Street between 29th Street and Martin […]
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Environmental concerns delay city action on upcoming MoPac project
Several City Council members want more information about the planned expansion of MoPac Expressway before they sign off on a key funding agreement with the Texas Department of Transportation. Council voted 9-2 at its Nov. 9 meeting to postpone an amendment to its year-old partnership with TxDOT that would increase the city’s original $1.8 million […]
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Watson presents a new plan for I-35
State Sen. Kirk Watson unveiled a radical vision for the future of Central Austin on Monday: No more dual decks on Interstate 35. Watson’s speech before the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce marked the debut of a new plan concocted by the Texas Department of Transportation to add two new tolled lanes in each direction […]
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CAMPO greenlights MoKan study
The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization Transportation Policy Board on Monday evening signed off on a plan to spend $500,000 to study the viability of the MoKan corridor, the largely unused swath of right of way that stretches from Williamson County down to East Austin. That initiative was lumped together with an additional $1.59 million […]