Down the road: "Driving Ed Bluestein and Texas 71 will cost you about $2 each way. "

Time is coming for what seemed like good idea: to toll later.

March 13, 2006

Ben Wear
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 2006

So, it's 2009.

You live in Northeast Austin and work in Oak Hill, and for years, you've been taking the improved Ed Bluestein Boulevard (U.S. 183 east of Interstate 35) and Texas 71 to work. You've been slogging through all that muck at the big 183/71 interchange project seemingly forever, but it's finally almost done.

Years ago, you noticed some signs saying the roads would eventually have tolls. But those signs have long since blended into the landscape.

Then you open up the newspaper one day and read this: Starting next month, driving Ed Bluestein and Texas 71 will cost you about $2 each way. What?!

As things stand now, something like that will occur, date uncertain. And that situation, the ugly offspring of 2004's bellicose toll road debate, will create a ticklish political situation, to say the least.

What happened, if you've forgotten or missed it to begin with, is that the Texas Department of Transportation (and its junior partner, the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority) in April 2004 unveiled a seven-road, $2.2 billion toll road plan that contemplated expanding six Austin roads, building a seventh and charging tolls on the express lanes. Access roads would be free.

But improvements on three of those roads — including Ed Bluestein and Texas 71 — were already under way. After the several-month fracas that ensued, two roads were out of the plan, both of them in West Austin.

To keep East Austin representatives in support, the plan's authors agreed that Ed Bluestein and Texas 71 improvements would open at no charge.

The tolls wouldn't begin, according to the January 2005 vote by the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization board, until the entire semicircle from I-35 on the north to I-35 on the south was completed.

That includes sections in East Austin on Ed Bluestein and Texas 71 where work should be completed later this year. But it also includes other parts of Ed Bluestein and the 183/71 interchange where construction is nowhere close to beginning.

And when work does start, it will take several years.

So you could have a situation in which express lanes will be free for a very, very long time. Then not free.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

What might have made it appear bearable, from a politician's point of view, is that going from free to not-free will require no more votes by CAMPO.

The electronic toll equipment, including overhead gantries with the gadgets to read toll tags, will already be in place. So the mobility authority, which is supposed to run the roads, will simply have to flip the switch, as it were.

But you know it won't be that simple. A very determined anti-toll machinery has grown up around Austin. The CAMPO members are all listed on the Internet, and they all have office phones.

Suggestions are already circulating that perhaps Ed Bluestein and Texas 71 should be taken out of the plan completely. Look for that idea to pick up momentum, later if not sooner.

Getting There appears Mondays. For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.

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