Toll roads in Central Texas aim to help alleviate traffic congestion, but motorists may have to wait until 2011 to reap the benefits.
The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization approved $1.2 billion in federal funding for five new toll roads in October, but it will take years for designing and land acquisition to be finalized.
Construction on all five toll roads should be on the ground between 2009 and 2011, said Marcus Cooper, spokesman for the Austin district of the Texas Department of Transportation.
"Though it's hard to project completion dates for the new toll roads, each of the five projects should take between two and three years to complete," Cooper said.
There are two toll roads under construction in South Austin near the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
Toll road plans were met with opposition by Texas residents this year, but TxDOT officials say that could be because of the flood of inaccurate and misleading information about what the department is doing and why. Critics say that toll roads amount to taxation by private, unaccountable corporations, and this can lead to the misuse of funds.
"Even if the private sector participates, it is still a road owned by the state of Texas," said Chris Lippincott, spokesman for TxDOT. "The private sector may have a lease agreement to collect the tolls, but we have contracts with the private sector that are very thorough and require aggressive maintenance for any road we operate."
Lippincott said TxDOT is regularly a subject of audits and that the department works closely with auditors to make sure there is transparency, oversight and accountability within the department.
More than 240,000 motorists living in Central Texas have toll tags, but all tolled roads parallel untolled roads, giving motorists options when driving.
Leonard Gilroy, director of government reform for the Reason Foundation, which conducts public policy research, said the issue is not whether tolled roads or untolled roads are the most efficient use of land; the issue is how to deal with massive congestion and then how to finance the solutions.
"It is hard for the state to get the funding it needs for big-ticket projects. Tolls are a way to advance projects that wouldn't get funding for a decade, if ever," Gilroy said.
Another misconception that leads to toll road opposition is that free roads are the alternative to toll roads. Gilroy and Lippincott both said there is no such thing as a free road because the free roads are funded by gas taxes. Opposers have also said that toll roads are paid for by federal funding when laid, so to charge a toll is egregious.
"This simply isn't true for a public or private toll road," Gilroy said. "It takes money to maintain, repair and rebuild existing toll roads."
Lippincott said funds received from gas taxes no longer keep pace with the costs of highway development.
"Less gas-tax money is available every year to build new roads so we're going to need innovative financing from the private sector and toll roads, and this is the only way we're going to have funds available," he said.
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