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Follow TURFAustin tollways in the red 'for a generation'
Taking the tollways' temperature
Area turnpikes bringing in more revenue than expected, but TxDOT roads won't be in the black for a generation or more.
By Ben Wear
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 2:55 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2010
Published: 9:40 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2010
Four years into the Central Texas tollway era, gauging how the area's five pay-to-drive roads are doing could be a matter of perspective: Are the turnpike lanes half full or half empty?
Actually, most of the time and for most of those 78 miles in Austin's suburbs, the lanes are well below half full. But according to 2009 Texas Department of Transportation counts, traffic on Texas 45 North near the tollway's confluence with Interstate 35 is close to 100,000 vehicles a day. And all of the roads except the Loop 1 tollway, which connects the north end of MoPac Boulevard to Texas 45 North, are producing more revenue than originally projected.
The $66.2 million generated in the 2009-10 fiscal year by the three financially intertwined roads of TxDOT's Central Texas Turnpike Project — Texas 130, Texas 45 North and Loop 1 — was $6.5 million more than official estimates given to bond investors in 2002, before construction began.
TxDOT's Texas 45 Southeast, while lightly traveled with only about 8,400 vehicles a day on its four lanes, still brought in $3.2 million last year. That's 56 percent above projections for the road in southeastern Travis County. That highway, unlike the other four local turnpikes, was built completely with tax dollars and thus has no debt to pay off.
And the 183-A tollway in Cedar Park, built and run by the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority , will bring in $21.4 million this year — $1.8 million above the original estimate — and $9.7 million of that is "profit" that the agency is plowing into other road projects.
The half-empty part?
After a fast start financially, the gap between the actual and projected revenue for the three-road turnpike project has narrowed each of the past two years. If that trend were to continue, the gap would essentially disappear by 2012 .
Even though revenue is ahead of expectations, that amounts to a small dent in a debt that is expected to continue for at least the next 30 years. Even in the original estimates, the three roads were not expected to turn a profit until after the debt was paid off.
In 2009, TxDOT expected to have $125.1 million in debt and operating expenses, compared with $78.4 million in revenue from tolls, along with earnings on reserve funds and money made by the agency's toll service center on Loop 1, according to a 2009 agency bond document. That's a one-year deficit of $46.7 million.
That money would come from TxDOT's general funding, fed primarily by gasoline and diesel taxes. Through 2042, according to the document, this "commission support" will exceed $3 billion .
TxDOT officials say they're not worried about the turnpike project's financial vigor.
"For the first three years, we've been higher than projections" on revenue, said James Bass, TxDOT's chief financial officer . "We continue to monitor it and manage it. If it were to get close, we'd look for ways to control and reduce costs before looking at increasing rates."
TxDOT, in its original financial plan for the roads, intended to keep toll rates unchanged until 2015. Although TxDOT turnpike director Mark Tomlinson said that increasing the toll rates (now essentially 12 cents a mile) has come up in informal discussions, Bass said he is "not aware of any interest or discussion at the (Texas Transportation) Commission level to consider that."
As for Loop 1's disappointing performance — 2010 revenue of $11.9 million was almost $3 million below projections — Tomlinson blamed the frontage roads alongside and FM 1325 , which roughly parallels the tollway to Round Rock. And he said the toll roads' financial performance should improve as the economy, and the suburban housing industry along with it, recovers.
"It's the only part of the system that has an accessible free alternative fairly close," Tomlinson said. "In general, due to the economic downturn , there's been less development all over the system than probably the engineers (who did the original estimates) anticipated. That's a short-term blip."
If anything, the struggling economy is building up a latent demand for homes to be built near the area's toll roads, Tomlinson said. More rooftops and more commuters would mean more toll revenue.
"For all those reasons," Tomlinson said, "I'm not concerned."