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DFW wake-up! Your future is so laden with toll roads, your freedom to travel will become non-existent! Throw the bums out!

As officials mull HOV lane changes, North Texas’ toll-filled future comes into focus

By Tom Benning
Dallas Morning News
September 13, 2012

As long as they’ve existed in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, HOV lanes – on I-35E, I-30 and North Central Expressway, to name a few – have been free to any vehicle with two or more occupants.

But that’s changing in the near future, the latest sign that tolls, fares and fees are fast becoming the new norm in North Texas’ driving landscape.

Fee-based express lanes – open to all drivers, but with discounts only for vehicles with three or more people on board – start next year on the LBJ and DFW Connector highways that are being reconfigured in an effort to ease congestion.

And as officials look for ways to safely integrate those changes into the current system – and eventually transition existing HOV lanes to some kind of a toll – they are weighing what to do with the tens of thousands who already frequent the carpool lanes every day.

Keep the status quo and allow two-plus cars to hop on the current HOV lanes for free? Up the free threshold to cars with three-plus occupants, but grandfather in current two-plus commuters?

Or in what would no doubt be unpopular – among both drivers and policy makers — make three-plus the new, no-exceptions standard on the region’s HOV lanes?

“Motorists don’t like toll roads,” Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said Thursday at a Regional Transportation Council meeting in Arlington. “But what they really don’t like is when something free becomes a toll road.”

No matter what officials decide in the coming months – and the grandfathering option seems to be the favorite right now – the debate underscores of the reality of Dallas-Fort Worth’s major road improvements now and in the future: tolls, tolls and more tolls.

Transportation funding from the gasoline tax hasn’t kept pace with the region’s massive population growth. So while laws ensure that current freeways will remain just that, officials caution that toll roads are basically the only option to increase traffic capacity.

“This is the only tool we have left in the tool box,” said Michael Morris, transportation director at the North Central Texas Council of Governments. “The only other option is to do nothing … and [hurt] hundreds of thousands of people in stop-and-go traffic.”

That means there’s also going to be a major shift in the nature and purpose of the area’s HOV lanes.

The lanes, in the past, were jammed into the shoulders and medians of existing freeways as a way to encourage carpooling and reduce pollution.

Now – as the LBJ Express and DFW Connector projects are set to open next year and the North Tarrant Express in 2015 – the goal of the rebuilt managed lanes is still to improve traffic flow and air quality, but also to add capacity and increase speeds on the roadway.

Motorists – including solo drivers – will pay a variable fee to use the lanes, depending on how many others are joining them on the fast track. Three-plus vehicles will get a 50 percent discount, and there will be rebates if average speeds drop below 35 mph.

Officials hope the tweaks will benefit drivers in both the managed lanes and the free lanes.

“There will be about 120,000 vehicles a day that will not be on the main lanes that will be in the managed lanes,” Dan Lamers, a senior project manager at the Council of Governments, said in reference to the LBJ project.

With more such express lanes planned for the next decade, officials are looking in the interim at how to join the new system with the old. They don’t want people driving under one set of rules on one road and then facing a completely different set on another.

One trouble spot, for instance, would be where the HOV lanes on North Central Expressway meet I-635.

So one idea is to create uniformity throughout the region by having the current HOV lanes function like the new ones, where anyone could pay to use them when there’s excess capacity.

That’s why transportation experts and elected officials are seeking feedback from the public – with meetings this week and on Monday – as they grapple with what to do with today’s HOV commuters.

And many North Texas drivers, including several who voiced concerns at a public meeting Tuesday in Richardson, are less than thrilled by the developments.

Chip Pratt, who attended the meeting on behalf of a Richardson homeowners’ association, fretted that he wouldn’t be included in an effort to grandfather in current HOV users, since he only uses it sparingly.

“I don’t think that’s fair and equitable,” he said, noting that he’s paid taxes in the area for more than four decades.

And David Rose, a Dallasite who regularly uses the HOV lanes on LBJ and North Central Expressway, blasted the new managed lanes as “elitist” and contrary to “the America I grew up in.”

“We’re developing a transportation system where only rich people get to drive the speed limit,” Rose said. “If you call this serving the public, that’s what I don’t understand.”