Alan Clark is the director of transportation planning for the Houston-Galveston Area Council and has more than 30 years of transportation experience with the agency. Clark also worked as a transportation planner with the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County and as a traffic-engineering consultant.
Jeff Collins, a board member for the Transportation Advocacy Group, has more than 35 years of engineering experience and is the vice president of the public infrastructure division for LJA Engineering.
How important are the Harris and Montgomery county road bonds to funding road projects and accommodating growth in the Greater Houston area?
Clark: The [counties are] having to rebuild their roads from rural highways with just a couple of open lanes and big open ditches into modern urban infrastructure that can accommodate pedestrians and cyclists as well as multilane traffic intersections that need sophisticated traffic control and signage that they never dreamed about 20 years ago. So those bonds are extremely critical ... in making sure that someone traveling doesn’t spend more time getting to the freeway than they will [spend] once on it.
Collins: Really, it’s just growth. You put more cars on the road [and congestion worsens]—and then we know our issues with transit. We’re behind on the transit side so more cars are on the road and [the roads] are congested.
What will Proposition 7 mean for statewide transportation funding?
Clark: There [are] three Rs I would tell everyone [as to] why we do this: Repair what we’ve got, remove the bottlenecks and let’s reduce accidents. If we could do those three things with this money, then we can agree that some part of your daily experience will be better.
I would also say it’s important to remember what this is not. It’s not a new tax. It’s not a new fee. This is taking some of that fantastic growth the state is experiencing and saying we need to invest it back into one of the things that got us here—our highways.
Collins: It was calculated that the state needs an additional $5 billion a year in order to maintain congestion the way that it is now, meaning if you’ve got a 30 minute drive now it’s going to stay 30 minutes. The Legislature first took action with Prop. 1, which was passed two legislative sessions ago and took oil and gas severance tax money and diverted that to transportation. First year that was $1.7 billion, but because of the [lower] price of oil and gas, that’s supposed to bring in $1.2 billion [in 2016]. So we’ve already lost $500 million.
The MAP 21 legislation, which funds the federal Highway Trust Fund, was delayed for the third time in July. What kind of pressure does that put on local entities that are waiting on federal funding to plan and begin work on mobility projects?
Clark: I think this is an old story now, and perhaps some of us are becoming a little bit immune to worrying [that] the world will stop whenever the next extension is out. But the fact is the funding that’s being provided on the federal level has not only stagnated, but it has declined since the cost of everything has continued to go up. And in Texas, the federal funding is one of the primary sources for things like mass transit.
Collins: Typically, transportation bills are six-year bills, and [MAP 21] has been extended for 2 1/2 years. It really impacts the ability to do long-range planning for long-range transportation projects. That’s the reason it’s so important to get Proposition 7 done in our state because that’s going to give us that money to keep us going.
The rapid rate of population growth in the Greater Houston Area has led to challenges in upgrading and expanding infrastructure and services to unincorporated parts of Harris County. How would you rate the success of transportation officials when it comes to anticipating growth and planning accordingly?
Clark: They’re waking up [and] finding out the job they have to do is different than they had to do before. Most of our county roads and most of our city streets have no sidewalks. People are living in areas that have pretty significant density, and they want to have an optional way to get there. Even places like Conroe are developing transit services within their community. The growth is not only that we need more road capacity; it’s also that we need to address bigger needs for [drainage] and infrastructure that can address pedestrians, cyclists and transit.
What is the status of the Greater West Houston Mobility Plan, and are any short-term projects identified that may be implemented in the next fiscal year?
Clark: We have essentially completed the plan, although the report in its final form hasn’t gotten to our website yet. We’re trying to make this an easier document for people to read and see. Some of the things that are being talked about are actually not road projects. They’re more in the transit area. [The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County] agreed that extending some of their high-capacity, high-frequency bus routes to the west is a phase they would like to undertake. We recommended taking many of those out to Hwy. 99. The management districts—there’s three major ones that we have included—have all expressed interest in supporting last-mile connector services to some of their employment centers. So you might come in on a major high-frequency route or … we might develop a facility where you could be indoors and transfer to a local circulator that would take you to [the] last mile to your business.
It’s very difficult to be a pedestrian and access the suburban campus developments, especially in the Energy Corridor area. I think the Energy Corridor will be the first of the three to implement that kind of circulator, and we’ll help them do that.
We did list a lot of road projects. There [are] a lot of gaps in the road network there. Some of them are already in short-term plans by the city of Houston working with the management districts. Some of them are going to be much more longterm, especially the idea of bringing a new road crossing or the widening of roads that might cross one of the reservoirs. It might be easy to do, cheap to do, but it might be the last option to move people apart from keeping them on the Katy Freeway.
Everyone on the West Houston setting wants to see high capacity transit brought out to the west corridor … and I don’t know when or how that might happen. The first step is really to get something inside Loop 610 going toward the Galleria area then to be able to extend that. In the interim, we’ve talked about making better use of express buses coming from Houston, going west with services that begin like Purple line services.
