Eyewitness News traffic reporter Katherine Whaley is looking into the future of Houston traffic.

In the first of her series, Traffic of Tomorrow, ABC13 flew in SkyEye to get a preview of the biggest freeway project of a lifetime that is set to begin soon.

TxDOT has a plan to remove the backups on I-45 in downtown Houston by doing the seemingly unimaginable - moving the freeway.

"We needed more capacity, we needed to be able to move traffic better, and the Pierce Elevated in that corridor was just not enough room," TxDOT District Engineer Quincy Allen said.
From SkyEye, you can see the choke points TxDOT is trying to eliminate. Instead of having I-45 split off onto the Pierce Elevated, it will continue running north alongside Highway 59.

This will create a less tangled, less accident-prone route through downtown to accommodate Houston's booming commuter population.

"In the Houston district, we are a six county region, 6,000 square miles, six million people and our six million customers have five million cars," Allen said.

That's today, but engineers are looking ahead and modeling the system to meet the demands of traffic in 2040.

"It's a big project, because we have a big need, big road, big number of customers," said Allen.

Another big goal of the project is to create enough room to increase speeds, but with goals comes a big price tag. It's more than $1 billion. Much of the funding will come from the federal government, state voter-approved Propositions 1 and 7 and recent allocations from Texas Transportation Commission.

The funding has become more of a reality and that has got us excited.

Open greenspace over parts of Highway 59 and I-45 is not funded, but it is still part of the plan, if other public or private entities want to foot the bill.

In the second part of Katherine's Traffic of Tomorrow series, we take a look at TxDOT's downtown freeway project that promises increased speeds.

The way we commute through downtown Houston is about to change forever, thanks to a new Texas Department of Transportation plan that aims to make driving safer.

TxDOT District Engineer Quincy Allen said that drivers will have "better merging, better lane assignments and better alignment getting you in the correct part of the freeway before you make your decision."

The plan will move I-45 freeway lanes from the Pierce Elevated to the east side of downtown, running alongside US-59/I-69. Engineers said the increased lanes, and the straighter, less curvy flow of the new configuration will also increase speeds.

"We're talking about average speeds of 35 or 36 plus 24, so we'll get them back up to speed limit - 55 or 60 miles per hour," Allen explained.

But the Pierce Elevated isn't going anywhere just yet.

"We are going to need the Pierce for a while, because that's going to help us provide capacity and alternate routes during this work," Allen said.

Road work is expected to begin by 2020.