Texas Department of Transportation:
Study will determine feasibility of possible toll road in region

June 24, 2007

By Aaron Brand, Texarkana Gazette

Local Texas Department of Transportation officials say a feasibility study would be conducted before moving forward with the potential Texarkana-area toll road project. The Texas Transportation Commission recently gave its approval to 80 possible toll roads in Texas. And a corridor around one side of Texarkana was tapped as a candidate project. That stretch of roughly 20 miles goes from U.S. Highway 59 near the Sulphur River and Farm to Market Road 2148 to an area west of Texarkana near Leary and heads back north and east to meet U.S. Highway 71 North. Lance Simmons, a special projects engineer at TxDOT’s office in Atlanta, said an initial study to determine that road’s feasibility would be performed through a TxDOT contract.

“Actually we’re in the process now of trying to get the study started,” said Simmons. He said the local TxDOT district is initiating the study. Simmons said when that study is done, it would tell whether or not the toll road is completely viable or partially viable. He said then it would probably be up to the North East Texas Regional Mobility Authority, which Bowie County Judge James Carlow has said Bowie County is in the process of joining, and TxDOT to jointly decide whether to go forward with the toll road project or not. Private financing is one of the potential sources of revenue to build a toll road such as this. Collected tolls would be used to repay the financial backers of the highway.

Marcus Sandifer, TxDOT’s Atlanta District spokesman, said the loop around one side of Texarkana could get drivers, especially through-traffic, around Texarkana’s high traffic areas and back to rural areas. “The whole idea is to get the traffic out of the commercialized areas and neighborhoods where there’s the heavier traffic. The north part of the route was already determined by the Texas Department of Transportation, the Arkansas Department of Transportation and the Metropolitan Planning Organization, which is made up of both cities, counties and local governments,” Sandifer said. He said originally the northern part of the loop around Texarkana was planned for where State Highway Loop 151 meets Interstate 30. He said when the highway loop was first planned the amount of development there now did not exist. But since that time there’s been an explosion of commercial and residential development and more traffic added to that area of town.

Sandifer said drivers who may choose this potential toll road highway section would likely do so to avoid the traffic coming into Texarkana, the traffic on the existing loop and traffic in commercialized areas. Drivers heading north—to Fort Smith and in that direction, for example—could choose this route, he said, as well as traffic heading south toward Houston. Sandifer said part of what the feasibility study will consider is whether users would save enough time and avoid enough traffic to use this toll road section. He said what’s been approved by the Texas Transportation Commission so far is simply looking at a toll road and studying it. “If it’s not feasible, it’s not going to pay for itself,” he said.