Trans-TX hits a dead-end

January 8, 2009
Jacksonville Progress

The Texas Department of Transportation announced Tuesday at the annual Transportation Forum in Austin that it had officially killed the Trans-Texas Corridor project.

A highly contentious plan since being first unveiled in 2002, TTC was Gov. Rick Perry’s long-term answer to meeting the state’s growing traffic congestion problems and transportation needs. It has not been a popular plan among East Texans, according to State Rep. Chuck Hopson.

“I think this is a great move for TxDOT, and I am really glad to hear that they are going to cancel the project. Most of the people that I have spoken to about it were very, very opposed to it,” Hopson said. “When TxDOT has a public hearing, if 35 or 40 people show up it is considered a big crowd. When hearings about the Trans-Texas Corridor were held in Waco and Center, they were having like 1,000 people show up in opposition to it.”

Hopson, who represents House District 11 (Cherokee, Houston, Panola and Rusk counties), said he had two main objections to the governor’s multibillion-dollar plan — the broad use of eminent domain to acquire land for the corridor and the heavy reliance on foreign-owned toll roads for the plan’s funding.

“It would have cut a swath 1,200-feet-wide all the way up-and-down and across Texas, and one of the things that a large majority of Texans agree on is eminent domain — they don’t like the government taking away peoples’ land. The amount of land it would have taken is actually bigger than some of the states in the east,” Hopson said. “I think we can expand and broaden our highways in Texas without doing all the stuff to the people of Texas that the Trans-Texas Corridor would have done.

“The other problem is that portions of the new roads were going to be owned by a company from a foreign government (Cintra, an engineering firm from Spain) — they were actually going to own the land for 50 years, and that was very, very unpopular with my constituents,” he said.

The Corridor was intended to be a transportation mecca, with six lanes for passenger car traffic, four lanes for commercial truck traffic, two rails for passenger trains, two rails for freight trains, two rails for commuter trains, a utility zone for water lines, oil and gas pipelines, and transmission lines for electricity, broadband and other telecommunications services.

The greater TTC undertaking was made up of numerous smaller projects, many of which TxDOT said would continue as stand-alone enterprises. One such venture was I-69/TTC, which would have run from the Mexican border to Texarkana, and would have traveled through HD11.

State Sen. Robert Nichols was unavailable for comment Tuesday because he was attending the Transportation Forum. A former transportation commissioner, he authored a bill during the previous legislative session to impose a two-year moratorium on new private toll roads.

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