kittyhawk

You could have 10 general purpose lanes in both directions on IH-10 Katy and still have issues with congestion (not to mention some major weaving issues). This is attributed to the physical design of Houston and most sunbelt cities, with people moving farther away from their places of business to get to cheap real estate and good schools.

Utilized properly, a managed toll facility will at least give people a choice for improving their travel time if they are willing to pay a price. I personally think that its going to take awhile for Harris County to figure out how to use this thing. But mark my word, the world's traffic engineers and politicians are watching, and these will be popping up all over the place in the future.

Oh, and so nobody acts surprised, 290 also has toll lanes built in to its pending reconstruction.

http://www.my290.com/Map.htm

It doesn't like Safari. Big shock. Not all of the features work and it advises you to "upgrade" to the latest version of Internet Exploder. Since that would involve downgrading my entire computer to Windows, I think I'll live without the Microsoft maps.

No need to downgrade to Windows. Just upgrade to Firefox.

To the user not able to see the speeds in Internet Explorer 6, I think you can click "Map Controls" on the menu to show the speeds. It looks like the speeds don't come up by default in IE6--presumably because IE6 is slow when it comes to rendering lines on the map.

My concern about the Hempstead tollway is that it will not be wide enough with only two lanes each way and no room to expand, just like the Westpark Tollway. If the present TxDOT funding situation persists, it could be a very long time before the 290 freeway is rebuilt and expanded. However, I do expect the reconstruction work at the 290/Loop 610 interchange to proceed more quickly since that will tie into the toll road.

I agree on this point--2 lanes won't be nearly enough to handle the demand for this facility. However, the tolling here will truly be dynamic. The price will go up as the facility gets more congested--just like the Katy Tollway is going to do. That will control the congestion somewhat.

I am also surprised there hasn't been more press on this. TxDOT is in a world of hurt right now and I doubt any new projects are going to see the light of day any time soon. They just got grilled during a special session of the State Transportation and Finance Committee who basically said they were operating like a rouge organization with no accountability. During the session, it came out that they miscalculated appropriations by $1 billion (with a "b") becuase someone told someone else the wrong number.

As it stands, a lot consultants and contractors are losing their jobs becuase of the instant cuts that TxDOT is making. Now our transportation network is going to suffer too.