It's the west side's large companies that are mostly interested in the toll road -- small local businesses, like convenience stores, see a traffic jam as a captive audience of potential impulse shoppers.
"Retailers don't mind traffic all that much, but employers are different," Murphy says. "They want to get their employees home and have them reach home not stressed by the commute. If you have an employee who leaves work at five and is put immediately into a frustrating commute, you're going to lose that employee. And that's why you're seeing suburban employment centers blossom."
The potential users of the tollway are those south of I-10, north of U.S. 59 and west of Gessner, Murphy says.
The westside groups have long since scaled back some of the more esoteric aspects of their plan. Wall Street, which would be buying and selling the revenue bonds, was skeptical of such gimmicks as "congestion pricing," where a car might be charged $1.50 during rush hour and ten cents at midnight. The plan to eliminate tollbooth attendants by requiring all vehicles to use electronic fare-collection systems also fell by the wayside.
Proponents admit that ridership numbers will be relatively small, given that the road is only four lanes wide. But they remain convinced the project will work.
They point to the Sam Houston Tollway on the west side of Beltway 8, which they say has far exceeded traffic expectations. The most recent ridership figures, according to the toll road authority, show over 344,000 "fare transactions" per day on the road. (No statistics on cars per day are kept; many cars pay several tolls on a single trip, says HCTRA spokeswoman Patricia Watson.)
Most of those fare transactions are on the southern portion of the road, where it intersects with the Westpark corridor. "People are using it for shorter trips than the planners originally thought," Murphy says. "People are taking the toll road to avoid four or five lights. You just have to spend five minutes driving around southwest Houston to know that the demand is there for the Westpark road."
Of course, there's also the Hardy Toll Road, which ostensibly takes riders from the North Loop to Intercontinental Airport. Even though it parallels the usually clogged North Freeway, traffic on the Hardy is so low that a midday driver can get awfully lonesome.
Even if the demand is there, even if supporters can get congressional approval for their financing scheme, the Westpark toll road wouldn't be out of the woods yet.
The project would require a high degree of cooperation between turf-jealous agencies, each of which prefers to be the lead dog.
Already, there have been strains since Metro purchased the corridor in 1992. Metro and the toll road authority have squabbled over paying for a $800,000 study of the proposal. And Metro resistance to the toll road is evident throughout the documents tracing its history: When an initial description of the project called for buses to pay a 25-cent toll, an anonymous staffer scribbled in the margins, "Great! We furnish [right of way] plus $130 million, then our buses pay a toll!"
Indeed, the groups pushing for a tollway have been skirmishing with Metro staff almost from the first. In a November 1993 letter to then-Metro chair Billy Burge, representatives of the westside groups noted that, at Metro's suggestion, they had conducted meetings with various government officials "quietly" until the HOV-lane funding was approved by the feds. Metro staffers were worried the discussions would threaten the federal action, they said.
The groups noted that despite their cooperation, the staff was still pushing a proposal to build the HOV lane as a first phase for a later toll road.
"The Westpark MET [Maximum Efficiency Transitway] steering committee was and is emphatically and unanimously opposed to this suggestion! ... Proceeding with the one-way HOV transitway when the MET clearly is a higher functional use of the Westpark [right of way] would be a squandering of resources that we cannot afford," said the letter, signed by representatives of five westside groups.
"We've been trying to get everyone at the different agencies to think outside of the box," Murphy says. That includes dealing with the Texas Department of Transportation, which balked at having the toll road hook up with U.S. 59 inside the Loop.
Metro chairman Miller says he foresees no problems among the agencies if the project goes forward. "Our area has a good record of cooperation between agencies," he says.
That cooperation would probably extend to funding yet another study of the project. Murphy says that a few changes, such as adding or moving on- and off-ramps, would increase ridership. And that increased ridership projection would mean more revenue bonds could be sold, putting the project on more solid financial footing.
"If you could spend another quarter-million on tweaking the plan and by doing that get another $20 million in bonding capacity, it's worth it," he says. "Realistically, it probably will require doing another study."
Which is not necessarily good news if you're inching your way down Westheimer once again, with no relief in sight for another four or five years. Just remember, as you slowly and nerve-wrackingly crawl along: You're sitting only a few blocks away from ready-to-go land perfectly suited to solving your problem. If only the powers-that-be could agree on how to do it.
E-mail Richard Connelly at rich_connelly@houstonpress.com.
