By Robert Storch
The Texas Department of Transportation is changing the rules on its plan to widening Interstate 10 through Central El Paso. Instead of spending a billion dollars to widen the highway and add suburban style frontage roads for Executive Center to Copia, starting in 2028, they now plan to spend a half billion dollars to widen the highway from UTEP through Downtown starting next year. They have yet to show anyone how they will do it.
Widening the interstate highway through Downtown is unnecessary. It is economically and environmentally unsustainable. There is no empirical evidence to justify a bigger highway that was a mistake to build in the first place.
In the 1960s, the interstate highway was built through Central El Paso, destroying mostly poor minority neighborhoods and dividing the city.
In 2019, TxDOT rolled out multiple proposals to widen I-10 through El Paso. Their plans ranged from bad to horrible. They all would increase congestion, aggravate air and noise pollution while continuing to stifle local economic development and deteriorate the quality of life in surrounding neighborhoods.
Every year, the Texas Transportation Commission adopts a new “Unified Transportation Program,” which is a 10-year, long range list of highway projects.
The current, 2024 UTP, adopted last August, lists “I-10 Segment Two, Downtown 10”, as a $750 million (later revised to $1 billion-plus), not fully funded project, to start in 2028. The 2025 Draft UTP lists a “Downtown 10, Phase 1”, from Spur 1966 to a half mile east of Campbell Street, to start next year, fully funded for $500 million.
The Downtown 10 proposal is ill-conceived from the beginning. It is based on flawed data and will never accomplish its stated goals.
Wider urban highways never reduce congestion. In fact they increase it. Suburban style frontage roads in the urban environment are unnecessary for incident management since there are multiple existing alternatives to temporarily reroute traffic. In fact, urban frontage roads are unsafe and destructive to urban development and livability
Granted, the TxDOT priority is not improving the quality of life in El Paso. Its concern is moving interstate and international freight to markets in Houston, Dallas and the rest of the country. However, there is no reason all those trucks must run through Central El Paso, especially when there is a viable alternative route around the city.
This is a new, possibly illegal, segmentation of a segment with no publicly available plans. Based on prior TxDOT proposals, we can only assume this new plan will further deteriorate the surrounding local community. There is no local good in building a dangerous, destructive project that is not necessary.
TxDOT is taking public comments on the Draft 2025 UTP until Aug. 4 at UTP-PublicComments@txdot.gov. Tell them to stop destroying our city.
Robert Storch is a retired criminal defense lawyer and 30-year resident of El Paso.
The post Opinion: I-10 El Paso expansion plan looks like bait and switch appeared first on El Paso Matters.
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