Chronicle concurs: No stimulus for Grand Parkway
Harris County and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) continue to press on in their effort to secure federal stimulus dollars to help fund construction of the controversial Grand Parkway.
However, in today’s Houston Chronicle, the editorial staff weigh in against directing tax-funded stimulus dollars to construction of new toll roads:
Traffic alert: There’s a major collision directly ahead on the Grand Parkway — on an unbuilt portion of Houston’s outer loop, no less.
OK. It’s not a real-life wreck. More of a philosophical pile-up. It’s shaping up over a fundamental question: Should federal stimulus dollars be spent on a portion of the Grand Parkway that is scheduled to operate as a toll road?
We say no. Emphatically.
It seems clear that a toll road should be funded by … tolls.
Fees collected from users should foot the bills for these pay-to-drive roadways, which have come into ever-increasing favor across Texas. Funds to build them should not come from a huge pot of found money such as the stimulus. Those dollars can be put to better use on projects that are equally as necessary as the toll roads but which don’t come equipped with their own built-in revenue stream.
The Chronicle’s rationale is somewhat different than CTC’s. In our view, the problem with the Grand Parkway isn’t that it’s a toll road; it’s that it’s in the middle of nowhere. We believe it’s inappropriate to allocate hundreds of millions of scarce transportation dollars to a project that will serve a stunningly small portion (~0.04%) of Harris County’s population. Nonetheless, squandering stimulus dollars on this project is a bad idea.
You can read the entire editorial, “Grand Parkway snarl: Use tolls, not stimulus funds”, online.