MAROON said:

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I-10 to Hwy 71 is the way you get from Houston to Austin. No one would ever take I-10 to Toll 130 unless they were lost

Now TXDOT needs to build some overpasses between Bastrop and Austin to get rid of the lights to make it a fully functional highway (same scenario as 290 in Elgin).

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I live in west austin.

I go 71 to Houston.

I go 79 to College Station.

I try to avoid 290 to CStat or Houston. But sometimes I have to.

How this was ignored for 25 years but 183 at Liberty Hill was fully funded and completed in amazing time is a crime against 1/3 of the state that travels to and from Austin/Houston every week.

The Chicken Ranch said:

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290 should be an Interstate between Houston and Austin.

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AJ02 said:

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I've been gone from Austin 15 years now. I haven't been back since, but just hearing about all this....I can't even imagine!! I used to have a view of downtown skyline from my apartment off Southwest Parkway. From pictures online, I wouldn't even recognize downtown anymore.

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The Downtime skyline from SW Parkway looks bigger than Houston or Dallas's skyline...it's likely not...but it looks like it. Complete with the state's tallest building.

TxDOT is one department that severely needs to be DOGE'd.

Lots of wasteful spending on "contractors"

Solutions;
1. Plow the interstate like divided and raised highway through Manor
2. Bypass Elgin completely on the south side.
3. Bypass Giddings completely on the north or south side.
4. Fix the interchange between 290 and 36 in Brenham


Just a start.

aggiehawg said:

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HTownAg98 said:

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Let me guess: you sold the vehicle or traded it in and didn't take the plates off. Same thing happened to me about a year ago.

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No. We still had the same vehicles back then. The Hubs is one of those guys that never sells anything and I keep my vehicles for 14-15 years. And they were all registered in our home county. But the toll authorities still tracked us down with threatening letters about unpaid tolls.

As I said, when The Hubs did call about one and had the gal pull up the vehicle description on the registration and then the picture associated with that toll notice, she finally got it. License plate aside, how does a black one ton pickup truck with a huge brush guard on front turn into a VW Beetle? They were going off of either license plate numbers nor vehicle registrations.

Just weird.

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I sometimes get a toll invoice from that authority even though I have a TexTag. After paying a couple of them I now just throw them in the trash. I avoid that toll road if at all possible.

Bunk Moreland said:

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The run from 290/130 all the way to Elgin is an absolute nightmare. They're 15 years behind the needed infrastructure for the population growth out there and by the time they get something done it'll be 25 years behind.

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As a consultant, worked with TxDOT on signal timing in Liberty Hill and Elgin.... can't agree more. Just one of those areas in need of further upgrades... like US 380 up here between Denton and McKinney has been jammed for a decade+ now. We have a partial freeway on 380 now with overpasses at key intersections.

The Texas Highway Department was great. TXDOT sucks and is a cash cow for their road building butties.

WestAustinAg said:

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AJ02 said:

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I've been gone from Austin 15 years now. I haven't been back since, but just hearing about all this....I can't even imagine!! I used to have a view of downtown skyline from my apartment off Southwest Parkway. From pictures online, I wouldn't even recognize downtown anymore.

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The Downtime skyline from SW Parkway looks bigger than Houston or Dallas's skyline...it's likely not...but it looks like it. Complete with the state's tallest building.

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The Waterline is the tallest building west of the Mississippi! Which I thought would be in LA, but Austin beat them by 3 levels

Bigballin said:

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The Giddings paper (the hard times and bad news) had a report about a year or two ago about TXDOT reviewing options to bypass the funk (IFYKYK) and held an information session at the silos with the local community. Now, haven't heard a peep about it since.

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That is how those projects work. They will announce a project and get all the "public input" meetings out of the way. Then they sit for years until funding becomes available. By the time, everyone forgets about the project. Then they start turning dirt, and people scream, "Why didn't we know about this? No one asked me!". And then they have to be reminded about the public meeting 8 years ago.

Going to be similar issues with 79 east of 130. Hutto and Taylor are exploding in growth. Hutto is a 6A now which is crazy!

Sims said:

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Rule of thumb is, if it's obvious what the need is, TxDOT is planning to start planning it. If TxDOT has approved a plan, the need has doubled. If the plan is constructed, the current demand has already overwhelmed the new infrastructure.

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Then they say nobody could have ever predicted that more lanes would have been needed! Well everyone could have told you and they are not on the payroll.

Think of the money wasted building and then tearing out and rebuilding.

These large infrastructure projects have public outreach events for people to provide opinions/comments during the early and later stages of design

https://290extensionproject.com/project-news/events/

Did any of y'all attend and provide your input? Why not?

HTownAg98 said:

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knoxtom said:

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The annual "TxDOT sucks" post. We repeat this every few years.

Here is what is happening with TxDOT.

In 2024 they had a right of way budget of 1.5bn and they spent something like 2.3 bn. This is ROW alone. The Austin District was not irresponsible and they only went over by a few million bucks. Some of the other Districts went 70% and more over their budgets. No one cared.

This money overspend comes out of their 2025 budget that ended Oct 1, 2025. That means that in 2025 they had the 1.5 bn MINUS the overspend of 800 million, minus subsurface utility...BOOM, there was nothing left and they shut down for 2025. So now we are in the 2026 fiscal year.

The official budget was again 1.5 billion for TxDOT ROW but that number is deceiving. First in 2026 they did not receive the gas tax money they thought was coming. Second, the feds didn't pay what was expected from the infrastructure bill and the normal fed money. Third, the well money was significantly lower than expected. (Yes, TxDOT gets a lot of their money from a tax on well heads). Fourth, subsurface utility took a WHOLE lot more money than expected. Fifth, Sixth... So Right of Way had maybe half the money they expected to have in 2026. So 2026 has become a wash and TxDOT is doing very little in projects.

And this problem wasn't just right of way. Planning and Design had WAY less money than expected, construction had WAY less money than expected, maintenance is the last one cut and they don't have any money. Everything had way less than what they were expecting.

And then money was shifted to the border wall... Abbot wanted it.


Long story longer, TxDOT had no money in 2026, just like 2025. Projections for 2027 are that there won't be much money, but hopes are high that the TxDOT thing will get going again in FY 2028, starting in October 2027.


So why don't they build a toll road or some sort of PPP? Well back around 2022 the Governor saw how many roads were owned or licensed by Ferrovial through the toll systems and freaked out. He literally said "no more toll" and that business instantly dried up. The only toll road since that time was the attempt in Cibolo, which was stopped by the City of Cibolo and was done by a private company. New toll in Texas is dead, the only thing left is existing road contracts.

So what can be done? Nothing. Texas and the feds choose the border wall over roads, bridges, maintenance, etc. They pulled all of the hurricane drainage funding and sent it to the border, there is no action on City roads, County roads, State roads, FM roads, or interstate roads. The bridge work from the infrastructure bill is gone.

Will they look at 290 in the near future? No way. They are taking IH35 under the lake and rebuilding it all the way to North Austin. I think the budget for that project is something like 13.5 bn. They are finishing IH45 around downtown Houston for a cool 14bn. No money left.


All I can say is Deal with it. You all thought a border wall and cheap gas was so important that you were willing to give up all other infrastructure projects for it. Now it is what it is.

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This is the best analysis of what's going on with TxDOT at the moment. Everything is this post is identical to what I've been told about TxDOT and their funding, and it's got a lot of ROWAPS providers wondering what the hell they're going to do.

As an aside, I got to see an early schematic of the border wall. Once people find out that they're planning to split Big Bend National Park in half with the border wall, people are going to lose their ***** I'll be surprised if it ever happens. This article has a drawing similar to what I saw.
https://www.marfapublicradio.org/news/2026-02-18/border-wall-plans-now-set-to-include-big-bend-national-park

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I'm not surprised it is consistent with what the ROWAPS consultants say since I own a ROWAPS company, I was in a meeting in which the director of finance for all of TxDOT discussed this a month ago, and my friend who sits on the Texas Transportation Commission lets me know EXACTLY where the budget is and how much is actually coming in.

We probably know each other, as we run in the same circles.

My grandfather told me, a young smucket, back in 1979 that Texas will someday have one big city that goes from San Antonio all the way to the Oklahoma border. He didn't predict the toll roads but he was spot on.

RIP Leon

HTownAg98 said:

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We probably know each other, as we run in the same circles.

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It is a very small group.