Can transportation planning keep up with growth?

This is the first in a twopart series on the annual Transportation Summit held on Feb. 20.

The population has boomed across the entire Interstate 35 corridor, and with that, so has the traffic and the constant construction, which Texas Department of Transportation Executive Director Marc Williams said is unlikely to cease. The more people on the road, the more the thoroughfares need to evolve to support the additional drivers. The annual Transportation Summit co-hosted by the Greater San Marcos Partnership and the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce is a chance for community leaders to do a deep dive into the current opportunities and challenges facing the local transportation system.

There was a panel discussion consisting of elected officials from the area; former Hays County Commissioner Will Conley, who was a chair of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, was the moderator, and Hays County Commissioner Lon Shell, Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher, Caldwell County Commissioner Ed Theriot and Comal County Commissioner Kevin Webb were on the panel.

Conley said most of the citizens of this four county region are staying within its boundaries for all of their daily needs.

“That obviously has a huge impact on regional transportation and transportation locally here amongst the four county area,” Conley said.

Much of the conversation on Hays County transportation infrastructure focused on the newly opened FM 110 project.

Shell said that Commissioner Debbie Ingalsbe was instrumental in the development of FM 110, which took “many, many years” to come to fruition.

“There were many challenges associated with it,” Shell said. “We saw an escalation of land values. We saw all sorts of things that made that project take a long time.”

Shell used the Wonderworld extension, the split between Old Ranch Road 12 and Ranch Road 12 that joins at La Cima, as an example of the importance of planning for growth before it occurs. He said he believes that in the future, the FM 110 project will be looked at as equally important to the efficiency of travel through the city.

“Imagine closing down the Wonderworld extension,” Shell said. “If you close that section of road … all of the traffic that heads east and west from San Marcos would come right there around campus and come right to that intersection … at Hutchison and Moore Street at Palmers and old Lamar Middle School. Can you imagine all of that traffic at that intersection? It would shut the city down. There would be chaos. That took a long time. That was a challenging project.”

Shell said as Hays County, Guadalupe County, Comal County and Caldwell County continue to grow, cooperation amongst the counties will be key.

“I think the lesson to learn is that we’re all going to be working together on this,” Shell said. “Not that we won’t still be associated with the metropolitan areas to our north and south. I think we’ll see more forming of this four county region as a very important player in the future.”

The remaining counties represented by the panel are growing at a rapid pace as well and are having to develop projects that plan for that growth.

Theriot said Caldwell County has historically been a rural county with a strong agricultural based economy.

“That is changing quickly,” Theriot said. “We have over 18,000 … new lots in the development pipeline. I kind of look at Caldwell County as being where Williamson County was 20 or 25 years ago and Hays County was about ten or 15 years ago. We’re being tasked, in the face of all this new development, with keeping up with the needs and making sure our transportation infrastructure is adequate to handle it. We’re learning, slowly at times, but we’re learning that we need to be active participants in the transportation process and the construction and planning process. … We’re learning that [by] participating in this process both financially and with our labor, we’re able to move projects along quicker.”

Webb said in Comal County there are a lot of pressures and challenges to the transportation infrastructure.

“Every day now if we’re not going forward we’re going backwards,” Webb said. “Right now we have projects planned from the west connector trying to connect west out on [Highway] 46 to [Interstate] 35. … TxDot and our partners there have been tremendous. They started a study here a few years ago on [Highway] 46 between Seguin and New Braunfels, and we’re starting to see some of the fruit of that labor. Projects are going to start there pretty soon.”

Kutscher said Guadalupe County is also experiencing “extreme growth.” He said the county is unique in that many people that work in Comal County live in Guadalupe County, and the boundary of the city of San Marcos is inching further into that county as well.

“[We] have interstate 10 that traverses east to west across our entire county, a portion of [Interstate] 35, [and] segments 5 and 6 of the toll road,” Kutscher said. “All of these major projects that we’re looking at through thoroughfare planning … are going to be key components of future planning for larger projects than we’ve ever participated in before.”

Kutscher added that the increased development is pushing Guadalupe County to move at a faster pace than the county is used to.

“And if I was going to assess the job that we’re doing, it’s not very good,” Kutscher said. 'I’m a pretty critical person, especially when we talk about ourselves, but we need to be moving faster on thoroughfare planning, on preserving and protecting right-of-ways, on working on these bigger projects [and] getting funding for larger scale projects. So a lot of good things are happening, but we’re drinking out of the proverbial fire hose at the moment and trying not to drown. … We’ve got almost 17,000 residential lots just getting [developed] around Seguin in the pipeline.”

The 2024 Transportation Summit is available to watch on youtube at this link youtube. com/ watch? v= 1wZRXcNRh74.