In January the Metropo-litan Transportation Comm-ission presented members of Congress with a study that identified 10 areas of the United States as emerging megaregions.
Most of the regions are on the East and West Coast, the Gulf Coast and around the Great Lakes. Among the megaregions, however, is the Texas Triangle, which spans from Houston to San Antonio to the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
The study predicts that by 2050 there will be 35 million people, or 70 percent of the state’s population, living within the triangle.
“We’ve been saying this for years,” said County Judge Jon Burrows about the growth of the region. “This is nothing new as far as Texas is concerned.”
Transportation issues are expected to be among the biggest issues for state leadership during the projected period of growth.
Burrows, who serves on the transportation steering committee for the National Association of Counties, said that the Interstate 35 widening project is an indication the state is working at addressing transportation infrastructure issues. He added, however, that the planning for transportation is in a constant state of flux and often fraught with funding limitations.
“You just need to keep up with it because you can’t put infrastructure in place overnight,” Burrows said. “You have to plan for it. It is always cheaper to plan for growth than to react to growth.
“We don’t want to get into the situation Austin got into. Austin’s philosophy was that if you don’t build it, people won’t come. Well, they came anyway.”
Burrows said that philosophy is what ultimately caused the need for toll roads to move traffic.
Few people in Bell County are as connected to the traffic and infrastructure issues of this region as Bill Jones III.
In addition to serving as Temple’s mayor, he also serves as chairman of the Killeen-Temple Metropolitan Urban Transportation Study and as vice chairman of the Texas High Speed Rail & Transportation Corp., a group committed to bringing high speed rail to the state.
“People aren’t going to stop coming to this area just because we aren’t ready with our transportation infrastructure,” he said. “We have got to figure out a way to handle the population that is coming.”
Right now there are just under 16 million people living in the Texas Triangle but the population therein is expected to more than double over the next 40 years.
“I-35 can never be expanded enough to ever handle that,” Jones said.
He said part of the solution will have to be a highway built parallel to I-35.
“We’ve got people who are fighting the Trans Texas Corridor,” Jones said. “Whether it’s called the Trans Texas Corridor or not, it will be built eventually. There is not enough infrastructure available to handle the future capacity.”
Even with a parallel thoroughfare, Jones is convinced that the total solution to Texas’ transportation strategy has got to include rail.
“People say Texans aren’t going to abandon their pickups and SUVs but that has already proven untrue in Dallas with DART and Houston with the light rail line that serves downtown.
“It’s a mode of transportation that is long overdue,” he said. “Imagine getting to Dallas or Fort Worth in 30 to 40 minutes.”
Jones speaks about the possibilities in glowing terms, referencing fact-finding trips he has taken to investigate the high speed rail systems in place in Europe.
He said that if rail was done right, it would be less evasive to farmland than a large roadway and has the potential to link up airports, universities and hospitals in an exciting, new way.
“You could get on a rail here in Temple, Texas, check in your bags here and pick them up in London or wherever your destination is,” Jones said.
Jones has a fact-finding trip planned to Asia this May, where he said he will visit Shanghai, China, and ride a rail system that has trains that travel at 300 mph
“We’re behind the world,” he said.
For the past four or five years, Jones said Texas High Speed Rail & Transportation Corp. has been working to bring high speed rail to Texas. The goal is to have it here by 2020.
The plan is called the Texas T-Bone. It calls for one rail line to be built from the Dallas/Fort Worth area to San Antonio and another line from Houston to Fort Hood.
The lines would cross somewhere near Temple and would serve most of the Texas Triangle.
“The city of Temple started because of rail,” Jones said. “It makes all the sense in the world for it to be involved in rail.
“I tell people that the T in T-Bone stands for Temple.”
promer@temple-telegram.com
