Texas Toll Road Primer

This project provides a historical assessment of toll roads in Texas, including a brief legislative history of their development in this state, a brief review of the financial and operational characters of each toll facility, and a comparison of these facilities with those in other states. The major tolling authorities and toll roads in the state were examined, and profiles containing key financial information were created. These include development and construction costs, financing structure and obligations, revenue generation, operations, maintenance, and ongoing cash flows. Using all of this information, researchers then developed a model to examine scenarios where future toll revenues could be leveraged to finance other transportation improvements. This work also included toll revenue leveraging strategies in Texas and other states. Researchers then focused on the impact of toll roads on urban mobility. For the urban areas in Texas where toll roads are located, the overall impacts the tolled facilities have had on the region’s mobility were assessed. Much of this effort was on modeling these impacts, and it focused on capturing how travel has changed due to the existence of a toll road. This was done using mobility measures including traffic volumes, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and indices of congestion and delay.