Daily News Briefs, June 27, 2023

Texas Law Makes Ice And Snow Removal Training Mandatory For Tollway Workers

Fort Worth Report covers the final adoption of HB 4797, a Texas measure approved on June 17, that mandates training of toll entity employees and contractors who are tasked with maintaining a roadway during icy or snowy weather. The law, which takes effect on September 1, requires that the training be comprehensive and commensurate with the instruction TxDOT provides to its own employees with winter maintenance responsibilities. The department is obliged to open its training courses to tollway staff and contractors. The bill’s sponsor proposed it after a federal investigation into the deadly 133-vehicle chain-reaction collision that occurred on the I-35W TEXpress Lanes in Fort Worth in February 2022. State Representative Ramon Romero, Jr. (D-90, Fort Worth) said he was “frustrated” over the National Transportation Safety Board’s finding that  NTE Express Mobility Partners’ failed “to effectively monitor and address icy roadway conditions” prior to the crash.

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Lawmakers Take Sides On Proposed Bay Area Bridge Toll Hikes

The Mercury News delves into new California legislation — SB 532 — that proposes raising tolls on the Bay Area’s seven state-owned bridges by $1.50 per year over five years to help regional transit agencies bail out of their current financial troubles. The sponsor, Senator Scott Wiener (D-11) said now that federal and state emergency aid provided during the pandemic is running out, it’s up to the Bay Area to “to engage in financial self help.” He added that transit ridership and fare revenue is on the rise, but it isn’t recovering fast enough to fill looming budget shortfalls caused by the expiration of federal assistance. The bill is “already meeting pushback from some of California’s majority Democrats,” including Senator Steve Glazer (D-7), a prominent critic of BART system operations and finances.

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Kapsch Connected Vehicle Technology Powers Spain's Newest Intelligent Highway

Kapsch TrafficCom announced it has obtained approval to implement connected vehicle technology to create one of the first intelligent highways in Spain. “By 2024, a 60-kilometer [37.3-mile] stretch of the A8 freeway near Bilbao will undergo digitization” to “enable vehicles with active connectivity to receive real-time information on . . . weather conditions, accidents, road works, traffic jams, obstacles on the road, and speed limits. Furthermore, drivers will have the ability to contribute information to the system themselves.” Kapsch has installed 25 wireless roadside units along the A8, and it is providing the software for managing and monitoring the “Connected Vehicle environment. This software not only enables direct communication with networked vehicles but also provides real-time traffic data to the control center, enabling efficient decision-making and traffic management.” The Kapsch system has already undergone testing funded jointly by the Bizkaia provincial government and TECHNALIA, a major European applied research and technology development center.

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ENR Comprehensively Explores North Carolina's "Complete 540" Tollway Construction Program

“Engineering News-Record” publishes an in-depth look at the North Carolina DOT-NC Turnpike Authority (NCTA) toll-financed Complete 540 (Southeast Extension) construction program. Logen Hodges, director of marketing and communications for the two agencies, describes the $2.3 billion, dual-phase undertaking as the largest investment in highway infrastructure in the state’s history. It is adding badly needed capacity to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle, a region of significant economic growth that became home to 100,000 people from other states between 2022 and 2023. ENR notes that Phase 1 construction, which started in December 2019, is now about 77 percent complete and slated to open next spring. (Flatiron-Branch and Lane-Blythe joint ventures are the prime contractors.) “In March, NCTA issued the final request for proposals to design-build teams that were short-listed to provide bids on one section of Complete 540 Phase 2. The final RFP for the other section of Phase 2 was issued in May.” The authority and NCDOT expect to award the design-build contracts for Phase 2 in the second half of this year.

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Former MTA Chair And NYC Civic Leader Richard Ravitch Has Died

The New York Times reports. Richard Ravitch — “a politically savvy, civic-minded developer and public citizen who helped rescue New York City from the brink of bankruptcy and its decaying subways from fiscal collapse” — died Sunday at age 89. Among his many other accomplishments, Ravitch championed “inventive means of raising revenue” while chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to lead the agency out of a 1980s financial crisis. He briefly served (by appointment) as New York State’s lieutenant governor during the administration of David Paterson (D).

Ravitch was eulogized yesterday by MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber and Governor Kathy Hochul, who called Ravitch “a titan of New York’s civic world who left an indelible mark on our State.”

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These are just some of the toll industry developments TRN is following.

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