Motorists who regularly brave hectic U.S. Interstate 35 got good news last month when, at the urging of Texas Department of Transportation staff, the Texas Transportation Commission approved allocating almost $1.1 billion to widen from four to six lanes portions of I-35 along Salado, from north Temple to Hewitt and from Lacy-Lakeview to Abbott.

Now state transportation officials have revived plans to significantly expand and improve parts of I-35 through Waco, using ideas originally discussed in 1999 and 2000. Other priorities ultimately saw many of these plans shelved till recently.

In this interview with the Trib editorial board, Steven E. Simmons, 52, deputy executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation, talks about the promise of toll roads, the concept of taxing drivers by the miles they drive, problems behind the gasoline tax and what lessons state officials drew from the now-mothballed Trans-Texas Corridor project. Simmons was joined by department media relations director Christopher Lippincott.

Q State officials pulled the plug on the Trans-Texas Corridor this year. What will you take away from this controversial project that could still be useful to Texans?

A Well, we learned a lot. One thing is to be better communicators. But doing nothing is not a solution. When the governor rolled that plan out (in 2002), one statistic I still remember. The state of Texas at the time was about 20 million people, and by 2040 we’re supposed to double that. If you think our transportation system is bad today, how do you think it’s going to be when we got twice as many people and twice as many cars? It’s going to be very difficult and very costly to find another alternative out there. At that time, the Trans-Texas Corridor seemed the right thing to do. We understand the concern about property rights. Maybe we just need to do a better job of communicating where this state is going.

Q Funding is a big problem for everybody. Any suggestions for federal or state funding of roads?

A Sen. Elliot Shapleigh asked us to develop some alternatives for additional funding. We developed a paper that’s on our Web site. The gas tax has been a good funding source. Vehicle registration fees have been a good funding source. But the gas tax hasn’t been raised on the state level since 1991 and on the federal level since 1993.

Q That’s a hard one to do politically, especially now.

A A lot of people still don’t understand the gas tax. They thought that when the price of gas went up to $4, we were getting more money because of it. But it’s not like the sales tax, based on how much you spend. It’s based on unit volume. Whatever a gallon costs, we’re getting 18 cents. It doesn’t matter whether the price of gas is a dollar or four dollars. We’re getting the same money on it.

Q On top of that, you’re getting more fuel-efficient cars out there.

A That’s the thing. When gas went up, people started making lifestyle changes. They bought more fuel-efficient vehicles, they started car-pooling, they decided to try transit, so fuel taxes went down. So, too, fuel revenue is down. We had projected we were going to see 1 1/2 percent increase each year over the next 20 years and now we’re basically at half of a percent. But there are alternatives out there. I’m not advocating one or the other, but our vehicle registration is pretty darn cheap compared to other states. We also have the vehicle-miles-traveled tax that Oregon has piloted. Two federal groups came out and said we need to transition away from the fuel tax to the vehicle-miles-traveled tax. It doesn’t matter if you’re driving a Suburban that gets 12 miles per gallon or a Suburban that gets 20 miles per gallon.

Q How would you do that? Check the odometer during annual inspections?

A Well, you could do it as low-tech as that, whenever you got your car inspected. If you drove 15,000 miles, that would determine the tax you would pay. It can be as high-tech as the OnStar system in your GM cars. I get an e-mail once a month from OnStar telling me, “Your oil change is this month, this is good, that is bad.” It could be as high-tech as that. But technology is not going to be the impediment. Policies will determine all this.

Q What do you think about Sen. John Corona’s idea about local public taxing options for road projects?

Christopher Lippincott: If you do a gas tax increase in Waco through a local option and go through all that, and then somehow political will either changes or the economy picks up and our leaders come back two years or four years later and say, “Let’s raise the gas tax (statewide),” what are your readers going to say? They’re going to say, “We’re already paying more.” From our perspective as custodians of the system, understanding full well there are specific problems we need to address in Brownsville or Houston or Hillsboro, from a political perspective it’s difficult to imagine advancing on both of these fronts, from a local transportation tax and then on a statewide front. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a local option fuel tax because, if you’re not going to do something at the statewide level, then you get back to Sen. Corona’s concern. That’s really the conundrum we find ourselves in.

Q We’ve got some neighborhoods and parts of this county where people are upset because their projects are continually put on the shelf because the Waco Metropolitan Planning Organization is hard-pressed to find money for them, federally or statewide.

A When you look at the local option tax, the way it was first presented included just Dallas and Fort Worth. By the time it worked its way through the Legislature, 60 percent of the state was looking at this option. Well, that raises a good question: Why not just do it statewide if there’s that much of the state that says, “We want to do something.” Maybe we need to put a referendum out there to see if people really want this. We don’t care where the money comes from. We just see a need that’s not being addressed in transportation. We look out there at I-35 and we see the need expanding. If you think about the interstate highway system, it’s over 50 years old, close to 60 years old. We’ve just been patching it while traffic continues to grow. We’re not keeping pace with it.

Q Toll roads got to be very controversial the past few years. Some of us like them, others have problems with them. Where do they figure in our future?

A I think there was a misconception that every road that we were going to do was going to be turned into a toll road. There’s only a certain number of projects that were really seen as financially feasible as toll roads. But toll roads have to be part of the equation. Everybody talks about double-taxation and stuff like that when it comes to toll roads, but if you really look at what a toll road is, you’re not paying to just use the road, you’re paying for time and reliability. That’s what a toll road is. I mean, I grew up in Houston and when they built the Sam Houston Tollway out there, I wondered why anyone would pay to use a toll road. Well, the bottom line is people are getting on the toll road and paying for it because they know they can get on it and that if they’re going 20 miles it’s going to take 20 minutes. If they get on a frontage road or a side street, the reliability may not be there and they may have to leave an hour earlier.

Q How confident are you of the political will of our leaders in Austin or Washington to grapple with these issues?

A Our Legislature and Congress have a tough job. They’ve got a lot of different issues, whether it’s health care or transportation or homeland security. Do I think they’re going to find a solution? Yes. Will it be a long-term solution? That I can’t say. But that’s what transportation in this country needs — a long-term solution, whether it’s funding or just a vision of what transportation needs to be.

Q How difficult is the passage of eminent domain protections for private property owners going to be for the Texas Department of Transportation?

A Well, we’ve always lived with eminent domain. We’ve used it sparingly. We know property rights are important. But it’s something that, if you’re going to deliver a true public infrastructure, you’re going to have to have some ability to take property. If you ask most people, they feel like they got a fair shake (from us) when they went through the process. I can tell you that the department worked hard with the Texas Legislature to come up with something that will work for transportation. We’ll be able to continue with our process.

Q Is there a public misconception about TxDOT that it must continually battle?

A A lot of people think we sit in Austin and make decisions for communities without listening to them. That’s the furthest from the truth. We’re very decentralized in how we are structured. Our district engineers are Mr. Highway Department for the region. Like Richard Skopik — he’s got staff spread out all over his eight-county area (in Central Texas) and they know what’s going on. They’re the ones who drive the process. And then we have the MPO that’s involved. MPOs are the ones who have to plan for the region and they know how much funding they’re going to get from us.

Q What’s the best ride in all Texas?

A Well, State Highway 130 (a toll road that parallels part of I-35 and was built to relieve traffic congestion on it). We drove up it this morning. That’s the great thing about Texas. It’s so diverse. If you like to drive through the Piney Woods of East Texas, if you want to drive the mountains of Big Bend, you can do it. We’re fairly biased about it. Truckers routinely rank the roads of Texas as the best in the nation every year.