The Kyle Report is an opinion column written by Kyle resident, Pete Oppel, that covers city leadership issues. You can follow The Kyle Report here on the Kyle Life or by subscribing to Mr. Oppel’s blog, The Kyle TX Report.
In spite of its $600,000 price tag and the overwhelming opposition to it by residents, particularly those who live close by, the City Council Tuesday evening directed the staff to prepare a resolution that would put the city on record as supporting the construction of a roundabout at Kyle Parkway and Kohlers Crossing.
Of course, Tuesday night’s action doesn’t mean squat. It has absolutely no bearing on whether a roundabout will ever be constructed at the intersection. All it means, if the resolution drafted by the staff is ultimately passed by the council, is that the city will be on record as telling the Texas Department of Transportation it favors installing a roundabout at the location.
The council’s direction to staff came without an official vote, just a mention by Mayor Todd Webster that he felt the consensus of the council leaned to favoring a roundabout.
According to Assistant City Manager James Earp, TxDOT is willing to foot the bill ($250,000, according to Earp) to install a traffic signal at that intersection. He estimated a roundabout would cost about $850,000, but he also guessed TxDOT would contribute the $250,000 traffic light cost to the project, leaving the city to come up with the remaining $600,000. This came a couple of hours before the council hosted a workshop in which council members were told it would cost the city $18 million a year over the next 30 years to pay for the road projects called for in its Transportation Master Plan.
Of course those are capital projects and would be paid for by putting the city more in debt. Because of extremely poor planning, Kyle already has the highest property tax rate of any city in Hays County and I’m guessing that rate will jump about three cents when the city manager unveils his FY 2015-16 budget next week. The problem is, because of that poor planning, the burden of paying that debt falls way too heavily on individual homeowners and asking them to shoulder more of that responsibility is absolutely unconscionable. The city needs to attract far more businesses to relieve homeowners of some of this taxpaying burden before it goes on these types of spending sprees.
Not only that, while I am a big fan of roundabouts in general, I am not convinced that a roundabout at that intersection is the best idea.
Earp is also a big fan of roundabouts, but he is one of those city officials who say that since a particular solution solved a particular problem a number of different times, that same solution will work every time. That can be a dangerous assumption, especially when it comes to city planning. Earp presented a nifty slide show illustrating the benefits, particularly the safety benefits, of roundabouts, but not one of those slides, not a single one of his examples, was illustrative of the situation at Kyle Parkway and Kohlers Crossing.
For one thing, the speed limit on that section of Kyle Parkway is 60 miles an hour and I’ve never seen a roundabout on a stretch of highway where the speed limit is 60 miles an hour. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one somewhere on this planet, but I doubt if there is one at an intersection that closely resembles the configuration at Kyle Parkway at Kohlers. Usually roundabouts are found at intersections that closely mirror each other; i.e. a four-lane undivided road that intersects another four-lane undivided road, a 40-mile-an-hour road that intersects another 40-mile-an hour road. Here, however, you have a four-lane road with a significant median intersecting a four-lane road with a narrower median and a road with a 60-mile-an hour speed limit intersecting one with marked at 45 mph.
Earp offered a slide that indicated studies suggest that a car traveling a 60 miles an hour will slow to under 20 miles an hour at a roundabout. But that study was done on a two-lane road and I doubt if it was done in Texas where drivers will hope the road ices over in winter so they can slide their pickups all around the circle at crazy speeds. And why create an obstacle on a 60-mile-an-hour highway that slows vehicles to under 20 mph? That makes no sense. Why not construct an overpass at the location to really keep traffic flowing along Kyle Parkway? Would an overpass cost significantly more than a roundabout? There is no way of knowing because, in typical fashion, instead of trying to find the best solution to a particular problem, Kyle officials only considered two alternatives: traffic light or roundabout. But it seems to me an overpass would be the best traffic-management solution.
But we’ll never know that because, again in typical Kyle poor planning mode, the city waited until the last minute to take any action at all on this. According to Earp, TxDot needs to have an answer from the city on the plans for this intersection by the end of this month or sometime next month at the absolute latest.
There is also the fact, as mentioned Tuesday night by both Mayor Pro Tem David Wilson and council member Diane Hervol, that the majority of Kyle residents don’t want a roundabout at that particular location. And if the internet message boards hosted by Plum Creek residents are any indication, those individuals who live closest to the intersection are overwhelmingly against it. Now, none of those residents came to City Hall Tuesday night; the only ones who did appear were those who favored roundabouts, including two members of the Planning & Zoning Commission, Mike Wilson and Dan Ryan. But even these two gentlemen spoke in favor of the theory of roundabouts, but never addressed the actual situation at Kyle Parkway and Kohlers.
As far as the cost, Earp justified the $600,000 cost of the roundabout by saying the city would have to bear the cost of maintaining the traffic signal which would be higher than maintaining a roundabout. Council member Damon Fogley asked the perfectly logical question of how long would it take for the traffic light maintenance costs to reach the $600,000 expense of the roundabout and Earp responded with a tapdance that would have made Fred Astaire jealous.
There are plenty of potentially good locations for roundabouts in the Kyle area: at the intersections of Center and Rebel, Center and Old Stagecoach Road, RR 150 and 2770. And someone please explain to me why a roundabout should be located at Kyle Parkway and Kohlers, but not at Kyle Parkway and 2770, which is really the official city portal on the parkway. The answer. of course, is because the parkway shrinks from a four-lane, widely divided road to a two-lane undivided one north of 2770, but, as I mentioned earlier, you also have a road mismatch at the Parkway and Kohlers.
This just seems to be another example of doing something not because it’s the right thing to do, but because the fix is in.