Wurzbach and Northwest Military - your chance to be heard

It could be your last chance to provide input on the future of the intersection of Wurzbach Parkway and Northwest Military.

The current plan, based on input from previous open houses hosted by our planning team, is to expand the intersection without building bridges. Challenges with access between the Inverness neighborhood and the Alon Business Center led to scrapping plans with an overpass in favor for an expanded signalized intersection. Traffic engineers estimate morning delays at the intersection improve from 47 seconds to 34 seconds with this solution; evening delay will improve from 77 seconds to 36 seconds, elevating the current level-of-service rating an entire grade.
The current proposal extends all right-turn lanes for added storage space and includes dual left-turn lanes in all directions. The estimated cost as of today is about $7.5 million.
This is all based on current public input. Those yet wishing to be heard may provide their input at our final planned open house tomorrow night. Here's the info:

• Thursday, Dec. 15 between 5 and 7 p.m.
• Barshop Jewish Community Center Auditorium, 12500 NW Military Hwy

The meeting will be an open house format so residents may come and go at their convenience and staff will be available to answer questions.
Construction on the project could start as early as 2020.

Another expansion on Lp 1604 to be discussed

It's not on the northside, nor on the far west side. That doesn't mean we're not paying attention, though.
There's this seven-mile stretch between US 281 and Elmendorf that's currently a two-lane country highway we need to expand to improve safety and prepare for increased capacity.

We need your insights to make this happen effectively. We'll be hosting an open house tonight between 5:30 and 7:30 at the Southside High School cafeteria. You'll need to be there to check out our design and the features involved with this expansion. You'll also get to visit with the engineers designing the project. They'll have notepads ready for your comments regarding their plans.
Here's a snapshot of what we've got on deck:

• Expanding Lp 1604 to a four-lane divided highway
• Add pedestrian accommodations at various select locations
• No additional right-of-way acquired for this work

This is your chance to influence the design of this project - if you're one of those who live, work or play in this area, be sure to come out and see us!

An open letter regarding the Potranco Road medians

Full disclosure: The text below is pulled from an email conversation between our staff and an individual representing a conglomerate of business owners involved with a petition regarding the raised median being built on Potranco Road. It has been edited from its initial form to fit the blog format.


To those questioning the need and placement of the raised median along Potranco Road between Loop 1604 and Culebra:

Thank you, first of all, for your efforts to become engaged in the transportation planning process. We've heard your issues and do not take them lightly. It's unfortunate we couldn't discuss these issues before we reached the construction phase of this project - we could have had much more productive discussions had this outreach happened during our planning process or at our open house on this project.

How we reach out
We don’t send out mailers for our open house meetings because of the logistics involved. For starters, the cost of doing that would prove exorbitant - we couldn't limit mailers like that simply to those living or working along the corridor, and the sheer volume of mailers would be beyond our capacity (we do all that stuff in-house, after all). We know we'd miss people, and quite often we've found the owner of a property doesn't communicate these kinds of things to their tenants - which would leave us in a situation we have now with folks saying they never knew.
We try to be responsible stewards with the money we’re entrusted with, and seek the most effective and efficient means to communicate. We are required by law to post notices of public meetings in the "legal notices" section of the largest print news outlet in the area (in our case, the Express News). We also use traditional and social media channels to broadcast these meetings by sending out news releases to a very long media distribution list and tweeting about these meetings (not to brag or anything, but at more than 29,000 followers ours is the second-largest Twitter account in the department, behind only the statewide account).
We don't do Instagram or Facebook locally - this is a strategic communication decision we've made as an agency to help us control content and manage our messaging strategy. We do have a statewide Facebook account, though. It's got great stuff there. But we digress.
We also posted alerts of the open house with digital message boards strategically located along the routes. These message boards are placed ten days or more ahead of public meetings in the hope we're giving people ample opportunity to see the alert and take appropriate action. We also work with city council offices, who broadcast these meetings through their email blast lists where appropriate.
One thing we can do better about is utilizing this blog - which gets more than 20,000 reads every month - to broadcast these meetings.

The goal of the project
The ultimate reason for these medians is safety. Raised concrete medians are specifically designed to restrict left-turn movements that create what engineers call “conflict points” – a space on the roadway two opposing vehicles are competing for. These conflict points on high-trafficked collector routes like Potranco Road (and Culebra Road, for that matter – which got the same medians in 2015) often see a higher rate of catastrophic collisions. When these raised medians are installed, the collision rate drops dramatically.
For instance, the Potranco Road corridor saw a crash rate more than double the state-wide average because of these conflict points and some driver behaviors that favored risk and perceived convenience over safety and a few extra minutes. We’re seeking to improve that issue. You can see more about the pronounced safety benefits of these medians in our information page on the project located here.

But it's going to hurt our business/property value/lifestyle
There absolutely are some growing pains associated with any new roadway feature, and the growing pains with a raised median that restricts a particular movement are probably a little more pronounced. The improvement in safety is something we simply feel is worth the trade-off and is something we've thought long and hard about.
It’s much more important to us that, for example, a vehicle carrying children to a daycare facility re-route themselves to take much-safer (and, in many cases, faster and cheaper) right-turn approach and arrive or depart safely than it would be that same vehicle try rush ahead of a bloc of traffic and get into a catastrophic collision. We also don’t want people using the center left-turn lanes as acceleration lanes to merge with traffic; this behavior – particularly on developed and busy roads – tends to lead to other collision risks (such as head-on collisions or side-swipes). For more on this, see what the Texas Highwayman has to say in his primer on Texas road laws, specifically on the center turn lanes.
Here's the good news: this perception of inconvenience is short-lived and people generally get used to this new arrangement very quickly. We know this because we do this on similar roads across the state (and across the country, really) and others manage just fine.

Why does a neighboring driveway get a cut in the median and mine doesn't?
This is a terrific question. Before we delve into it, take a look at the planned layout of this new median (be sure to zoom in on the document so you get a good look). We'd post a jpg of it here, but it wouldn't give you the resolution needed to be effective.
We consider access to each location based on a master transportation and development plan. That is, when a property is platted for development it includes any access plans - including shared access easements - so a city can conduct proper urban planning to ensure order and efficiency. When this master plan isn't followed and the easement isn't utilized properly, this creates significant issues.
For example, a string of commercial properties west of Hunt Lane all have a shared access easement that would afford not only an additional driveway onto Hunt Lane itself, but a shared cut in the curb. That easement was never developed as a driveway, and some commercial tenants have used that easement space to perform alternate functions (one uses it to store a dumpster, another uses it as an outdoor recreational facility for kids).
Take a look:

via GIPHY

Our plans are built with the master plans in mind - that's the sense of order that maintains a rhyme and reason to what we do. When the master plan isn't followed frustrations ensue and could potentially be perpetual. These issues can be solved by reverting back to the master plan and adhering to the strategy initially in place.

Our commitment
While we are committed to seeing this critical safety project through and maintain it's design is planned to operate the same as any other similar road in the state (or the country, for that matter), we do consider each case. In the end we're all human and can miss something - but with the number of people that touch each project, those misses are extremely few and far between.
We've reviewed all outstanding requests to review this project already and are confident we got things right with the current plan sheets. Heck, we're only six weeks from being finished with the work - we're ready to wrap it up and be done with it!
Projects like these, after all, reflect our forward-thinking as these corridors grow and produce increasing challenges to safety and operational efficiency in the future. We're just trying to get ahead of tomorrow's issues today.

-TxDOTSanAntonio

Wurzbach Parkway and NW Military ... still developing

We are hearing from some who live near the planned project at the intersection of Wurzbach Parkway and NW Military that the plans presented at our recent forum are concrete regardless of input from the public.
With this in mind we want to review (briefly) what's happening, why we're doing it and where we are in the planning process.
For information on the project (if you're not familiar already), check it out here.


The plan in principle
The main goal of what we're trying to do is get the main lanes of Wurzbach Parkway through Northwest Military Drive and, potentially, Lockhill-Selma (for a later project, perhaps). Once Wurzbach Parkway pushes through Lockhill-Selma it's no longer a parkway and becomes Wurzbach Road, a city facility. Frankly, after that point the road just isn't designed to be a parkway but an arterial. With the heavy development approaching I-10, we simply don't have a lot of options to take the parkway all the way to I-10.


The problem we're solving
When we finished the last segment of Wurzbach Parkway back in 2015 drivers began using the route as an east-west expressway between I-10 and I-35. The problem is the number of traffic signals at the bookends of Wurzbach.
Why the signals? Because, frankly, Wurzbach was not initially intended to be an expressway. When designed in the 1980s it was intended to be a connector route for communities east and west of US Hwy 281. Those first segments were on the bookends (we worked from the outside and went toward the middle) and included traffic signals.
Drivers should know once Wurzbach crosses Lockhill-Selma (on the west) and Weidner (on the east) it's a city street. TxDOT only owns and maintains the portion between those two roads.
Over the years driver demands have changed and we've tried to accommodate those changes. One such accommodation was the increase of speed limits on the Parkway from 45 miles per hour to 60 miles per hour. This increase was done because of the overwhelming demand from drivers in the area.
With traffic moving rather quickly in the middle, we're seeing traffic really bog down once it hits Northwest Military. We think if we can get that higher-speed traffic through that intersection we should see enough of a reduction in traffic volumes approaching Lockhill-Selma and beyond things will be pretty manageable.
This brought the city council office for District 8 in San Antonio to have us sit down and think through some options to promote better traffic flow. We even dedicated about $1 million to studying traffic patterns to figure out where people are trying to go and how we can best help them get there. The work has yielded some interesting results and is still ongoing.


One solution
Again, the goal is to push main lane traffic through the intersection of Northwest Military and allow others to seek alternate routes at the intersection without bogging down the through traffic. One design that will help this along and was presented is a SPUI at the intersection of the Wurzbach exit ramps and Northwest Military. The intersection would favor left- and right-hand turns onto Northwest Military as traffic moves to communities in the area.

This is a new design to San Antonio used fairly effectively elsewhere across the nation - and beyond - as an innovation in traffic configurations. Without trying new things, after all, we'll end up with the same result and continue being bogged down at traditional intersections. Being forward-thinking about the current and future problems of the intersections is what our folks were trying to accomplish.
That said, some have criticized the idea as being overly burdensome for some specific neighborhoods. These have provided feedback, including comments, that will be considered in the final design of the project.


It isn't set in stone
With our road designs, this really popular idiom is, well, literal. Until a project has been constructed with concrete poured and asphalt laid, we typically have at least a little wiggle room. While we're still designing the project we've got a lot of wiggle room.
Though the official comment period is up March 15, we're still open to suggestions. The deadline is set so we have a cut-off point to include comments in our official records of the public hearing process and is designed to keep us compliant with state and federal rules on this sort of thing. The deadline isn't a hard deadline.
Once we get to March 16, the plans aren't set in stone.
In fact, we're still really early in the planning process (we'll have to post on what that is another time...). If you've got input on the project, sent it our way. Well, send it to the folks with Parsons-Brinkerhoff who are helping us on these plans. They can be reached at wurzbach@pbworld.com.
Or you can always just send it to us. Please email it to us using the online form here - leaving comments through the blog is not the most effective way to let us know what you think on this one.


Every project has trade-offs
Ultimately, these are your roads. We can come up with every forward-thinking design we can cart out, but if these ideas aren't meeting the needs you have now and you think will exist in the next 5-25 years ... well, we won't go that route.
As our director of transportation planning and development often says, we don't like to go where we're not wanted.
This means getting the trade-offs you are willing to make and want to see happen. So let us know - keep the ideas coming! We have changes on nearly every single project we develop stemming from public input. If you don't like the ideas we're coming up with, tell us what you don't like and what you would do different - and we'll try to incorporate those ideas to the best of our ability.
Note we do consider a democratic process here. If a complaint is from one single individual while the overwhelming feedback from others is to do the opposite, we're going to stick with the masses. That doesn't mean you need to organize on NextDoor to inundate us with feedback, however. Designating a representative for your HOA to speak on behalf of the group (and clarify they are indeed representing a number of voices) will typically do the trick.


For what it's worth
Take a look at the presentation from the public meeting, if you missed it. Some cool stuff on the SPUI in there. We've also posted the schematic and a video presentation. Check them out so you know the ideas we're coming up with!

Wurzbach Parkway: The next chapter

Yes, the saga of Wurzbach Parkway continues.

Brief history
A collector and arterial route serving north-central San Antonio and crossing US 281 was drawn up in the early 1980s. This route was built piece-by-piece as money became available, with the final three segments starting construction back in 2011. The final segment, connecting West Avenue to Jones-Maltsberger, opened up September 2014.
With the final segment open and Wurzbach Parkway in full use, we kind of thought we'd be done talking about it here on the Go Ahead! blog. We were wrong. We've had more than a half-dozen posts on the Parkway since it opened, though admittedly many were about requests from stakeholders to raise the speed limits.
Now the speed limits are up, folks have been clamoring for help getting traffic through the Northwest Military and Lockhill-Selma intersections. Well, in true Wurzbach Parkway fashion, we're fixing this in pieces.

Public input
If you get frustrated being stuck at that signal at Northwest Military Highway during peak traffic hours, we need to hear from you.
Not so fast! Don't go emailing us just yet. Instead, we want to chat with you in person. Tonight.
We'll be at Oak Meadow Elementary School between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. to discuss the plan we've got worked out to get traffic through the Northwest Military intersection and improve traffic flow up to Lockhill Selma.
The idea is pretty cool, and looks a lot like the intersection of Fredericksburg Road at Medical Drive. It also involves a fancy intersection called a SPUI, or single-point urban interchange. (You can read about these things here, then come ready to chat with us about them at the open house. An animation on how a SPUI works is found here.)

If you can't make it
We'll have the materials posted on our web site here later this week. It'll include the powerpoint we show at the meeting as well as any relevant schematics and a video animation of the intersection. You'll also find appropriate contact info there to let us know what you think.
Whether you're at the meeting or not, if you don't speak up we won't know what you're thinking and considerations you are thinking of may get missed! We are, after all, only human!

New stop signs to be installed: when you call us, it really does matter

A couple of weeks ago a truck driver called us to share an observation of the traffic situation at the corner of I-410 and WW White on the city's southeast side.
Well, after the conversation we visited with our operations guys and found out we've heard similar comments in the past, and we're planning to make a change.

Again, our timeline here is measured in months - mostly because we need to get the signs gathered and contract the restriping of the intersection. But it is coming!