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The Voice of Seguin WEEKEND
EDITION
TODAY
City gets update on proposed new Seguin, New Braunfels connector route Darren Dunn
(Seguin) -- More people and businesses are moving into the area, and with that growth, there’s now a push to create better ways for people to travel between the Seguin and New Braunfels areas. The SH 130 Concession Company, which manages the southernmost leg of State Highway 130, is proposing to build an east-west connector that would create direct tie-in between Interstate 35 in New Braunfels and SH 130 somewhere near Seguin. Jeff Billows, chief operating officer for the SH 130 Concession Company, recently discussed the idea with the Seguin City Council. Billows says this is all tied to the growth that’s occurring locally. He says the tollway is already experiencing more traffic due to that growth. There are more vehicles utilizing that stretch of the toll-road, but Billows says it can handle much more. “After the pandemic cleared, we suddenly saw traffic jump. So pandemic was part of it, but it’s also
just sort of the accumulated growth in the area. There are significant numbers, which I won’t bore you
growth from a pretty small base, but still pretty large. It’s (also) a facility which is currently congestion free.
with all of them, but I think there are two things to take away. It’s up, give or take, 50-percent in the last five years. So massive, massive
We have an incident rate which is a fraction of most rural highways that are similar from a capacity standpoint. Even with this growth,
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we don’t think we have a congestion issue where travel would slow to 65 (MPH) or less until (the year) 2050 or so. The point of that is – it’s wide-open space, (and) congestionfree travel,” said Billows. Billows says the current growth in Seguin and across other parts of Guadalupe, Comal and Caldwell counties shows there’s a need to address the existing traffic issues, and the connector road would be one way to do that. “Guadalupe County is growing 30-ish percent in the last decade. There’s 15,000 or so dwelling units planned and in the pipeline in Seguin alone. That’s replicated other cities in the area. The expectation is that this sort of rate will continue if you extrapolate it out to 2050, it will be about a 70-percent growth rate, which would put these two counties at 750,000 residents. So just some numbers to probably bring to life, what you’ve seen every day in your seats -- all that extra traffic results in congestion time. Route, pg. 2