Boom.
A private company that operates part of the Texas toll road with the highest speed limit in the country filed for bankruptcy Wednesday, fewer than three years after the section of the road it oversees first opened.
The SH 130 Concession Company, a partnership between Spain-based Cintra and San Antonio-based Zachry American Infrastructure, opened the 41-mile-long southern portion of the State Highway 130 toll road, from north of Mustang Ridge to Seguin, in October 2012 to much fanfare. In addition to the record 85 mile-per-hour speed limit, the company signed an unprecedented deal with the state to build and operate its section of the road for 50 years in exchange for a portion of the toll revenue.
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SH 130 Concession Company CEO Alfonso Orol said in a statement that the road will continue to operate while it goes through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.
“The filing will have no financial impact on the state of Texas,” Orol said. “It’s business as usual for our customers, employees, vendors, and surrounding communities during these proceedings.”
See here and here for the prior steps towards this seemingly inevitable point. The Statesman adds on.
The problem, despite the road’s potential for speed, has been low traffic. “The lingering effects of the recession,” the company said in a press release Wednesday, “reduced traffic volumes regionally during the project’s early years and delayed development along the largely rural SH 130 corridor.”
The building boom in Central Texas has largely bypassed Lockhart (located just east of Texas 130) and Caldwell County, and several large developments announced along the corridor are still only in aspirational form.
As of 2014, when the road had about 16,400 toll transactions a day, traffic was about 30 percent below the projections used in borrowing the money for the road. Original projections for 2015 and 2016 weren’t available Wednesday.
But use of the road, while not enough to meet the company’s financial obligations, has been improving. According to SH 130 Concession, the road had 5.15 million transactions in 2013, 5.99 million in 2014 (a 16.3 percent increase) and 6.9 million in 2015 (a 15.2 percent increase).
See here for all my SH 130 blogging. Will this actually affect operations of this ill-fated road? Who knows, and who would be able to tell if it did? I’m just wondering what the next stage of this story is.