Merging the Brownsville Metropolitan Planning Organization into the regional Rio Grande Valley MPO in 2019 was the right thing to do, though it revealed some gaps in the city’s transportation and mobility planning.
That’s according to Brownsville City Manager Noel Bernal, who said the city’s first ever comprehensive mobility plan is among the one-time projects being paid for with surplus funds from the 2021 budget stemming from greater-than-expected sales tax revenues. The plan is long overdue and will be put to work as soon as it’s done, probably in June 2023, he said.
Bernal said the city has had to rely on a thoroughfare plan that the city adopted last April. It worked well for major transportation corridors but doesn’t address arterial and collector roads, streets linking neighborhoods and so on, he said. Nonetheless, the city’s planning department was forced to press the thoroughfare plan into service late last year in order to give the city commission at least some recommendation regarding infrastructure needs for construction that was already happening, Bernal said.
“We really were operating without a governing document for our transportation needs,” he said. “When we have new subdivisions going up … we need to determine the right-of-way that needs to be set aside, and what needs to be requested from developers to have the proper space or right-of-way to enable our network as we’re going.”
Not having such a guide to help the city make the best possible planning decisions is an impediment to growth, Bernal said, adding that the current situation is “less than ideal.”
“That plan would be immediately implemented, because there’s ongoing growth and permits being issued, where we need to be able to provide guidance to the developers in terms of what are the city’s expectations for where some of this infrastructure needs to go,” he said.
In addition to a more granular analysis of Brownsville transportation and mobility requirements, the new plan will tie together all the various modes of transportation: air, rail, road, water, and ideally, space, Bernal said.
“We also want to figure out innovative ways to leverage our unique modes of transportation, whether that means through technology, by making the most of our transportation system, and/or capturing the best of things like VTOLs (Vertical Takeoff and Landing), which is the next generation of transportation and mobility,” he said.
The city hired Austin-based Alliance Transportation Group to develop the plan at a cost of $600,000, Bernal said, noting that the project got underway last month.
“That number reflects the demand that we have and the scope of what we had not yet studied in a thorough way,” he said. “The reason why it is a significant undertaking, and thus the price tag is what it is, is because we had not done this type of planning ever in Brownsville.
“We’re moving away from your thoroughfare planning at the corridor level, but really looking at linking our bike paths, our sidewalk planning, our trails planning, our capturing the unique aspects of our five modes of transportation more fully in our planning.”
