Commissioners officially nix Westpark peak pricing

The unpopular proposal to double tolls on the Westpark Tollway during rush hour is officially dead: Harris County commissioners officially scrapped the plan Tuesday, meaning the price of the county's toll roads will remain the same — or won't, actually, given that a 25-cent increase on all toll transactions will still take effect on Sept. 3.

The Westpark proposal, as we're sure you remember, called for toll transactions to double for inbound traffic between 6 and 9 a.m. and for outbound traffic between 4 and 7 p.m. That, paired with the general 25-cent increase, would have meant that tolls on the Westpark would have increased to $2.50 during peak hours, an attempt to cut traffic on the tollway. But the proposal didn't go over well at all with motorists, who accused officials of trying to reserve the tollway for the wealthy and said they would no longer be able to afford to use the road to commute to and from work. A flood of angry calls and letters helped influence the decision to do away with the peak pricing idea, as did the fact that construction on the Katy Freeway meant drivers wouldn't have a viable alternative to the Westpark. "You can't have congestion pricing if you don't have a place for people to go to avoid congestion," Harris County Judge Ed Emmett said late last month.

Commissioners also decided Tuesday to cancel thousands of EZ Tags that had been issued free to county employees. An investigation by KPRC showed that the free tags had resulted in more than $1.3 million in compensated toll charges in the past 13 months, which the public also wasn't too fond of. "For us, the non-revenue tag program is over," Art Storey with the Harris County Toll Road Authority said. From now on, employees using the toll roads for work-related purposes will have to sign at a toll booth; officials said they're still working on a plan for emergency and military vehicles.