Why is the spot of the deadly vehicle pileup on I-35W in Fort Worth so dangerous?

The area where six people were killed early Thursday during a 133-car pileup on an ice-coated Interstate 35W is known for its chronic traffic congestion.

In 2018, a $1.4 billion expansion and modernization of I-35W was completed north of downtown Fort Worth — yet traffic continues grinding to a halt, not just during rush hour, but throughout the day and night.

Why can’t this problem be fixed?

Part of the issue is that another freeway, Texas 121 — also known as Airport Freeway — dead-ends at I-35W near downtown Fort Worth, about two miles south of Thursday’s crash. That merger forces lots of cars into a relatively small space — and motorists trying to get from 121 to I-30 must cross several lanes of traffic in less than a mile to get to their exit, which during heavy traffic (or bad weather) can cause gridlock for miles up the road.

In the 1980s, the state proposed extending Texas 121 around the north side of downtown Fort Worth, and extending the roadway into southwest Fort Worth, which would relieve much of the stressful lane-changing. But that plan was opposed by neighborhood groups, many of whom worried about the impact on historical Samuels Avenue.

“It absolutely would have facilitated the flow of all that traffic to the southwest, but people were concerned about the impact to Trinity Park and the river and Samuels Avenue,” said Bill Meadows, a former Fort Worth councilman and Texas Transportation Commission member who also served on the city’s Streams and Valleys organization in the 1980s.

In addition to the bottleneck caused by highway mergers, the 2018 expansion project created a new set of toll lanes — known as TEXPress lanes — in the median of I-35W. The toll lanes require motorists to pay electronically (most car owners do that by affixing a TollTag to their windshield), but once you’re in the toll lanes there are limited places to exit.

Thursday’s pileup occurred near where the TEXPress lanes merge back into the nontoll freeway main lanes, in an area between 28th Street and Northside Drive. The lanes merge back into the nontoll main lanes on the left side of the road, which often caused motorists in the fast lane to brake and swerve. The speed limit is 75 mph on the TEXPress lanes where the crash occurred, and there are no shoulders or breakdown lanes.

The private consortium of companies that built the TEXPress lanes for the Texas Department of Transportation is known as North Tarrant Express Mobility Partners. That group is responsible for maintenance of the toll and nontoll lanes.

Videos of the pileup aftermath taken by passers-by appear to show the pavement iced over when cars and trucks began to smash into each other. However, a spokesman for the North Tarrant Express Mobility Partners told the Star-Telegram the company had been actively working to keep ice off the roads.

“NTE & NTE35W maintenance crews started pre-treating our corridors on Tuesday and have been spot treating since then,” spokesman Robert Hinkle said in an email.

But one state elected leader is calling for an investigation into NTE Mobility Partners’ role in the maintenance of the I-35W corridor.

State Rep. Ramon Romero, D-Fort Worth, whose district includes the site of the deadly crash, said he is “not a fan” of the state entering into partnerships with private companies to build and operate roads that ought to be the responsibility of the state. He said he is concerned that for-profit companies could overlook safety issues such as preventable bottlenecks.

“Texas should be doing this on our own,” Romero said in a phone interview. “Now we have created this clearly very dangerous trap.”

Romero said that based on the videos and photos of the pileup that he saw, he doesn’t think NTE Mobility Partners had even tried to deice that stretch of I-35W.

“It sure sounds false to me,” Romero said. “The officers and fire folks that are there now, they’re hurting because they had to pull all those people out of those cars, and they know how it happened. Those folks didn’t have the ability to brake.”

Beyond the deicing issue, Romero said he wants to learn more about how the state managed to spend $1.4 billion on road improvements yet didn’t add any nontoll lanes.

Southbound I-35W features three lanes heading toward downtown Fort Worth, but when motorists get to the Belknap Street exit the freeway shrinks to only two lanes. There, many motorists wait until the last second to get out of the merging right lane, and that can cause backups for several miles all the way to 28th Street — near the site of Thursday’s tragic pileup.