by Ryan Puzicki
As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas – and that includes our road system.
With more than 700,000 lane-miles, Texas maintains the nation’s largest network, nearly 50 percent larger than the next state. The Texas Highway Department, today’s Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), even started a travel magazine in 1953 to encourage Texans to explore what a wonder Georgia O’Keefe described as “the same great wonder as the ocean and the highest mountain.” The newspaper was called Texas HighwayAnd the significance was clear: the way around Texas was on his road.
Now, TxDOT is confronting the possibility that the way Texans have gotten by in the past is not the road of the future.
Part of it is financial. Running the nation’s largest road system is expensive: TxDOT projects $43 billion over the next decade just to maintain the existing system, with another $100 billion earmarked for expansion. There are also hidden costs: Within the Texas Triangle—home to nearly 80 percent of the state’s population—drivers lose an estimated 423 million hours to traffic each year, resulting in an economic cost of $11 billion. Even as the share of Texans working remotely has more than doubled, traffic congestion continues to grow. Meanwhile, with Texas’ population expected to grow by 40% by 2050, per-capita traffic delays will increase by 200%. All traffic is deadly: More than 75,000 people have died in crashes since Nov. 7, 2000, the last day without a traffic fatality in the state. Although TxDOT itself operates less than 30% of the total lane-miles on the state’s roadway system (the remainder being local roads), 64% of all fatal and serious injury crashes occurred on state-owned roads. The department aims to reduce the 4,000 or more annual deaths to zero by 2050.
Historically, states have approached congestion problems by building more lanes. But by TxDOT’s own admission, the “one lane only” strategy has reached its limits.
Texas provides a clear empirical test of whether highway expansion can reliably relieve congestion. The state has the space, money and political support to build roads to an extent that few others can match, so if congestion, safety and access can be solved with lane-miles alone, Texas should be the place where that strategy has succeeded. Instead, the results have been mixed at best. After TxDOT expanded Houston’s Katy Freeway to 26 lanes, subsequent studies showed that travel times during peak periods worsened rather than improved, as the increased capacity was quickly absorbed by excess driving. If lane widening was going to ease congestion anywhere, it would have solved it here. Instead, Texas Place near the bottom US states measure urban congestion.
Originally, the The congestion problem is a connectivity problem: Texas cities have grown rapidly and they’ve grown outward, spreading jobs throughout the metro area; For the most part, the only way to get around is through those 700,000 miles of road. This problem is largely shaped by geometry: automobiles take up a lot of space relative to the number of people they carry. A typical city bus can carry forty passengers while a Ford F-150 occupies nearly twice the length—often occupied by a single driver. If those same forty people travel separately by car, their vehicles will take up 20 times the road space. Even before accounting for safe following distance. Scale the difference between thousands of vehicles traveling through the same restricted corridor, and congestion is no longer a failure of planning or enforcement but a predictable result of space constraints.
And in densely built urban areas, that space is very limited. To facilitate the expansion of Interstate 35 through central Austin, TxDOT had to purchase more than 100 homes and commercial properties, seizing 54 acres of valuable land that would fall off the city’s tax rolls as it steamrolled in extra lane-miles. The project again reflects the geometry problem: cars take up a lot of space, and widening urban highways means taking up space already occupied by high-value uses. In dense areas, this is an increasingly expensive proposition.
So it’s worth noting that this highway-first state is recognizing that these constraints require new approaches to address Texas’ future transportation needs.
In fact, late last year, TxDOT released its draft Statewide Multimodal Transit Plan (SMTP), first in Texas. While that alone is notable, what makes it groundbreaking is its focus on transit options as a necessary part of solving the congestion problem. The report, which comes as TxDOT is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar highway expansion project in urban areas, reflects the problem: The state is deeply committed to highway construction, even as its own analysis shows that widening alone is unlikely to deliver its long-term transportation and safety goals.
TxDOT cited Demographic changes Puts extra stress on the road dominant model. With the elderly population projected to nearly double by 2050, demand for alternatives to driving is increasing. The younger cohorts of Millennials and Gen-Zers—instead of spoiling everything—express greater interest and preference for automobile mods. Meanwhile, the state’s growing majority-minority population drives less and uses transit more in urban areas. At the same time, many households are increasingly burdened with housing and transportation costs combined.
Texas already has 77 transit agencies, which together will carry nearly 230 million passengers over 252 million service miles in 2024, almost all locally funded. Yet most of these services operate with mixed traffic, limited frequency, reliability and capacity. SMTP argues that many errors in transit are less due to missing infrastructure than poor service, and that transit needs better coordination among high-quality transit-providers with priority treatment if it is to work effectively. TxDOT also recognizes that better communication is needed to overcome misconceptions about transit.
The big opportunity for the state is intercity transit between various nodes in the Texas Triangle, where TxDOT projects total Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) to increase by more than 50% by 2050. Today, drivers make more than 40,000 daily trips between Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, a drive, Houston and Houston. 2.5-hour drive. Surprisingly, Austinites and San Antonians make more than 266,000 daily trips along the 90-minute Interstate 35 corridor connecting the two cities. This corridor represents one of the highest benefit opportunities for improving regional connectivity and both TxDOT and Travis County Studying Feasibility of rail connectivity between the two cities.
TxDOT also opens the door to other transportation providers. SMTP highlights the role of Amtrak, which already provides passenger rail service across the state (for just a 7.5-hour trip between San Antonio and Dallas), as well as public-private partnerships that have created bus-based transit hubs across Texas. They also flagged Brightline—a privately owned intercity rail line between Orlando and Miami—as a possible model. Meanwhile, Texas Central, a private initiative to build a high-speed rail link between Houston and Dallas, has struggled to gain traction. The plan suggests that autonomous vehicles will undoubtedly be a part of the state’s transportation future but stops short of spelling out the policy proposals.
While TxDOT acknowledges both the high costs of the congestion problem and the potential economic benefits of transit options, SMTP is devastatingly realistic about the challenge:
Texas has no funding source to provide a statewide transit network.
Under the Texas Constitution, almost all state transportation dollars are dedicated to roads, which transit depends largely on federal, local or other sources. Meanwhile, state legislatures’ recent interest in alternative transportation modes is trying to defund local transit. So it’s no surprise that Texas’ transportation system remains overwhelmingly road-dominated. Statewide, the total VMT has reached over 300 billion More than 1,000 times the service miles traveled by state transit agencies in 2023. On a per capita basis, Texans travel about 10,000 vehicle miles each year, while transit companies collectively provide about eight service miles per resident.
If Texas is car country, it’s by design.
While it seems unlikely that Texas as a whole is ready to embrace transit, TxDOT has done perhaps the most difficult thing yet: admitting we have a problem, and admitting that the road to recovery won’t be widened with one more lane.
SMTP doesn’t mean that TxDOT has suddenly embraced transit, or that highways are going to be abandoned. It’s that the state’s own transportation agency, based on its own data, has concluded that roads alone cannot deliver the transportation results Texans want. If the future of transportation in Texas is multimodal, it’s not because TxDOT has changed standards but because it recognizes real-world limitations. Congestion is, at root, a geometry problem. The solution is political.
This article originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on Ryan Puzicki yes city. Shared here with permission.
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Previously published Also at strongtowns.org Creative Commons License
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