EYE ON TRANSPORTATION
by Joshua Fechter
DALLAS — The state agency in charge of building Texas’ massive highways says Texans need more ways to get around if the state’s going to continue to grow — a stunning acknowledgment in car-dominant Texas.
A draft of the first-of-its-kind Texas Department of Transportation plan released in October outlines the need for boosted public transportation in rural and smaller urban areas as well as a greater array of travel options, including rail, between the state’s major urban centers.
Texas, the report acknowledges, needs a variety of ways for people to get around the state without a car to help absorb that growth. Texas is projected to add more than 9 million residents by 2050. The number of drivers on the road has vastly outpaced the state’s ability to build highway capacity. Meanwhile, there’s generational forces afoot. Millennials and Zoomers in the state’s major urban areas want more transit options, while older Texans in rural parts of the state may increasingly need it owing to the rising cost of car ownership.
“We have almost 32 million Texans, millions of (jobs), thousands of companies locating to Texas in droves, headquarters, etc.,” said Caroline Mays, TxDOT’s director of planning and modal programs. “The fundamental need is, how do we address mobility needs for this growing Texas?”
To some, the fact that the document, titled the Statewide Multimodal Transit Plan, exists at all is an astonishment. In Texas, the automobile reigns supreme, and the state is primed to spend $146 billion over the next decade on maintaining and expanding the state’s vast highway network. State lawmakers have often sought to thwart projects to enable modes of travel other than cars, like the long-gestating Texas Central high-speed rail line and Austin’s embattled public transit expansion known as Project Connect. TxDOT has fought to expand highways through the urban cores of major cities like Austin and Houston, displacing residents and businesses while fueling concerns around exacerbating pollution and climate change.
“It is completely out of character for TxDOT to be addressing mass transit,” said state Rep. Terry Canales, an Edinburg Democrat who previously chaired the Texas House Transportation Committee. But he doesn’t see the political appetite among Texas lawmakers to address the state’s transit needs.
“What I would tell you is that it’s foolish, short sighted and moronic not to start making comprehensive plans when you know unquestionably that the population growth is going to double in the next 25 years,” Canales said.
At the same time, public transit isn’t entirely outside of TxDOT’s wheelhouse. The agency has had a public transit arm since 1975, when the state’s short-lived Mass Transportation Commission merged with the Texas Highway Department. What few dollars the state spends on public transit go toward rural and smaller urban transit agencies. The state spends nothing on public transit in the major urban areas, including agencies like Dallas Area Rapid Transit and CapMetro, the Austin’s region’s transit provider.
TxDOT has increasingly gestured at ways to travel around the state without a car in recent years. During the Biden administration, the agency applied for federal planning grants for intercity rail between the state’s major urban areas, a bid to give travelers ways to bypass the state’s increasingly congested highways. TxDOT is implementing an “active transportation plan” that lays out strategies to make it easier for people to walk and ride a bicycle.
Transit advocates say the plan is a major step that could help lay the groundwork for at least a statewide conversation about the state’s public transit needs.
“It’s a great opportunity to understand what could be possible for our future,” said Jay Blazek Crossley, executive director of the nonprofit Farm & City, an urban planning advocacy group.
Just because TxDOT has a plan doesn’t mean that lawmakers have to back it up. Enacting a vision to boost statewide transit access would cost at least tens of billions of dollars, according to the plan. Even if the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature suddenly wanted the state to have a bigger hand in public transportation, they would need to find a way to pay for it — a tough ask. The Texas Constitution mandates that most of the agency’s budget must be spent on building and expanding freeways.
Texas needs “everything we can get” when it comes to public transit, state Sen. Robert Nichols, a Jacksonville Republican who chairs the Senate Transportation Committee. But he’s skeptical that state lawmakers would help foot the bill.
“Is the Legislature willing to step up and lock in multibillion dollars per year for mass transit?” said Nichols, a former Texas Transportation Commissioner. “I don’t hear anybody talking about it.”
The report also comes as several suburban cities in the Dallas-Fort Worth region threaten to pull out of Dallas Area Rapid Transit, the region’s largest transit system. Farmers Branch, Highland Park, Irving and Plano have signaled their intent to ask voters to allow the cities to leave the system on the grounds that they don’t get enough in services for how much they invest.
TxDOT’s plan, which came about as a part of the state’s long-range transportation plan, pinpoints a number of holes in the state’s transit infrastructure and lays out potential strategies to plug them.
For example, a good chunk of the state’s projected growth will be in once-rural places that surround the state’s major metropolitan areas, which will need access to transit service. Though the number of Texans living in rural areas is declining, the agency expects rural Texans to become increasingly dependent on transit as they age to access medical care and other services. But rural and smaller urban transit agencies already face significant service gaps as well as future funding gaps.
To Mays, the plan’s most significant finding is how difficult it is to travel between the three points of the Texas Triangle — the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio regions. What’s more is there’s no government entity in charge of making it easier to travel between the places where the state’s economic activity is largely concentrated.
“Who is that entity?” Mays said. “What does that entity look like to be able to facilitate transit?”
Most Texans already live within the megaregion, but the region’s population is expected to grow by nearly 50% by 2050, when it could be home to about 80% of the state’s population. On a typical weekday, travelers make hundreds of thousands of trips along the Triangle. The Austin-San Antonio corridor alone saw more than 266,000 trips between the two urban areas in fall 2022, according to state figures.
Passenger rail service between the metro areas is limited, slow and, between Dallas and Houston, doesn’t exist. Private bus companies like Greyhound and Vonlane have somewhat filled the void, the agency said. But those operations often don’t connect with local transit networks, and not every city or town has bus service to transport residents elsewhere.
Increased congestion on the state’s freeways has made highway travel “unreliable,” the agency wrote in applications for federal rail planning grants. Boosting intercity passenger rail service between major cities, the agency argued, would ease congestion and reduce traffic deaths by removing hundreds of thousands of vehicles per year from roads, the agency wrote.
Intercity rail could take several forms, the plan says It could mean slower, more traditional rail service that reaches maximum speeds of about 79 miles per hour, like the Trinity Railway Express commuter rail line between Dallas and Fort Worth. Or it could mean high-speed rail that tops out at 186 miles per hour, like the long-discussed Texas Central line. Where rail doesn’t make financial sense, bus services could fill the gaps, the report says.
Providing better levels of transit service to a greater chunk of the state would be costly. Achieving “statewide connectivity” means connecting all cities with at least 10,000 people with some level of regular transit service, TxDOT poses, be it highfalutin high-speed rail or a humble bus. Doing that, the agency estimates, would cost at least $30 billion in upfront capital costs and $5 billion at a minimum in annual operating costs.
Any plan to ensure consistent levels of transit service and frequency would require a steady funding stream, Nichols said. Lawmakers would need to pinpoint a funding source or make cuts elsewhere in the state budget. To keep that funding steady, lawmakers and voters would likely need to pass a constitutional amendment, Nichols said — ensuring that lawmakers are legally obligated to spend money on transit.
To Crossley, the plan doesn’t focus enough on the needs of riders in the state’s major urban areas where most of the state’s transit riders reside, though the plan does nod at the need for expanded service in major urban areas.
Enacting the plan would also mean making a public case for expanding transit in car-dependent Texas. Under the plan, TxDOT would lead what’s essentially a public awareness campaign to tout community and economic benefits of public transit.
The report cites estimates from the American Public Transportation Association that every dollar invested in transit yields $5 in economic returns. TxDOT even pointed to a local example: Austin’s CapMetro Red Line, a commuter rail line that stretches from downtown Austin to Leander. After the line opened in 2010, areas within a quarter mile of the line saw a 62% increase in jobs and a 154% increase in high-paying jobs, the agency said.
TxDOT even pointed to the potential cost savings of ditching cars for public transit. Doing so can save residents in Dallas and Houston at least $1,000, the agency noted, citing an APTA report.
There are signs Texans already feel the need for expanded public transit, though whether they’d support efforts to do so is to be determined. In a poll commissioned by the agency, some 86% of Texans in 2023 said it’s at least somewhat important to improve the state’s public transportation network. At the same time, three-quarters of Texans said the state needs to boost funding for highways, and about 94% said it’s important to improve the state’s existing roadways.
“We can’t pave our way out of the population growth,” Canales said. “Mass transit has to be an option.”
TxDOT is holding the last pair of meetings seeking public input on Wednesday in San Antonio and on Thursday in Austin. The public may also submit feedback on the plan until Nov. 20. A final plan is expected by the end of the year.
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This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
