We submitted the following comments to the committee, which is meeting today to discuss transportation funding:
“Chair Canales & Members:
Thank you for your attention to reforming Texas transportation decision-making to get better results from our spending. Farm&City offers independent, nonpartisan analysis and recommendations to do more good with each public dollar.
Key understandings:
- Crashes cost Texans far more than congestion. TxDOT’s latest estimate puts the economic impact of traffic crashes in 2025 at $54 billion, including 3,769 lives lost. TTI estimates the cost of congestion at roughly $15 billion.
- Our allocation system is optimized for congestion, not for deaths and serious injuries. The UTP, MPO systems, TxDOT district planning, and most local funding processes are built around reducing congestion, with no method to direct attention and funding to the places and strategies most likely to prevent a bad crash. The Commission adopted the Road to Zero goal in 2019: fewer than half as many deaths in 2035 as in 2018, and zero by 2050. That goal is not integrated into TxDOT’s decision-making systems, and the Legislature has not yet taken the steps that would let TxDOT take it seriously.
- Texans know how to invest in safe, multimodal transportation: TxDOT’s Mesa Drive in El Paso, Houston’s Frequent Bus Network, Dallas’s Loop, Amarillo’s safe school streets. Since 2019, TxDOT districts, cities, counties, and MPOs statewide have innovated. We simply are not putting the money or the decision-making systems behind it.
- Texas mandates high-driving lifestyles and subsidizes driving at great cost. The era of user-paid roads ended over a decade ago. More than half of what Texas governments spend on roads comes from sources other than user fees: over $10 billion in subsidy a year on top of over $10 billion in user fees, while all public transportation spending in Texas from all sources is about $2.5 billion. A recent TxDOT study found truck freight pays nothing close to the costs it imposes on our roads. Families pay the costs of pollution and crashes.
Recommendations:
- Mandate and fund a biennial transportation safety assessment and plan by TTI and other Texas research institutions, parallel to the existing budget rider on the less costly problem of congestion, including a statewide map of the most dangerous streets, roads, and intersections, required to inform allocation across all UTP categories.
- Give voters the option to fund a safe, multimodal system: Rep. Walle’s constitutional amendment to fix the mistake of restricting oil and gas severance taxes to one mode, and the Safe Texas Streets and Sidewalks Fund, a Farm&City proposal to assign the costs of crashes to road users.
- Pass safety reforms letting local governments spend more effectively on safe neighborhood streets and safe options to drive, walk, bike, and use transit. TxDOT’s slogan is Drive Like a Texan: “looking out for one another, on and off the road.” Texas law should reflect that personal responsibility and freedom to travel as we wish, paying the costs of our actions.”