The Highway Establishment and How it Grew and Grew and Grew
All roads have to go somewhere; but it could be that roads in Texas are going the wrong way.
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Garrett Morris has seen the problem from both sides, first as a highway commissioner and currently as a member of the State Board of Public Welfare, and the experience has made him a firm believer in mass transit.
“For many people,” he says, “the automobile doesn’t provide true mobility—the young, the old, the blind, the disabled, the indigent. You’ve got to make good money to buy a $4000 car and maintain it. Ever since we tore up our streetcar tracks and shipped them to Japan in the Thirties, these people have had a hard time getting around.”
Bob Bullock noticed the same thing when he lobbied for rebates to rescue local bus companies in the Sixties, “These transit companies were a losing proposition but a necessary service,” he says. “Affluent people don’t realize this. I don’t understand all about mass transit, but I understand something when I see a bus full of blacks and Mexicans.”
This latent class bias is implicit in the attitudes of the middle-class “layman’ supporters of the Texas Good Road; Association. TGRA President Eugens Robbins says, “our objection to using gasoline taxes for mass transit is that it places the entire burden on the guy who drives his car—and he may or may not be the one who’s using mass transit.” The broad front of the Highway Lobby is distinctively white middle class, and such a person, burdened by the already-high costs of running an automobile— or two, or three—sees good sense in Robbins’ argument. But others are not so sure. Robert E. Gallamore, Director of Policy Development for Common Cause, recently argued to a Congress sional subcommittee that despite the fact that the roads themselves are usually constructed out of highway user taxes, those who use the highways still don’t pay the full social costs:
Noise, congestion, and air pollution are shared with others. Large portions of dislocation costs are borne by unfortunate people whose incomes and often whose race do not enable them to move out of the path of new freeways until it is too late to make that choice voluntarily. Gasoline is relatively cheap [this was in 1973] because all tax payers subsidize oil companies through the percentage depletion allowance, intangible drilling cost write-offs, and foreign tax credits... . Local jurisdictions pay for traffic police out of general funds... .
The auto got us into this mess, say the mass transit advocates, and those of us who are too poor to own an auto now that public transportation has dwindled to almost nothing may reasonably think that there is nothing wrong with taxing the auto to help get us out again.
The Highway Lobby has kept the mass transit advocates off balance by cheerfully agreeing that Texas does need more mass transit—surely does, needs it in the worst way. The problem is, they say, that there’s not enough money in the highway budget right now for highways, and besides, nobody has invented any sort of mass transit system that will work in Texas. They prefer to think of mass transit in terms of large fleets of diesel-powered, rubber-tired buses rolling over ... roads.
The TGRA has too much political savvy to sit back and allow the increasingly-popular notion of mass transit to be co-opted by the highway critics. Last November TGRA Chairman Russell Perry announced the formation of a 29-member “Urban Mass Transportation Advisory Council” having as its “primary function” the dissemination of information “giving Texas citizens perspective and understanding on urban transportation issues” so that the public will support “reasonable urban transportation programs for Texas cities.” At its organizational meeting February 12, the group endorsed the idea of a state mass transportation fund so long as it did not interfere with the dedicated highway fund, and they suggested that the TGRA change its own name to “Texans for Better Transportation” to reflect its “broad concern with the total transportion picture.”
The Advisory Council’s specific recommendations must await future meetings, but it seems doubtful that its members will discover any “reasonable” programs that require fixed rails or invade gasoline tax revenues. Meanwhile they have the inestimable public relations benefit of being able to disseminate the TGRA position from a letterhead containing the magic words “Urban” and “Mass Transportation.”
Despite brave words (“We have the farmer out of the mud. Our challenge now is ... to get the city dweller out of the traffic jam”) the TGRA’s position on mass transit boils down to this: do it if you want to, but get your money somewhere else. In a letter to Governor Briscoe in January 1973, the Association listed fifteen “specific actions” they would support. Some of these, like state guarantees for transit authority bonds and passage of legislation to permit establishment of metropolitan transit authorities, were helpful to mass transit without being harmful to the Association’s members. Others were a veiled way of saying “leave our money alone” (e.g., “Support of increased Federal and State funding from general funds,” “Support the release of funds authorized by Congress ... but withheld by the Nixon Administration”). The rest were clearly designed to pad out the list: (Support demonstration projects to prove new systems will work,” “Support coordinated planning for all transportation modes,” a proposal seemingly indistinguishable from “Support coordination of efforts by state agencies,” and, finally, “Support the Texas Highway Department in its desire to help the cities achieve improved public transportation.”)
The intensity of the THD’s desire to help the cities in this respect is open to question. It does not appear to have grown significantly since DeWitt Greer declared in 1967:
I do not believe mass transit is the answer in Texas... . Texans are oriented to the use of the automobile. It would take a generation to break Texans of the comfortable and convenient habit of riding in the automobile. If we are to please the taxpayers ... then we must develop more adequate thoroughfares in the urban areas.”
To the extent the Department does set its collective mind to considerations of mass transit, it thinks only of buses and roads. Asked about the THD’s plans, Commissioner Charles Simons mentioned Houston’s heavily-traveled West Loop 610 as evidence that the Department is already “the biggest public transportation system in Texas.” Of the auto user, he said that “when it gets to be too inconvenient and too costly to drive downtown, he will use public transportation. When gas is 50 cents a gallon people will go back to buses. We’re gonna help them because we have the facilities over which those buses roll.”
Today gas is over 50 cents a gallon and there are few buses for Texans to go back to. In the past generation, bus service has been discontinued at the rate of one city per year in Texas, declining from 36 cities in 1955 to 18 cities today. The systems that remain are a pale shadow of comprehensive public transportation.
There are two fundamental problems facing any urban mass transit system in Texas. They figure prominently in every THD and TGRA statement on the subject, and even the advocates of mass transit do not deny them.
One is residential density. Texas cities grew fastest in the era after automobiles had become the primary mode of personal transportation. Therefore they sprawl: unlike the closely-packed, high-rise cities of the East Coast, where population densities exceed 20,000 persons per square mile, residential neighborhoods in Texas are spacious, with densities in the vicinity of 3000 persons per square mile. How, ask the mass transit critics, can a bus or fixed rail network serve enough riders within walking distance of each stop to make the whole thing attractive?
The other problem is commercial decentralization. Traditional mass transit systems are designed to handle suburb-to-central-business-district movement quite well, but the Shopping Center Society of 1974 spends most of its travel time going places other than the downtown area. Commissioner Simons estimates that only five to seven percent of all trips in Dallas County have downtown destinations. How, ask the critics, can a mass transit system take urban Texans where they want to go?
Density and decentralization are the favorite themes at TGRA gatherings where mass transit is discussed. They are treated as insuperable barriers to a mass transit system, at least within the lifetime of the audience, and thus they take on the character of a rhetorical fail-safe system against threats to divert the dedicated fund. If mass transit is impossible, only fools would waste money on it. Especially highway money.
One illustration of this phenomenon occurred at the joint meeting of the TGRA and the Houston Chamber of Commerce last November. The speaker was Dr. R. W. Holder, Associate Research Engineer at the Texas Transportation Institute. He discussed the density and decentralization problems and concluded that
... no rapid transit system in use today appears to be directly applicable to Texas cities. Our urban forms are so different from those of cities in the North and East that we faced a different set of problems.
By this, said Holder, “I do not mean to imply that we cannot solve this problem... . We must search for mass transportation system designs that are compatible with our urban forms and” —he added significantly to his highway-minded audience— “[with] our existing urban transportation systems.”
One suggestion proposed by Holder was to establish “freeway surveillance and control with priority entry for buses.”
As newspaper headlines outside warned of imminent gasoline shortages, Holder concluded by telling his audience:
Texas is the greatest state in the greatest nation in the world. ... I see no reason why Texas should adopt an approach of copying urban transportation systems developed for other cities... . Let us design our own systems... . Let’s pioneer the way, and let the rest of the world follow us.
The applause was fervent.
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