Engineers’ group criticizes inaction on transportation
Yes, the Texas Council of Engineering Companies has a self-interest in roadbuilding, needless to say, but so does everyone who drives on Texas roads. The point of the TCEC statement, as the headline says, is that there is a cost to doing nothing.
TRANSPORTATION: THE COST OF DOING NOTHING
No one wants to pay more for anything, but in transportation it’s becoming more and more clear that there is a cost – in both time and money – to doing nothing. This week, the Funding Subcommittee of the Texas House Select Committee on Transportation Funding heard testimony from Frank Bliss, a commercial real estate developer in the Metroplex, who investigated the cost to taxpayers in increased fuel costs through decreased fuel efficiency when traffic goes from free-flowing to “stop and go.”
Mr. Bliss used data from projected congestion trends in the DFW area and EPA estimates of highway and city fuel efficiency for different kinds of vehicles to estimate the aggregate cost incurred when congestion increases the amount of driving that takes place under city conditions (19.6 mph) versus highway conditions (48.3 mph). He concluded that, depending on the fuel efficiency of the vehicle, the increased cost to the average taxpayer if no action is taken would range from $250 to $350 per year just in extra fuel costs. Increased time in congested traffic would also cost time (204 hours each year) that could be spent at home or in the community – and would cost businesses productivity.
His conclusion: “Without adequate funding for transportation, as growth occurs we pay for the lack of infrastructure by buying more gasoline and having less time for our families, communities, and the businesses we represent. Instead of . . . [paying] to fund new roads, we’re giving it to the gas companies. If we understood the math, I think we might change our attitudes and put the money where it can help us the most.”
The state’s transportation user fee is set at the same rate as 1991 (well before the world wide web was invented) and its purchasing power has declined forty percent. But anyone who thinks drivers are not paying more to drive has not looked at the pace of toll road construction and gross toll revenue collections in Texas over the past fifteen years, as toll authorities work to meet the capacity demands that aren’t being paid for by user fees.
This rate of increase is essentially equivalent to a one-half cent per gallon annual increase in the state’s transportation user fee over the period –- and it is driven by a shortfall in user fee-funded investment.
Our point is this: If Texas continues to grow at a pace of 1,000 new residents a day, highway users don’t get to decide whether or not we will pay more to use the highways. We will pay more. We only get to decide how we want to pay. If we decide we don’t want to pay through increased user fees (the most broad-based way), then we will pay more with our time and pay more in tolls. It’s that simple.
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Rick Perry can say that he hasn’t raised taxes, but tolls are more expensive than gasoline taxes, and they have surged upwards. The rate of toll revenue increase cited above — equivalent to a 1/2 cent per year increase in the gasoline tax (I’m not going to adopt the euphemism of “user fee”) since the last tax increase in 1991 — figures out, over 20 years, to be identical to a 10-cent increase in the gasoline tax. Critics of the gasoline tax have a point, that it has lost a lot of its revenue-raising potential due to greater fuel economy, but raising the tax is still better than stagnancy. We could have built a lot of free roads with a ten-cent increase in the tax. Instead, we have spent this decade fighting over unpopular toll roads and even more unpopular proposals to privatize roads. At any point, Perry could have stepped forward and said that we needed to raise the gasoline tax — or presented the public with a referendum of the two alternatives, toll roads or gasoline taxes. Instead, we took the most costly approach: borrowing. We spent billions of dollars on bonds and hundreds of millions on interest payments. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Or, I should say, politics, politics, politics.
Tagged: toll roads, transportation
Nutter Butter says:
I understand what you’re saying, but I still have a problem with this sentence: “We could have built a lot of free roads with a ten-cent increase in the tax.”
Assuming wiki answers is right (it’s Fri. and I’m not going to do the math myself), the average American person uses 486 gallons of gas per year. Multiply that by 10 cents and that’s almost a $50 per person increase in cost to motorists every year.
Those “free roads” aren’t free.
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Anonymous Reply:
May 14th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
$50 per person per year, dude, have you seen the cost of the tolls in Williamson County? about $30 per MONTH.
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Robert Morrow Reply:
May 15th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
free roads are not “free” but toll roads are very, very, very expensive. It is one BIG reason I will be campaigning against Rick Perry this fall.
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paulburka says:
Nutter Butter is right: No road is “free.” But, if you accept TCEC’s figures, if no action is taken, the cost of congestion ranges from $250 to $350 a year for the average motorist, which is a lot more than $48.
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Old guy says:
I know a lot of people disagree, but I love toll roads. If I’m willing to pay extra, I can forgo traffic and the frustration. I wish we had more!
And, I like the way the private contractors complete the toll roads quickly. Guess I’m out of step!
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Dukakis_in_a_Tank Reply:
May 14th, 2010 at 12:23 pm
It’s not that I don’t like toll roads per se, it’s that I don’t like everyone else free riding off me paying for use of the toll road. Every time I take a toll road (say the Westpark toll road) I pay the entire toll, but the benefit also goes to those on I-10, who get one less car on the road. The idea that tolls are a perfectly efficient “usage fee” is completely flawed because it fails to take into account the collateral benefits that non users get from the roads.
The gas tax, while also well short of perfectly efficient, at least spreads the cost generally to all road users in proportion to their use of fuel. Granted, those like myself who drive trucks that get fewer miles to the gallon pay more tax per mile driven than those with small cars. However, maybe my 1/2 ton causes more wear and tear on the road than some Mini Cooper.
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David Siegel says:
The state’s transportation user fee is set at the same rate as 1991 (well before the world wide web was invented)
In fact: Tim Berners Lee in 1990 proposed using “HyperText [...] to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will” and released that web in December.
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Anonymous Reply:
May 14th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
uh, the web was invented in ’90 by your buddy TB Lee…
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Calculatin' Coke says:
I like toll roads because folks who decide to live and work where there isn’t a core pay for the added infrastructure cost of doing so.
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John Johnson says:
Might I suggest that while everyone wants to address toll roads vs. no toll roads the real underlying issue is how TxDot is managed.
Take a look at the Texas Transportation Commmission. Starting with Delisi, its head, not one commissioner has any roadbuilding experience. They are simply political appointees, and as such they just nod their heads in agreement with their boss, the governor. Long time TxDot employees who do know something about designing and building must be some of the most frustrated people in the state.
If you want to gripe about roads, insurance or utilities in Texas, bypass the appointees and look toward Perry. After all, if they bow their necks and disagree with him, they are asked to resign.
They are also expected to make it easy for the large political money contributors to garner payback. It is a corrupt system, and it needs changing. We could start with the governor.
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mac says:
What percentage of tollway funds goes to admin. cost and not put directly back into road building and maintenance vs fuel tax?
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keenobserver says:
This discussion is much like the health care debate. Everyone seems to understand there’s a lot of cost-shifting going on, so much so that we need complicated studies to quantify just how much. Everyone also seems to agree (except to the extent of doing anything without a crisis) that more transparent allocation of costs allows better governance, increases equity and results in greater efficiencies. In other words, keep it simple, stupid, and you won’t get screwed as often.
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Anonymous says:
Burka ignores the elephant in the room. Let’s use Austin as an example.
An effective road system and solutions would include an alternative to IH-35 that truck traffic would use. They don’t use SH 130 and they never will. Too many tolls AND increased fuel costs.
It would also alleviate congstion on MoPac by expanding it. That hasn’t happened and won’t for a variety of reasons.
We’d also have at least three major east-west thoroughfares to get you from west to east. Due to cost and politics, that won’t happen either.
So if the public is cynical because toll roads are too high, are built where no one drives or are going to spur new development so certain landowners get rich, it is understandable why they don’t want gas taxes raised.
The public simply doe not believe people anymore -especially when bond packages get passed and the money gets spent on things other that the intended use.
May be SHOULD dust off the old liberal mentality “if you don’t build it, they won’t come.”
Except this time it would be “If you make it so bad, maybe they will all leave.”
That seems to be working for California.
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Old Austinite Reply:
May 15th, 2010 at 10:14 am
1. Mopac should have never been built. What a colossal mistake that was. In retrospect, I’m convinced that Mopac was built solely for the benefit of landowners at both ends. They made a bundle.
2. My house is close enough to Mopac that I’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it from ever being expanded. I’ve been in that house since before Mopac was built, so I don’t want to hear about “choices”. Mopac wasn’t my choice. TxDOT lied through their teeth about what the impact of Mopac would be.
3. The reason that Austin needs E/W thoroughfares is because of all that development out West, which was never supposed to happen. That’s because of the gutless land-use rules that existed then and now. The No-Growthers in the 1970s were right, but they were also politically stupid.
4. If it gets bad and they all leave, then good riddance.
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Moderate Reply:
May 17th, 2010 at 12:49 pm
I was told that MoPac was built because the railroad donated the right of way for the road in lieu of paying taxes to the City of Austin.
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Pat says:
I have two problems with toll roads, specifically the NTTA:
(1) There is scant or non-existent oversight.
(2) Pricing is inelastic, i.e., NTTA has a monopoly. Perry would have you believe that if you don’t want to pay tolls, there are other highways! But Metroplex residents know that isn’t true. The toll roads (121, PGBT, and DNT) are the only major highways that serve the busiest corridors in the Metroplex. It was designed that way. The Addison gantry on the DNT has seen tolls go from ~$0.80 to $1.80 since 2008. The DNT is still bumper-to-bumper every day. Why? Because the DNT is the only road. People don’t have a choice to take a freeway.
Bill White should hammer Perry with NTTA’s state-sponsored monopoly. He’s got to learn to talk like a Republican if he wants to win over Republican-leaning independents in DFW.
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anonymouse2 says:
>> It would also alleviate congstion on MoPac by expanding it. That hasn’t happened and won’t for a variety of reasons.
Well, I’m not sure I would credit Kirk Watson for being a variety of anything but, aside from poor attribution for who has done what to whom about MoPac, guess which side of it he lives on? It ain’t south and it ain’t east and it ain’t north. Any regular person here live on Woodlawn? I didn’t think so.
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Tumbleweed Smith says:
Anonymouse2 makes a good point. Kirk “Not my Problem” Watson doesn’t have to drive it.
Thank God the LRB is all Republican. We need to see what can be done the SD 14.
Maybe we can finally get a Senator who doesn’t buy his clothes in the little boy department at Sears.
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Pat Reply:
May 16th, 2010 at 8:00 am
Way to not be condescending.
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Tim says:
It’s interesting because this cuts right to the core of the “trickle-down” religion that exists in the Republican party right now. That somehow we can keep cutting taxes forever and it will inspire so much growth that eventually everything will be paid for. That works fine to a point, and one of the key points that this starts failing at is when the infrastructure business needs is no longer being created or maintained because not enough money is being taken in.
As with most things there needs to be balance. And if we need more roads and transportation infrastructure (which pretty much everyone seems to agree on), then it’s time to start talking about raising taxes. The cost to business will eventually become to high to not do so.
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AAC says:
The most fiscally responsible thing to do is to increase the gas tax so that we can assure we have a vibrant economy at the least possible cost. So why can’t we get behind this and provide our politicians the so-called “leadership” they claim to offer us???
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JUICE says:
Actually, Woodlawn is east of MoPAC, but the notion that regular Joes can’t afford the rent is accurate.
Here are you E/W options in Austin:
Enfield;
Windsor;
45th; and
Koenig Lane.
That’s in descending order of residential clout (i.e., $), although homes in Crestview are now going for $300K. Which is it going to be?
As for N/S, I-35 cannot be expanded. It’s constricted by UT, and cemeteries. A reversible toll lane or two could be squeezed into the MoPAC footprint with relatively small residential disruption, but the improvement in congestion would be modest. And just think, even if construction started tomorrow, completion would be years away.
I personally think all of this argues for more rail.
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