The Transportation Advocacy Group-Houston Region has identified unfunded future projects totaling over $68.7 billion from several different transportation agencies in the Greater Houston area.
During a June 1 luncheon for the North Houston Association, TAG Executive Director Andrea French and Raj Basavaraju, senior project manager at civil engineering firm HNTB, presented the advocacy group’s Regional Mobility Map for the Greater Houston area.
“[The map] is a visual representation of what our region needs and comes from visiting all of our agencies and asking, ‘If [you] could do anything, what would [you] do?’” she said. “It’s a fiscally unconstrained look at what we need as a region as of today.”
French said TAG worked with the Texas Department of Transportation, the Harris County Toll Road Authority, the Gulf Coast Rail Authority, Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, the Port of Houston Authority and other advocacy groups to identify every project possible—along with costs—to include on the map for future transportation projects in Houston.
“Some people were very nervous about putting numbers to the projects because they didn’t want to be beholden to those numbers,” French said. “But we felt it was very important to give a full assessment of what that grand total would be.”
French said the needs of the area had to be represented in a way that will show legislators how much funding the area realistically requires.
“We cannot keep asking them for money for this region if we do not have a cohesive package of needs and funding beyond what we have today,” she said.
French said many of TxDOT’s unfunded projects come from its list of the state’s 100 most congested roadways, which includes areas of Hwy. 249, Hwy. 290, I-45, I-10, FM 1960 and Beltway 8. The map is also multimodal, incorporating extended METRO bus lines to more Houston suburbs and new potential Gulf Coast Rail projects along major corridors outside of the downtown area.
Basavaraju said—while the map and its exact projects are not yet finalized— TAG expects to begin advocating for plan funding beginning with the 2017 legislative session.
“It’s a living document; we’re not saying it’s a done deal,” he said. “In our minds, it’s an aggressive 10-year time frame, but we do understand that these projects take much longer.”
Although the group hopes that funding for these projects will come from the federal and state levels, French said it is likely that additional future funding will also come from the drivers [who] use the transportation system.
“The reality is that [drivers] are not paying what we should be paying to use the system,” she said. “Our vehicle registration fees are some of the lowest in the country, [and] our gas tax hasn’t been indexed since the 1990s [to account for] inflation. Locally, there absolutely has to be more creativity and more willingness to invest.”
