Highway Robbery

When Transit Gets Run Off the Road

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In the fraught election of 2020, the people of Austin voted overwhelmingly to raise taxes on themselves to pay for an expanded transit system called Project Connect. More than five years later, the project is mired in cost overruns, litigation, political sabotage from the state legislature, and wavering federal support. The centerpiece of the project, a light rail line, is now expected to cost $840 million per mile—roughly triple the 2020 estimate—and may not arrive until 2033. Critics have seized on the cost overruns and phased rollout as proof that the project “went off the rails.” Governor Greg Abbott joined the chorus, saying:

While Austin leaders keep pushing higher property taxes, the State of Texas is keeping Texans moving. Smart infrastructure grows our economy and moves people efficiently—without more local tax increases.

It’s tempting to infer from the governor’s statement and recent coverage that Project Connect is stupid infrastructure. While it has actually already delivered on some of its goals, such as bus lines, Project Connect has real challenges. Some, like the cost overruns, reflect inflation and labor shortages; others reflect design choices and America’s broader incapacity to build infrastructure competently. But the governor’s comment is illuminating: the “smart infrastructure” he is referring to is almost exclusively highways—which are never subjected to the same scrutiny as transit. His own Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is recognizing the limits of highway expansion in Texas’s increasingly crowded urban areas, even as it pursues new expansion projects. Of course, the people affected by those projects don’t have a say in the outcome.

Indeed, when was the last time you voted on a highway?

It’s absurd to even ask the question. At the same time that democratically-approved Project Connect is being dragged through the courts and the press, TxDOT is ramming its $4.5 billion I-35 Capital Express Central Project through Central Austin. Years of hearings allowed residents to shape details of the project, but never to meaningfully decide whether it should happen at all. The 107 homes and businesses seized through eminent domain didn’t have a choice, either. Where TxDOT once erected a concrete barrier separating Black and Hispanic neighborhoods from downtown, it now plans to dig a trench up to 22 lanes wide through the city’s core. A proposal to partially cover the submerged highway with park-like “caps and stitches” received no state funding, while the Trump Administration revoked a federal grant that would have helped. If the city cannot assemble the money itself, which seems more likely by the day, future Austinites will inherit a massive highway chasm through downtown.

The project’s $4.5 billion price tag promises to accomplish what, exactly? Austin voters never had a meaningful say in I-35—and the critics who complain that voters approved Project Connect when it was only 5% designed might consider at what percentage of design voters typically approve a highway. (The answer is never percent.) Major highway expansions in Texas have repeatedly failed to durably reduce congestion; successive expansions of Houston’s Katy Freeway, for instance, only worsened traffic. Studies routinely show that urban highways impose major economic and social costs on the communities around them: pollution, noise, dangerous streets, lost time, and declining quality of life—occasionally the wholesale obliteration of entire neighborhoods for asphalt. Yet unlike transit projects, highway expansions are rarely subjected to existential public scrutiny. There is no referendum, no sustained accounting of whether the promised benefits materialize, and no realistic mechanism for voters to stop them once they begin. Now TxDOT wants to do it again: the proposed MoPac South expansion would add eight more miles of lanes on the west side of the city to the tune of $825 million, no credit check or referendum required.

So here’s a question for the governor: why must one project win a citywide referendum, survive years of litigation, secure federal sign-off, and face potential death by the Texas Legislature and Supreme Court—while the other requires nothing?

This asymmetry, of course, is not accidental. For more than a century, American policy has systematically favored the automobile. It is not entirely unreasonable, given the long history of state-funded roadways and municipal control of city streets, that roads are seen as an unquestioned function of government. Many transit systems, by contrast, were originally private, always regulated, increasingly constrained, and eventually absorbed as they were “outcompeted” by government roads. The collapse of private transit, and its subsequent strangulation, is considered a natural outcome—as if this was not engineered by policy.

That highways are considered politically neutral is itself ideology masquerading as common sense. Transit is treated as “socialism on wheels” while highways are the American way: a big-government, government-funded, deficit-financed free-for-all. Yet these highway socialists still argue that transit should “compete in the marketplace.”

But there is no marketplace for transportation. Transit competes with highways in the same way that the Washington Generals compete with the Harlem Globetrotters: the Globetrotters always win. Consider Florida’s Brightline, the only privately financed passenger railroad in the country. Ridership has grown steadily, yet the company still struggles financially—not because the railroad itself is flawed, but because it operates within a built environment engineered around the automobile. Florida’s sprawling land-use pattern, weak local transit systems, and overwhelming car dependency suppress the very ridership base a private rail operator needs to survive. Critics point to this and conclude that “the market” has spoken against transit. But this is circular reasoning. The transportation market was already shaped by decades of public intervention on behalf of roads and highways. Transit is then judged for failing inside conditions designed to undermine it.

Meanwhile, America’s highway industry is deemed Too Big To Fail.

The federal Highway Trust Fund, which pays for highways and some transit infrastructure, is not self-financing. The gas tax that feeds it has been fixed at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, and three decades of inflation and fuel efficiency gains have steadily eroded its purchasing power. For most of the past 25 years, expenditures have exceeded revenues, so Congress has transferred $275 billion in general revenues to the fund since 2008 just to keep it solvent. The Congressional Budget Office now projects a cumulative shortfall of roughly $300 billion over the next decade. Some have proposed solving the deficit by stripping out the 12-14% of transit funding entirely, which would delay the shortfall by about one year. Meanwhile, a 2025 study found that roughly 40% of the new urban highway lane miles built over the past four decades were funded by the gas tax. In other words, the road network has vastly expanded while its primary funding source has failed to keep up, meaning the gas tax is fueling the Trust Fund’s insolvency. But who in Washington is actually counting?

In this context, it is no surprise that transit struggles. The playing field has not merely been tilted against transit, it’s been toppled over in favor of highways. A private transit system, however well-capitalized and well-run, can’t overcome the terrain engineered against it. A flawed transit project doesn’t stand a chance.

Interstate highway projects are eligible for up to 90% federal funding, meaning a state may contribute as little as ten cents on the dollar, with the rest drawn from a trust fund kept alive by general revenue transfers that every American taxpayer finances. So Governor Abbott’s claim that Texas is building transportation “without local tax increases” is narrowly true: Texas is building highways through nationalized inflationary deficit-spending, seizing private property unilaterally, and handing cities the bill for the damage. The professed fiscal conservatives who lecture Austin and other cities about responsible spending perpetuate the largest federally subsidized transportation entitlement in American history and call it freedom.

This is not a free market in transportation. This is not fiscal conservatism. It’s central planning for cars, paid for by everyone, yet accountable to no one.

If the train doesn’t arrive in Austin, it will be because it couldn’t compete with that.

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