Houston Strategies

HCTRA: from model agency to delay, divert and do nearly nothing

This week we have one of Oscar Slotboom's best guest posts to date, although sadly with bad news about the state of HCTRA, which used to be one of the crown jewels of Harris County. If you know anybody in the Texas Legislature (including your rep), please pass it along. Thank you.

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Once upon a time, the Harris County Toll Road Authority was a model agency that regularly delivered projects quickly and efficiently at a low cost. This efficient and financially conservative approach put HCTRA in a very strong financial position.

Democrats took majority control of Harris County commissioners court in 2019. Since then, HCTRA has degenerated into an agency which gets very little done and takes forever to move forward with any project, in spite of collecting huge revenues from the public.

Reduction in new contracts since Democrat control

HCTRA has awarded only two new major construction contracts since 2019, with a nearly five-year hiatus between awards, and only one project which was planned and prepared after 2019. (reference 1, 2)

The list below shows contract awards in the six years before Democrat control and six years after, keeping in mind that the 2019 project on the Tomball Tollway was already poised to proceed.

Contract(s) Awarded	Project
August 2024	Sam Houston Tollway at SH 225, 5 connection ramps, $205 million
December 2019	Tomball Tollway (SH 249) at Grand Parkway, 4 connection ramps, $92 million
2017	Sam Houston Tollway widening, I-45(S) to SH 225: $199 million
2017	Sam Houston Tollway Ship channel bridge : $934 million (original contract amount)
2016-2017	Hardy Toll Road downtown connector, Lorraine and Collingsworth: $47 million
2015-2016	Sam Houston Tollway widening, SH 288 to I-45(S): $185 million
2014-2015	Hardy Toll Road widening, FM 1960 to Grand Parkway: $84 million
2013-2016	Tomball Tollway main lanes, Spring Cypress to county line: $200 million

Ship Channel Bridge

The project contract was awarded in April and June 2017. It has been delayed for years and sustained a major cost increase, around $487 million. This 2023 HCTRA document lists the current cost at $1.449 billion, up from the original reported cost of $962 million.

The 2018 failure of a bridge designed by the same engineering firm, Figg Bridge Group, prompted an independent design review. Based on the design review findings, HCTRA made major changes to the design, including replacing structural concrete bridge sections with steel structures.

Figg also designed TxDOT's new Corpus Christi harbor bridge, which is longer and taller than the ship channel bridge. TxDOT paused construction for an independent design review which resulted in findings and recommended adjustments, but a major redesign was not required and the concrete structural design was retained.

Of course this problem occurred before 2019 and was inherited by the post-2019 management. But was the costly major redesign really necessary? HCTRA can justify it based on the independent consultant report, but a major redesign was not needed for the longer and taller Corpus bridge.

Delayed Projects

Toll plaza modernization

HCTRA has plans to replace the outdated toll plazas along the original three sections of the Sam Houston Tollway, from the Southwest Freeway to the North Freeway. This project was listed as costing $494 million in this 2022 document, but the current cost of this project is unclear.

This project is surely a sore point to customers on these three sections of the tollway. This segment consistently generates over $300 million per year in revenue ($336 million in 2023) and has paid for itself many times over since all sections were completed in 1990, but HCTRA wants to spend hundreds of millions to continue to collect tolls. It certainly smells like paying tolls to pay for the collection of tolls.

An eye-opening investigative report on Click2Houston.com in February 2024 was not able to get answers from HCTRA about this project, stating "that the total price tag remains uncertain as HCTRA was unable to provide us with numbers". The report concludes that this relatively simple project would require "a total of nearly 8 years to reconfigure and reopen the publicly funded toll lanes along the Beltway" at the plazas. The video states "The now four-year delay in reengineering of the tolls is attributed to the pace Harris County government operates these days."

Hardy Toll Road Downtown Connector

Preliminary work on this project has been ongoing for a very long time, starting with work to relocate a railroad track in June 2003. Contracts for completed projects at Collingsworth and Lorraine were awarded in 2016 and 2017, and the project appeared ready to proceed to construction in 2018.

When Democrats took control of Commissioners Court in 2019, it became clear that the majority did not want to this project to proceed, in particular Judge Lina Hidalgo, and the project was suspended in May 2020. But there were longstanding agreements between HCTRA, the City of Houston and TxDOT to build the project, and TxDOT funded the $36.5 million replacement of the Elysian Viaduct, which connects to the project.

So HCTRA went into the delay mode. It hired a consultant to conduct a reevaluation process, community meetings and "visioning" in 2022. This visioning process resulted in recommendations to make the entire length an elevated structure or a cut-and-cover tunnel (1 2 3), with a 0.83-mile-long tunnel from north of Lorraine to south of Collingsworth. No cost estimates were provided, but the vision design would drastically increase the cost, probably by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Parks on a deck ("cap" in TxDOT parlance) above a freeway are trendy these days, but this is the most absurd proposal for a cap park I've ever seen. The purpose of cap parks is to connect neighborhoods which were severed by past freeway construction, or create park space where land is not available. Neither condition exists along the downtown connector. The connector is alongside a long established and heavily trafficked multi-track railroad corridor. The deck park will be alongside or near the railroad, not connecting any neighborhoods. It would, however, provide good views of warehouses, scrap yards and freight terminals on the east of the the railroad. Google aerial view shows there is plenty of vacant land in the area, and it's difficult to justify a massive expenditure for a strip of park land around 80 feet wide.

So is this super-expensive redesign a poison pill intended to indefinitely delay construction by increasing the cost? Maybe. Since the majority on Commissioners Court appears to be against improvement and expansion of the toll road system, it could also be a way to burn up money which otherwise could be going to highway and street improvements.

Interchange at the Sam Houston Tollway and SH 225

This project is the low hanging fruit among the planned projects, since it has negligible negative impact and would directly benefit motorists connecting to and from the Sam Houston Tollway and SH 225. This project has been delayed for years, but HCTRA was obligated to proceed because it is part of a 2018 agreement between HCTRA and TxDOT. The $205.4 million contract for five connectors was awarded in August, and this is the first HCTRA contract for a major project planned and prepared after 2019.

Interchange at the Hardy Toll Road and Beltway 8

The project has been delayed for years and the HCTRA site now says "Construction is expected to begin in 2026."

HCTRA's Guiding Principles since 2019: Delay and Divert

HCTRA revenue has fully recovered from the impact of Covid, with revenue at a record $935 million in fiscal year 2023, including $896 million in toll revenue. (However, inflation-adjusted revenue was higher in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019, see chart).

Every planned project is being delayed year after year, and of course costs have escalated rapidly during this period, with the highway cost index up 65% since October 2021. Delay may be the intent of the majority on Harris County Commissioners court, since they appear to be against making improvements to the toll road system.

Instead, Harris County Commissioners Court has drastically increased diversions of surplus revenue out of HCTRA, which is called "transfers out" in financial reports. Diversions include a longstanding amount for general mobilty, and additional transfers are mainly or entirely to flood control budgets, but of course budgeting is like a shell game, where money that normally could have gone to flood control can be redirected to other purposes. In the four years from 2020 to 2023, Harris County diverted $1.29 billion out of HCTRA ($1.45 billion in 2024 dollars), which is about $824 million above the long-established transfer rate. HCTRA toll revenue has become a slush fund for Harris County Commisioners Court.

Have Legislators in Austin Noticed?

The Texas Legislature authorized HCTRA with legislation in 1983 (SB 970). HCTRA in 2024 collects massive revenue from the public, diverts toll revenues to general government and gets very little done in terms of construction. Is this what the Texas legislature intended? I don't think so.

Toll roads have become a hot political issue around the state in recent years due to sky-high tolls, excessively punitive penalties and general arrogance of toll road agencies. In May the Dallas Morning News did a comprehensive report of the discontent called Toll Trap (overview, part 1), and an accompanying DMN editorial stated the following in a commentary called "Texas made the wrong decision on toll roads".

The state of Texas has abdicated its responsibility to provide necessary transportation infrastructure in exchange for a vast web of toll roads controlled by a patchwork of powerful, self-interested organizations that often act to the detriment of residents.

That’s our conclusion after reading a yearlong investigation conducted by our newsroom into how Texas built more toll roads than nearly all other states combined over the last two decades, and the alarming consequences for the public.

A subsequent report hinted at the possibility of toll road reform in the 2025 session: "As lawmakers have grappled with how to ease toll expenses on motorists, some say the time is ripe for them to reform Texas’ complex tollway system"

My Preference

The state Legislature gives, and it can also take away. My preference is for the State of Texas to disband HCTRA due to its mismanagement and ineptitude, and take control of toll road system, including assuming its debt. Under state control via TxDOT, diversions of toll revenue to Harris County would stop. Then the system should be managed to be customer-friendly by reducing and eliminating tolls. TxDOT should cancel plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize toll collection on older parts of the system which have long paid for themselves. Instead, tolls on the original sections of the Sam Houston Tollway, from the Southwest Freeway to North Freeway, should be entirely eliminated. Surplus toll revenue should go to local projects, including projects currently being planned by HCTRA.

This may be wishful thinking. But it appears that Harris County is attempting to repair its soiled reputation in Austin, possibly to preempt any legislative action. At the November meeting of the Texas Transportation Commission, Harris County Commissioners Tom Ramsey and Leslie Briones spoke to the commission in support of a new era of partnership between TxDOT and HCTRA. HCTRA Executive Director Robert Trevino, whose salary was recently increased to $485,000, was also in attendance. (video, "open comment period" starting at 34:15)

All the the long-planned projects remain on HCTRA's to-do list, and this October 2024 document has schedules for contracts. HCTRA also launched two studies, the Westpark Tollway Capacity Optimization Study and the Harris County Truck Route Study & Freight Corridors Plan. Will HCTRA actually be able to get these jobs done, or just continue its policies of study and delay?

Let's hope something happens to improve HCTRA's performance - either legislative action or mandates from Commissioners Court to get things done. Ideally, we can bring back the pre-2019 HCTRA that got the jobs done quickly and efficiently.

Labels: governance, mobility strategies, toll roads

posted by Max Concrete @ 10:10 AM 3 comments

Redeveloping the old Days Inn downtown, METRO needs to learn from Denver's failures, Texas' boom, and more

A few smaller items this week...

• The Chronicle examines what's up with the abandoned shell of the old Days Inn high rise hotel downtown. TL,DR: it's uneconomic to do anything with it, esp. with low ceilings. I’ve hoped to see it redeveloped for a very long time. I always thought the best use was an off-campus student dorm for Rice and UH students, with rail access to both campuses. But I understand what they’re saying about the math not working, especially at these high interest rates, which would need to dramatically come down. Hat tip to Rich.
• Developers focus on Waller County as Katy area grows. Short article highlighting the importance of freeway-widening and affordable housing. Hat tip Nathan.
• METRO needs to learn from the horrible expensive failures of Denver RTD, which has been focused on rail for many years now.

Finally, hat tip to Hugh for sending out this video of Why Florida and Texas are booming (and NY and California are not) by Economist Joseph Politano.

Labels: affordability, development, growth, home affordability, Metro, rail, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 4:18 PM 2 comments

A simple solution to help Houston traffic, our tax-debt-spend problem, HSR bankrupted Japan, Austin builds towards affordability, METRO comedy!

Just a few small items this week:

• Charles Blain in City Journal: Saddled With Taxes and Debt - Houston-area leadership is losing touch with the fiscal restraint and pragmatism that made the city an engine of growth.
• How high-speed rail help sap Japan's economic vitality. The lines look and operate great, but what you can't see is how they bankrupted Japan and helped cause decades of lost growth.
• Austin Builds Apartments and Single-Family Houses, Prices Fall

"I worried from afar that my hometown would meet the same fate as San Francisco, the poster child of the housing shortage and all its associated woes. I feared that Austin would become known as a playground for the rich, a city where displacement and mind-boggling home prices marred the natural beauty that once made it such a draw. In my hand-wringing, though, I'd overlooked one crucial detail: Texas is better at building homes than almost anywhere else in the country.”

There are differences between Austin (and Texas) and San Francisco that, if not changed will continue to make it possible to build in Austin (and Texas) and nearly impossible in San Francisco (and California). Unincorporated county territory in Texas is unzoned. That means that, barring environmental difficulties, developers and builders can build. By contrast, in the San Francisco metro, and virtually all of California, draconian state and local regulations make it very difficult to build on greenfield sites, where land prices would be much lower if the market were permitted to operate."

• Caught my eye from Y-Combinator Demo day: XTraffic 

What it does: Reduces congestion and accidents with smart traffic lights

Why it’s a fave: Controlling traffic lights with AI sounds like the perfect application of this technology. XTraffic says that it’s already doing it in several cities in Texas. I hope they make it to my town in California, too, because I sure am tired of waiting for the light to turn green when there are no other cars around.

Please get this Houston!! 

Finally, ending on a lighter note, maybe the first ever METRO Houston joke by a professional comedian?... 😅 (hat tip to Jay)

Labels: affordability, development, governance, high-speed rail, home affordability, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies, rail, taxes

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:03 PM 0 comments

The Best Plan for Housing Is to Plan Less - NYT

I've had this excellent NYT opinion piece queued up to share for a while, because it essentially argues for adopting the Houston approach to housing regulation for the whole country: The Best Plan for Housing Is to Plan Less (no paywall gift link). In fact, Houston shows up quite favorably in a lot of their excellent graphs.  Below I share the opening, an AI summary of the main points, and the excellent conclusion that this deserves to be a bipartisan issue (bold highlights mine).

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"I would be the first to argue that if an economist claims to know of a cure-all policy — a reliable way to relieve a long list of social ills in one fell swoop — common sense tells you to stop listening.

So it is awkward for me to declare that I know of something close to a panacea policy: one big reform that would raise living standards, reduce wealth inequality, increase productivity, raise social mobility, help struggling men without college degrees, clean the planet and raise birth rates. It’s a sweeping reform that Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives could all proudly support.

The panacea policy I have in mind is housing deregulation. Research confirms that there are large benefits in saying yes to tall buildings, yes to multifamily structures, yes to dense single-family development and yes to speedy permitting. The growing YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement already has high-profile wins in Minnesota, Oregon, California and beyond, but even YIMBY devotees rarely appreciate the scope of the merits of loosening rules on housing.

• The economic argument for housing deregulation rests on basic supply and demand principles: allowing more construction leads to lower prices. This is evident in historical data, showing that housing prices were relatively stable before stricter regulations in the 1970s, while rising significantly afterwards.
• Housing deregulation would directly improve the standard of living by significantly lowering housing costs, which currently represent a significant portion of the average American's budget.
• The distributional effects of deregulation would be impactful in reducing wealth inequality, as rising home values have been a key driver of the growing disparity between the rich and the poor.
• Deregulation would enhance social mobility by removing barriers to moving to higher-wage areas. Current strict regulations often make the cost of living in such regions outweigh any potential wage gains, discouraging relocation for many.
• Deregulation would create numerous job opportunities in the construction sector, a large and well-paying industry, particularly benefiting men without college degrees, who have faced challenges in the job market.
• Environmental protection is a common rationale for restricting construction, but deregulation can actually lead to more sustainable practices by encouraging denser housing in urban areas, resulting in lower carbon emissions.
• While concerns exist about homeowner resistance, the bigger obstacle to deregulation is public misunderstanding of basic economic principles, with many believing that increased housing supply will not lead to lower prices.

Labels: affordability, density, development, economic strategy, governance, home affordability, land-use regulation, opportunity urbanism, perspectives, politics, YIMBY

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:51 PM 3 comments

Next big moonshot for Houston? TX will pass CA and HTX will pass LA, auto vs. transit job access and realism

 A few smaller misc items this week:

• Texas will surpass California, and both DFW and Houston will pass LA in population over the next 40 years. "The American future seems to be more Lone Star State than a Golden one."
• Houston Public Media/NPR asks "What could be the next big moonshot for Houston?" Among the answers, clean energy struck me as the most ambitious and most appropriate for Houston (ideally cost-effective carbon capture!). My own suggestion for a Houston moonshot? METRO could aspire to offer half-hour or less express trip times from every park-and-ride and transit center to every major job center and both airports using a network of MaX Lanes. A high goal but very achievable and it would support Houston's growth for decades to come. More on it here.
• New Geography: Auto vs. transit job access ratios for the top 50 metro areas (hat tip to Bill). Essentially comparing how many jobs are accessible by car within 30 mins (the typical commute) vs. by transit. A Houstonian can access 97.3 times (!) as many jobs by car than by transit within the same commute time. Even in NYC with excellent transit a car can still reach 9.7 more jobs than transit in the same time. The conclusion is compelling:

Where for Transit from Here?

With this minimal transit use relative to the auto and especially in view of the huge transit market share losses since the pandemic, it would seem useful to rethink the role of transit.

Transit does well for work trips to the largest downtown niche markets (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and San Francisco), though pre-pandemic market shares are unlikely to be replicated in the future because of the popularity of hybrid and remote work, lower office occupancy and the likely improvement in virtual meeting technology.

The reality is that transit is not a substitute for the auto and there isn’t enough money to make it one. Professor Jean-Claude Ziv and I found that making the auto a genuine alternative to transit could be prohibitively costly, annually requiring the entire metropolitan area gross domestic product in some cases. This would leave nothing else for anything else.

It would be foolhardy to suggest that transit is an alternative to the auto (despite this having sbeen implied by federal, state, and local policy for decades of decline), In a non-utopian world, no reasonable increase in subsidies could make it so.

It may be best to identify the small areas within metro areas where transit could actually be an alternative to auto. This would be in neighborhoods where automobile ownership is particularly low, which, in most metros are also areas of greater economic need. Investing billions more to coax middle class commuters off the roads seems a daft approach given the realities.

Labels: census, growth, MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, perspectives, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 4:43 PM 3 comments

METRO+DART Ridership Update: summer slump and Beryl erase spring gains

This week we have another great analytical guest post from Oscar Slotboom. Dallas DART's extensive and expensive light rail strategy is looking more and more like a total failure as suburban cities try to reduce their tax subsidy to DART.

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When I last reported on Metro ridership in April, ridership had reached a post-Covid high in February, down only 14.7% from the 12-month pre-Covid average. An upward bump in April pushed ridership to another post-Covid high at only 13.5% below the pre-Covid level. Summer months are usually low ridership months, and Hurricane Beryl caused Metro service outages during the week of July 9-12. July ridership was 22.3% below the pre-Covid average. However, in spite of the substantial service outages due to Beryl, July ridership was only slightly lower than June. So we can probably expect a strong rebound, especially since September and October are normally the highest ridership months.

In Dallas, June ridership (page 55) was 23% below the pre-Covid baseline. As the plot shows, ridership has been flat in the last 9 months, appearing to end the four-year trend of slow recovery. It's interesting to note that the image shown below mentions that on-demand services are included in the ridership data, but a version of this plot presented one month earlier (page 4) without any mention of on-demand services showed ridership down 28%. Multiple member cities of DART, including Plano, are attempting to reduce their tax subsidies to DART.

Nationally, public transit ridership is down 25% compared to pre-Covid levels and appears to be holding steady with little or no upward trend. Of course, there are wide variations in performance by city and Houston is above average.

Plot credit: the Antiplanner

Labels: Metro, rail, transit

posted by Max Concrete @ 11:51 AM 0 comments

Mobility is more important than density

Bill Reeves sent me a great link to a Marginal Revolution blog post by Tyler Cowen arguing that mobility has been more important than density in shaping American history and its future, which I 100% agree with. It highlights the historical importance of mobility in the US and challenges current urbanist trends favoring density. He makes some key points:

• America's success is attributed more to advancements in transportation and infrastructure than to population density.
• Historical examples range from horses and ships to modern aviation, showing a consistent focus on movement and connection.
• Urban density is linked to lower fertility rates and the potential replication of undesirable political climates.
• Mobility, on the other hand, is seen as fostering a stronger national defense and better immigrant assimilation.
• Low-speed options like bicycles are viewed as impractical and even dangerous - "low-speed transport is a poor country thing"
• The future lies in high-speed, affordable, and eco-friendly transportation solutions, such as self-driving vehicles and improved aviation.

I made my own comment over there, which I'll repeat here: 

Mobility is one of the secret sauces to Houston's success. In Jane Jacob's world, mobility was fixed and limited but density was variable. In today's world, density is fairly limited (by cars and higher living standards in terms of living space per person), but mobility is highly variable. My own thoughts on this:

Applying Jane Jacobs' 4 tenets of vibrant neighborhoods to car-based cities

Labels: density, opportunity urbanism, perspectives

posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:14 PM 2 comments

The solution for Houston's traffic lights, transit doesn't reduce emissions, HSR terrorism risk, and Colorado's bad transportation policy

Apologies for taking a break from blogging over the summer. Looking forward to picking up the posting again in the fall. Today just a few small items:

• Bill King: Mass Transit Has a Negligible Effect on GHG Emissions. Great takedown of the pro-transit argument for emissions reductions. Some key excerpts: 

"In other words, if we eliminated every passenger automobile in the U.S. in favor of a transit alternative and use completely unrealistic assumptions, the total estimated reduction would be barely out of the margin of error for total estimated GHG emissions.  ...

I believe we need an efficient and effective transit system as part of the basic social safety net. Providing some mobility for those who cannot afford to own and operate their own vehicle and those who are physically not able to operate one is the right thing to do.  It also helps the local economy by providing a way for employees to get to their jobs.

But transit does little to relieve traffic congestion and virtually nothing to improve air quality. We need to start having an honest conversation about the purpose of transit and what we can reasonably expect it to accomplish. And we need to stop lying to the public and voters about fanciful, non-existent benefits."

• NYT: Olympics Precautions Failed to Halt Rail Sabotage. One of the issues I've pointed out in the HSR vs. planes debate is the near impossibility of securing hundreds of miles of HSR rail from sabotage or terrorism.
• WSJ: The Smart, Cheap Fix for Slow, Dumb Traffic Lights - Most cities can’t afford smart traffic signals. Fortunately, data from new cars—and even drivers’ smartphones—can make old-fashioned traffic lights work a lot better. "the system yields a 30% reduction in stop-and-go traffic at intersections" Can we get this for Houston please?!?
• NYT: Colorado’s Bold New Approach to Highways — Not Building Them. I really disagree with this. Studies have shown that highways are the great enabler of opportunity and upward social mobility for the working class to get access to better jobs and newer, more affordable, higher-quality housing in better school districts. Massive transit expansions, like LA, have not increased rideshare and don't work. Environmental solutions focused on reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) will be an economic disaster. Instead, gas stations should be required to charge at the pump for the necessary carbon capture to offset the gas, currently ~$1 per gallon.

Labels: environment, high-speed rail, mobility strategies, planning, rail, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:55 PM 13 comments