Category Archives: roads

Transportation Funding Reforms Empower Texas Style

How would Empower Texas improve transportation funding? By doing this:

  • reduce motor fuels sales tax diversions, which will trigger:
    • eliminating non-essential programs and agencies
    • dedicating future revenue streams to transportation
    • reforming the budgeting process to prioritize core conservative principles
    • enacting stricter spending growth limits
  • extend 2014’s Prop 1 spending restrictions to ALL STATE FUNDS for use…

Chair Houghton: Roadways Still Need More Funding Options

What transportation funding options does Texas have:

  • Bond issues
  • Public-private partnerships and
  • Massive voter support last November for using $1.7 billion from the state’s Rainy Day Fund

TXDOT Chairman Houghton says it’s not enough. What options did he offer:

  • He avoided talk of the gas tax
  • He supports solutions that “will require new thinking, planning and new funding.”

Posted byadminPosted infunding, roads

Tollroads Are as Popular as Kilts in Texas

Stands to reason that kilts may be more popular than  toll roads based on a recent TXDOT meeting inDallas.  TXDOT proposes toll lanes for portions of Interstate 35E and U.S. Highway 67 in Southern Dallas. People were not pleased.

80 people showed up to voice opposition. including, the Dallas Zoo, which was not thrilled about making it harder for people to get to the zoo, but because TXDOT borrowed the Zoo’s giraffe logo for the project. Reasons for the opposition:

  • harm…

8 Reasons to Abolish the Gas Tax

8 Reasons why the Gas Tax should be abolished courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:

  • Cars are more efficient, eroding the projected growth of the tax 
  • Purchasing Power of the Gas Tax has slipped
  • Diversions
    • 1/4 the federal gas tax is diverted to:
      •  mass transit in 6 metro areas &
      •  other programs:  street cars, ferries, sidewalks, bike lanes, hiking trails, urban planning and  landscaping nationwide

Trend: How to Lower Traffic Fatalities With Love From Sweden.

A record low number of Swedes died in traffic accidents in 2014. Sweden’s traffic fatalities run at 3 per 100,000. In the US, it is 11 per 100,000.  Sweden’s fatality rate is nearly 1/4 of the U.S.’s.

What did the Swedes do right that has so many Americans studying Swedish transportation?

  • Engineering: roads that are designed for safety, not speed.
  • Lower speed limits in crowded areas
  • Safer pedestrian crossings with bridges and flashing lights 

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TPPF: Transportation Recommendations for 2015

TPPF’s recommendations for transportation in 2015:

  • Remove governmental restrictions on the development of innovative practices in the financing, design, building, and private ownership/operation of Texas’ transportation infrastructure.

  • Extend and expand design-build contracting after it expires in August 2015. 

  • Rising federal aid funding for transportation and other s…

Regulating Driverless Cars: Technology Moves Fast. Regulations Do Not.

7 Companies are testing driverless cars in California. As a result, California is trying to get ahead of regulations before the cars hit the consumer market. 2 Questions arise:

1. How do you regulate?

  • Do self driving cars obey all traffic laws?
  • What if their computers freeze?
  • Can they smoothly hand control back to human drivers?​

2. How do you verify the safety standards of the cars?  3 options:

  • Follow the current U.S. syst…