The Dallas Forth Worth region needs to improve transportation capacity to respond to its massive transportation growth and has billions of dollars of new projects planned. DART’s billion-dollar Silver Line commuter line will connect many of Dallas’s northern exurbs to DFW airport, joining a suite of other rail investments that the region has made in recent years. The state Department of Transportation plans to spend $3 billion on new freeway projects in the region over the next ten years.
But as I discuss in a Manhattan Institute report, these projects may not be the fix DFW is looking for as the planned public transit investments have questionable merit. DFW suburbs are in general low-density and unwalkable, hardly promising regions for rail developments: previous rail expansions such as the DART Orange Line extension and TexRail have gotten precious little ridership. Much of the new freeway investment, meanwhile, focuses on highly peripheral or relatively uncongested areas. For instance, part of Interstate 820 that constitutes the eastern leg of the freeway loop around Fort Worth will get a billion-dollar widening — even though, by Metroplex standards, it is hardly congested. $800 million, furthermore, will go to widening I-35 in sparsely developed territory north of Denton, and other freeway widenings are also oriented at new, sprawling exurbs.
DFW’s biggest transportation demand, meanwhile, is still around the old city centers, especially downtown Dallas: the freeways connecting Dallas to the north and west are some of the most congested in all of Texas. Meanwhile, the DFW bus network continues to be slow and unreliable, and several busy bus lines serving poor central neighborhoods of Dallas still lack such basic improvements as bus shelters.
What’s the common thread here? Senseless freeway expansions and low-ridership rail lines both come from planning divorced from signs of market demand. Rail projects, for instance, owe less to actual travel demand — airport rail connections everywhere typically get poor ridership — than to the political clout of affluent jet-setters. Many Collin County suburbanites who rarely take transit, for instance, likely supported the Silver Line because they thought a train to the airport would be occasionally useful for them.
The billions of dollars going to exurban freeway construction, meanwhile, are largely a subsidy to new residential developments, many of which exist largely because of zoning codes in DFW’s already developed areas. Most areas in DFW — including highly central neighborhoods of Dallas with high jobs access — have stringent zoning codes, often banning any housing denser than single-family homes on lots of half an acre, that prevent the process of gradual urban growth that was common in all cities before the introduction of modern zoning codes. Zoning reforms that allow more gradual densification of built-up areas could obviate some of the demand for exurban sprawl and, therefore, the need for expensive freeway expansions.
And for areas that do require more transportation investment, there are better ways that can save the public money. Many metropolitan areas, including DFW, have built “managed express lanes” that offer access to vehicles willing to pay a toll — DFW’s TEXpress lanes are of this sort. By changing tolls throughout the day to keep traffic free-flowing at maximum throughput — as well as make mass transit such as commuter buses more reliable and attractive. But DFW’s most congested and central freeways, such as I-35E and the Central Expressway, still don’t have express lanes. It’s possible that new express lanes could be built at no financial risk to the public and without having to demolish existing buildings on freeway margins by auctioning off a contract to build and operate new lanes to private contractors and having them build elevated structures supported by columns in existing freeway medians — similar to other projects in the United States, such as the Lee Selmon Expressway in Tampa.
Texas’s economic success owes a lot to its adoption of small-government principles, leaving as much as possible up to the private sector and market mechanisms. It’s time for DFW housing and transportation policy to follow suit.
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Connor Harris is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in RealClearPolicy
