DALLAS TRANSPORTATION

A Red River bullet train?

The Obama Administration announced another big round of funding for its much discussed high-speed rail initiative, shelling out some $2.4 billion this morning.

Texas' share? About one-quarter of 1 percent, or $5.6 million.

That's in keeping with Texas' poor showing previously when the first round of grants were announced, and reflects the embryonic state of the state's planning for high-speed rail. Other states saw big gains today.

Still, state transportation officials are calling the funding an important, if small, first step to moving forward with key feasibility and environmental studies for a high-speed rail line in Texas.

Texas had estimated that it will cost about $14 million to complete ridership projections, feasibility studies and key environmental assessments for a route that could bring bullet trains from Oklahoma City to San Antonio, with stops in North Texas and Austin.

The studies will take two to three years, and are necessary to put Texas in the position to apply for federal constructions funds or private investors should state leaders want to proceed.

But what's not clear yet is how the money announced Thursday will be spent.

To pay for the studies, Texas had sought $11.2 million from the administration, partnering with Oklahoma to better its chances, according to Texas Department of Transportation spokeswoman Karen Amacker.

That multi-state strategy apparently worked, as two other Texas-only applications -- for rail lines connect Houston and Austin, for example -- failed.

Trouble is, the grant is for just $5.6 million, and its summary description released by the federal government Thursday suggests it is to study a high-speed route from Oklahoma City to Dallas/Fort Worth, wiht no mention of furthering the line down to Austin or San Antonio. Needless to say, many Texans may feel the Oklahoma leg is the least important part of that line.

Amacker said Thursday that exact details of how the money can be spent, and whether it will be able to help advance the planning for the longer corridor, will be hashed out over the next month or so as officials negotiation a grant agreement.

"This is a small step forward in a very long process," Amacker said. The money will let Texas determine whether there is a "business case" for high-speed rail in the state. The studies themselves will take 18 months to three years, and won't get under way for another couple months, she said.

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The tea party symbol could soon be rolling off the production line at the state's prison license plate factory in Huntsville.

The "don't tread on me" message is somewhere near 180 degrees from the once-familiar "drive friendly" message from Texas plates.

One benefit to the buyer: Keeping tailgaters at bay.

The rattlesnake image comes from a traditional pre-Revolution American flag. Colonists were in a bad mood where England was concerned.

Tea partiers have a bit of attitude themselves this year, and the flag has been a common sight at tea party rallies. You can get yourself a "don't tread on me" bumper sticker, refrigerator magnet, coffee cup, T shirt -- you name it -- on the web.

I was surprised to see the image come up on the latest round of specialized offerings from official plate vendor MyPlates. Maybe I shouldn't have been, since you can buy a hamburger license plate these days and plates from a number of out-of-state universities. To me, they all are equally weird for a state-issued plate.

You can go to MyPlates and vote on the snake plate, if you like. Also vote on plate with the defiant "come and take it" message that draws on a pre-Texas Revolution flag, the Gonzales flag.

I asked MyPlates spokeswoman Kim Drummond about adopting the image from the rattlesnake flag, also known as the Gadsden flag. Unlike other plates, where outside groups make a proposal and share the proceeds, MyPlates came up with these ideas to appeal to the public's interest in history, she said.

Drummond said she learned about the Gadsden flag's tea party significance only after the planning was under way.

"Our idea has no particular group in mind," she said. "These flags have different meanings to different groups."

The Obama Administration is announcing the winners of the TIGER II grant competition tomorrow, and North Texas has a lot on the line.

Fort Worth learned last week that the federal government is giving TxDOT $34 million in TIGER II money to help unsnarl the freight rail traffic that lines up around Tower 55. We've written about that request often, including here.

But will any of the rest of the grants, which should total about $600 million, head our way? It looks unlikely, though we'll know for sure when Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announces the winners at 12:15 p.m. central time.

The city of Dallas submitted an application for additional funds for its street car project, among other local requests.

The first round of TIGER grants favored North Texas, with this area receiving $43 million, including more than $20 million for street cars in downtown Dallas and another $20 million to cover costs for a $400 million, government-secured TIFIA loan that helped deliver the SH 161 toll road now under construction by NTTA.

Both grants from the first round of funding, however, have hit snags. Dallas, Oak Cliff and NCTCOG planners are still wrangling over a plan to make use of the federal funds, and haven't yet submitted their plans for final approval. (Colleague Roy Appleton, however, reports that progress is being made.)

And officials at the Federal Highway Administration have raised questions about the TIFIA loans as well, citing concerns about the loan-guarantee of sorts that TxDOT is providing to help make it easier for NTTA to finance the road. A resolution to that dispute is expected, though negotiations have taken much longer than anyone had previously predicted.

If you have a beef or even just questions about the NTTA's toll collection policy -- the policy that adds up to $25 to every unpaid toll after 75 days or so -- you might want to hold a place on your calendar for next Tuesday night.

That night, beginning at 5:30 p.m., NTTA will hold an open house for folks to come chat about their transition to cashless toll collections. That's the system that bills drivers with Toll Tag as they zip through their toll gantries without stopping. It's also the system that takes photographs of the license plates belonging to drivers who do not have tags, and mails them a bill.

Ignoring those bills can turn costly in a hurry, with drivers regularly reporting the receipt bills for several hundred, and sometimes, thousands of dollars.

There won't be an actual public comment period -- NTTA leaders won't have to sit there while you complain or make suggestions to the room. Instead, they will be there to talk one on one with residents who have questions. You will also be allowed to submit comment cards.

This newspaper will request a copy of all those comment cards and either use them in a future story, or reprint them here.

The meeting is in the boardroom at NTTA headquarters, from 5:30 p.m. till 8 p.m., though you can come and go as you like. Its headquarters are in Plano, at 5900 W. Plano Parkway. The full release by NTTA is on the jump.

Anything is possible. Colllin County is advertising for companies interested in developing and tolling a portion of the Outer Loop project across the county's northern tier. It would be a CDA (comprehensive development agreement), the likes of which the Spanish company Cintra almost had to build and toll SH 121 in Collin and Denton counties.

Here's the irony: Some of the roughest criticism of the Cintra deal three years ago came from Collin County. The argument was that the region should "keep the toll revenue here" by steering the deal to NTTA and not "let it go to Spain" under a long-term tolling deal. NTTA won, Spanish lost. It was a rough fight that spilled into the Legislature in Austin.

Now, acting as the Collin County Toll Road Authority, county commissioners have out a request for qualifications on the Outer Loop project. It was approved in August, and preliminary expressions of interest are due today.

It would be a surprise if any big international outfit got in on the loop at this stage of the game. The deal initially would call for building a three-lane road stretching 14 miles west of US 75. That's a lot of work to draw toll revenue for only three lanes.

But maybe there's a game-changer in dishing off development rights of some kind.

Today, the political spin is not keeping the money from Spain; it's keeping the money from getting away to Austin or to NTTA's Southwest Parkway project in Tarrant County.

What's worse -- letting money get away to Fort Worth or to foreigners? Or is that the same thing in this side of North Texas?

Another irony: Cintra and a host of other investors make up groups now developing the LBJ project in Dallas County and the North Tarrant Express project to the west. (See the LBJ Express page on Facebook.)

Stay tuned. The Outer Loop adventure sets Collin County on a collision course with NTTA's well-connected supporters in a battle in the Legislature next year over who has rights to any new toll road.

   NTTA chairman Victor Vandergriff called me late Thursday to say the executive director of the toll authority had not discussed with the NTTA board any plans to seek permission from the state to toll existing highways, and that the proposal made Thursday by executive director Allen Clemson would be withdrawn.
   "There is no support for that. It is not on our legislative agenda and hasn't been brought to the board. It will not happen," Vandergriff said late Thursday night.
   Just hours before, Clemson had told members of the Regional Transportation Council that he had been in discussions with TxDOT involving a three-mile stretch of State Highway 161 in Irving.
   The segment was built years ago as a four-lane free highway and is not currently tolled, though it connects to toll roads at both its northern and southern ends.  
   Traffic exiting the six-lane President George Bush Turnpike often stalls as it enters the free portion fo SH 161, Clemson explained. After three miles of the four-lane road, traffic then moves onto NTTA's SH 161 toll road. Adding tolls to the middle, free segment would allow NTTA to expand and rebuild that segment more quickly than TxDOT has promised to do so. It would enable NTTA to cover the $75 million in construction costs that TxDOT will otherwise have to spend.
   But such a move would be controversial, too, and would need legislative approval and an OK by the RTC and TxDOT.
   Our story from today, set to be published Friday morning, made clear that agreement from those entities is anything but guaranteed, and it revealed that Gov. Rick Perry is dead-set opposed to creating an exception for NTTA to toll the existing free highway.
   But that apparently is moot now. Vandergriff's opposition, shall we say his energetic opposition, effectively kills the idea before it even gets started.
   "Allen was looking at this issue from the perspective of making a business case (for tolling the free segment)," Vandergriff said. "And there is a business case to be made. But there is a political element to this too, and the board simply was not aware that this was being brought forward."
   Most drivers who currently use the free segment of highway are traveling from one toll road to the next and may not even be aware that they aren't being tolled for those three miles, Vandergriff said. A better, wider highway may even be worth paying the toll for those three miles to those drivers, he said.  
   But nevertheless, he said NTTA will not move forward with the idea.
   "This will not be pursued," he insisted.

RTC meets in Arlington at 1:30, NCTCOG offices, 616 Six Flags Drive.

We're likely to get some clarification later today on what regional transportation leaders will be asking for when the lawmakers return to Austin in January for the 2011 session. I say 'likely' because while the legislative agenda is, in fact, on this afternoon's agenda for the Regional Transportation Council -- and the subject of a special 11 a.m. committee meeting before that -- the council has so far struggled to find a set of goals it can live with. 

The confusion, or perhaps the caution, that has characterized the region's discussion of transportation funding and the 2011 Legislature stems from two hard-to-get-around facts. For starters there is the region's lousy track record when it comes to the so-called local-option funding bill, having lost in each of the last three Legislatures. And for another, the Legislature is going to look at requests for more spending with a collective frown, if not loud round of cursing, no matter who is asking or what the money is for. Lawmakers are confronting what could be a $21 billion shortfall. 

In case you're keeping track at home, that's California-like budget problems, though you'd never guess it from the rhetoric on the campaign trail for governor. To make the ins meet the outs when it comes to the state budget, there is going to be a huge emphasis on cutting rather than increasing what goes out (the spending), especially since there is such built-in reluctance to increase what comes in (taxes). 

So where does that leave us with the Regional Transportation Council? Its 43 (or so) members are struggling with whether to once again go to Austin to ask for what what they really want, the local option tax, which is basically a bill that would give counties or cities, depending on its final form, the right to call elections in which residents would vote on whether to pay more taxes and fees to boost transportation spending. 

The idea -- that Dallas area folks are so desperate for better transportation infrastrucutre, they'd happily pay more for it - has been around a while, and for a brief time it looked like enough state leaders would see it as a way to make North Texas happy without costing their own residents a penny that it seemed it could pass. But Gov. Rick Perry objected, and others followed suit. The new House transportation committee chairman, Joe Pickett, has never liked the idea much, since he feels the state out to solve its problems as a state and not carve out special taxing districts for the big cities. (On the other hand, Democrat Bill White has promised to support the idea should he replace Perry.) 

Still, the RTC members realize the needs here aren't going away and so they have bravely said they'd carry their request to Austin once again. But over the past few months the proposal floated by staff at the North Central Texas Council of Governments has changed a lot. It began with a robust declaration that the region would seek passage of the local option tax, a balloon that was launched just as Sen. John Carona of Dallas let the air out by announcing he was giving up his transportation committee leadership because the issue was going nowhere 2011. 

Since then, the staff has been trying to gauge the council's mood. Should they simply go to Austin asking for more money -- and leave it up to the lawmakers to decide how to deliver and  how much? Or should they have a specific legislative proposal, and if so, should they scale their ambitions down to something easier to count on once the budget (and, don't forget, redistricting issues begin to cloud the session)? 

Or will other measures -- like asking lawmakers to reauthorize private toll roads? -- be sufficient? 

It's not an idle dilemma for lobbyists, though it may sound like it. The underlying questions are these: Dallas is growing, and will this region have enough money to keep its roads, bridges and rail lines well-maintained and relatively free of congestion? And if it's important that North Texas spend more on those assets, who is going to pay? Toll payers here alone? Locals, with a set of taxes and fees that act as a surcharge for living in this region? Or will the state itself accept the responsibility and find a statewide solution that dedicates more of its scarce funds to Dallas Fort Worth? 

And of course, there is always Option D, none of the above. A lot of smart money is on D. 

I'll be back later today to fill you in on how the folks at RTC see these issues, and if they resolve how they are going to approach the Legislature this time around. 

The transit agency's board of directors has chosen its officers for 2010. No surprises.

Dallas insurance executive Bill Velasco (right) was re-elected chairman.

Velasco, a member of the DART board since 2001, is active in several Oak Cliff civic and business organizations. He's a founding member of the Winnetka Heights Historical District and a member of the Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce board of directors.

Here's a short story from dallasnews.com that includes the other officers elected.

What do you think would happen if Dallas civic and elected leaders got together and shut down seven miles of city streets on a Sunday to create a safe, fun space for walkers, lingerers and cyclists and others?

Last Sunday in Los Angeles, another car-dependent city with big traffic issues, they did just that. And the event -- a first, known as CicLAvia -- drew more than 100,000 enthusiasts, according to the L.A. Times.

What was it all about? Organizers of CicLAvia, which had the support of city hall, put it this way:

In Los Angeles we need CicLAvia more than ever. Our streets are congested with traffic, our air is polluted with toxic fumes, our children suffer from obesity and other health conditions caused by the scarcity of public space and safe, healthy transportation options. CicLAvia creates a temporary park for free, simply by removing cars from city streets. It creates a network of connections between our neighborhoods and businesses and parks with corridors filled with fun. We can't wait to see you at CicLAvia!

The pedestrian-friendly blog, Streetsblog Los Angeles, called the event a huge success, and some commenters have said it helped convince them that some seemingly far-fetched ideas by urbanists are realistic.

Should Congress go along with President Obama's request that it spend $50 billion on transportation? He's calling it a down payment on the long-delayed six-year transportation authorization bill that has been mired in discussions on Capital Hill for months, and says it will create thousands of jobs and shore up our sagging infrastructure.

On Monday, a passel of mayors (including San Antonio's, as my colleague Melanie Mason notes) joined Obama and a couple of governors and two former U.S. transportation secretaries to urge Congress to write the check.

But one governor at least, Texas's Rick Perry, thinks the spending would be a mistake, despite the fact that his state faces a shortfall of up to 21 billion next year, and local transportation advocates -- not to mention state department of transportation leaders -- have been crying out for more money for roads, bridges and transit.

Perry told The News through a spokeswoman Monday that he wants Congress to reject the president's proposal. Here's why:

"For years Washington has shortchanged Texas taxpayers, sending back only 85 cents of every dollar in motor fuels taxes that Texas sends to Washington, of which only 70 cents may be used specifically for highway construction and maintenance.

"Gov. Perry believes that instead of following their instinct to increase spending, as they did with the existing stimulus bill and consequently deepening our national debt, Washington ought to focus on sending more of our tax dollars back to Texas and allow states to decide the most efficient way to address our transportation infrastructure needs. Or for that matter, let Texans keep more of their money in the first place.

"Texas continues to lead the nation in job creation as a result of our low taxes, predictable regulatory system, fair legal system and educated workforce.

"Gov. Perry will continue to call on Washington to lower taxes and to prioritize and reduce government spending to spur private sector job growth and strengthen our nation's economy."

A spokeswoman for former Houston mayor Bill White, Perry's Democratic opponent in November said she'd need more time to study the president's proposal, but said White shares Perry's concerns about adding to the national deficit. If the government did spend another $50 billion on highways, she said White would insist that regional planning agencies get the top say about which projects should be funded.

Besides, said Katy Bacon, after a decade of leadership under appointments made by Perry, TxDOT itself is "completely broken" and has failed to do quality long-term planning. White believes it would be better to reform the agency first, before the federal government throws a bunch of money its way.

For their part, Perry's complaints about Texas being shortchanged in federal highway dollars are old ones, and some argue the state does better than Perry's numbers would suggest, depending on how the funds are calculated.

But no matter how it is divided, $50 billion would buy a lot of roads and other projects, as would any share Texas would likely get. Last year's recovery act slated about $48 billion toward similar infrastructure and Texas nabbed about $2.3 billion of those funds. That has funded hundreds of projects in Texas, most of which are still underway.

DART released a pile of statistics this week on passengers moved on Texas-OU Saturday, but not the money figure -- the number of passengers who got to Fair Park by train before game time.

The answer, by my estimate, is more than 18,000 light-rail riders, about the same number of Texas-OU rail riders as last year, only without last year's service breakdowns. Thousands more reached aboard buses.

The other money figure is $200,000 -- the cost for special service for Texas-OU. It will cost the same amount for tomorrow's Tech-Baylor game.

Game-day performance became the yardstick for DART's competence after last year's inaugural fair service ended in embarrassment. DART pledged to do better this year. And I think there's no question they did better with added buses, trains and special rail routes.

The 18,000 figure is my estimate based on hourly breakdowns that DART provided me yesterday. Let's work through these numbers of rail passengers delivered to Fair Park stations:

9-10 a.m. -- 0-Red, 1,651-Green
10-11 a.m. -- 1,690-Red, 2,227-Green
11-Noon -- 1,760-Red, 2,559-Green
Noon-1 p.m. -- 2,372-Red, 2,324-Green
1-2 p.m. -- 1,495-Red and 1,909-Green
2-3 p.m. -- 506-Red, 1,243-Green

That's 19,736, but I'll shave some of those off my pre-game estimate, since game time was 2:30. Hence my guess of 18,000+.

Add to that the 4,000 that DART says got to Fair Park via shuttles from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Special bus shuttles ran from two stations on the Red Line and took TRE passengers from Victory to Fair Park.

So, rail and bus together, DART delivered 22,000 people to Fair Park in time for the game, by my estimate.

There's no telling how many of those helped fill the 92,000-capacity Cotton Bowl for Texas-OU.

Your guess?

More distortion on the campaign trail involving toll roads and foreign money, along with nativist talk about keeping out foreigners (something that gets under my skin).

This time it's from Rep. Robert Miklos of Mesquite, whose campaign material has a whopper of an error. Miklos says in a mailer that on 13 miles of State Highway 121 "North Texas commuters will soon be forced to pay tolls to the Spanish company Cintra."

That couldn't be more wrong -- and from a guy this newspaper has recommended over challenger Cindy Burkett.

The North Texas Tollway Authority fought like a terrier in 2007 to tear the SH 121 project from Cintra, and the NTTA's fleet of lobbyists found enough friends in the Legislature to make that possible.

State Highway 121 is an NTTA project, not a Cintra project, as the Miklos mailer suggests.

You can drive portions of that road now, and the NTTA will gladly take your tolls. The NTTA has renamed the road the Sam Rayburn Tollway (perhaps to erase the nasty political fight from memory).

I called Miklos this afternoon to ask about the misstatement and bat him around for his talk about "foreign-owned toll roads." He sounded surprised about the SH 121 question, and I'm surprised, since the fight over that road is legendary in transportation and political circles. He said:

"If I've put something out what's wrong on something, I'll have to check that. ... If it's a mistake, it's a mistake."

It's a mistake.

Dallas' love affair with the car is as torrid as ever.

Three items, based on new figures from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey:

1) The 2009 estimate of people who drive alone to work is 78.5 percent of Dallas' 599,034 workers 16 and older. That's up from 73 percent of drive-alone commuters in 2005.

2) Nearly 4 percent of those city workers took public transportation last year, a percentage falloff from the 4.3 percent in 2005. The number, however, remained flat -- 23,000+ daily transit riders.

That's not a good-looking number for DART. The agency puts lots of energy into extolling benefits of its growing rail service and fending off critics who complain that the 1-cent transit tax isn't worth it. But you be the judge -- is moving 4 percent of the city's commuters worth the extra sales tax?

(These figures are city-only, since the wider MSA sampling is less useful in looking at mass transit. The census bureau's Dallas-Plano-Irving MSA consists of eight counties, six of which are outside of DART.)

3) Carpooling is becoming less popular, both in the city and metro Dallas.

An estimated 10.7 city commuters carpooled last year, down from 14.5 percent in 2005. The actual number declined, too -- 63,898 last year, down from 77,859.

In the wider Dallas-Plano-Irving MSA, carpool numbers were also down -- 10.1 percent of commuters, from 11.8 in 2005.

Points of comparison: In carpooling last year, Dallas was not too far away from the city of Austin (10.4 percent) but lagged Houston (12.8 percent). In transit last year, Dallas was neck and neck with Houston (3.9 percent) but below Austin (5 percent).

For drive-alones, Dallas's 78.5 percent was tops of the three, with Houston at 75.6 percent and Austin at 78.5 percent.

Observations: I would have thought that the growing density toward the city center would have eased more workers into public transit. I would have thought that the awful-long commutes at the edges of the metro area would have eased more workers into carpools.

Neither is the case, it appears. Despite rising traffic congestion indexes and the wider network of tolls, local highway commuting must be tolerable and affordable for most people. Others don't have co-workers who live nearby or hours that coincide.

Still, it think the perception of a convenience factor wins out for most people who choose cars.

I'll ask DART if they've ever surveyed in the service area to find people for whom transit is an option (nearby routes or park-n-rides) but have never taken a test ride to see if it might work for them.

See the replay below of the live coverage of the traffic and DART conditions before the Red River Rivalry. After last year's mess, the months of planning paid off as people were able to take many different options to get to Fair Park in time for the big game.

1) The first is Texas Rail Advocates, capitalized: The statewide rail booster group has a new, updated website -- texasrailadvocates.org -- with more news items, links, background sites. Take a look.

The Advocates have activities that you may want to keep up with, including meetings that draw public and private leaders in the industry.

Today, the website has a timely item on North Texas-bound Amtrak riders who are heading here for the Texas-OU game.

I'd admire any of them who set out to take rail all the way to Fair Park. That would mean taking Amtrak's Heartland Flyer to Fort Worth, taking the TRE to the American Airlines Center, then hooking up to a Fair Park-bound Green Line. Three different links? I wonder how many tried that last year and what their experience was.

NOTE: Thanks to a reader comment (posted below by Oscar Zulu), I'm correcting the bit about the Green Line to the fair. The Green doesn't serve Victory while special fair loops are running on Saturday. Victory will be served by DART shuttle buses. See DART's webpage for details.

This is going to be a complicated Saturday. Read DART instructions more carefully than I did.

2) The second item has to do with advocates in Mesquite who have made a little headway toward mass transit, as the DMN's Ray Leszcynski reported.

Mesquite was a "no" vote in the original DART vote in 1983. It spends its extra cushion in the sales tax out of its 4B fund for economic development. Now the development board is funding a transit study on the idea of privatized rail service. Plus council will be paying for a shuttle to take people to hook up with DART's Green Line.

Two thoughts:

a) It will be interesting to see whether the commuter line study draws on headway made on the Cotton Belt by a high-powered group hired by the RTC. Is there a marriage possible someday?

b) The Mesquite shuttles will be the second service of this type that I know of -- meaning, feeds passengers to DART from outside the service area.

The other service runs from Grayson County to DART's Parker Road station on the Red Line. Operated by TAPS Public Transportation, it has shuttles from Denison and Sherman to Plano. Four southbound and four northbound every day. Fare is $4 per boarding.

Oops -- I almost forgot mention of the Denton County Transit Authority service that hooks up to the DART North Carrollton station.

After last year's debacle getting football fans to the Cotton Bowl for the Red River Rivalry, DART has ramped up its efforts to get people to the big game. Regardless, we're going to keep a close eye on what's going on Saturday morning on the highways and on the DART rail line and we're hoping to get some help from you.

Beginning Saturday morning at 10 a.m., we're going to be hosting a live chat featuring updates from various staff members stationed along the rail lines and at Fair Park. We also to hope to get input from you, the brave citizens taking the DART or highways to Fair Park. Check dallasnews.com before heading out or visit our mobile site at m.dallasnews.com to get the latest info and to share your own experiences.

The Texas Transportation Institute has compiled a report for state lawmakers who are studying how to pump money into the state's highway fund and the fallout if lawmakers keep kicking the problem down the road.

The report was released today by Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, vice chair of the House
Select Committee on Transportation Funding. The committee was given the job of reporting back to the Legislature before next year's lawmaking session.

From Rodriguez, highlights of the findings:

• Texas will lose 288,000 jobs by 2035 if we continue to spend at planned levels, including more than 73,000 engineering and construction jobs


• Reconstruction costs can total more than three times as much as the cost of 25 years of maintenance and proper funding.


• Proper maintenance can extend the life of a roadway by 18 years.


• If Texas continues to pursue the current spending trend, the cost to the state's economy from deteriorating mobility is more than $1.1 trillion over the next 25 years.


• By 2035, delays will cause the average commuter to spend almost 140 hours in traffic, compared to 38 hours in 2010.

These kinds of reports are helpful big-picture stuff, but I think the numbers get numbingly meaningless to lawmakers. And they've said so. Most want to know the same things I do: If funding doesn't get better, what does my community look like in the next 20 years? More to the point: What won't get built that needs to be built.

D/FW transportation advocates need to use lists and specifics when trying to round up support among lawmakers for better transportation funding.

I say sit down with a given lawmaker, point to a map and say, "Do you want to see this road or bridge get built in our working lifetime? If so, got any ideas short of new money to make that happen? Do you want to toll every new road?"

Support from business is key. Local transportation leaders made their case today to the Real Estate Council.

It will be business' demand for better roadways that will make the difference in Austin. The cost of congestion is tangible to companies trying to get goods in and out and employees to work. And it's not just the big outfits. Sen. Bob Deuell has told of small-business owners who can't get their service trucks to as many stops as they need to because of traffic.

That's mostly an urban problem, though, and many small-town and rural lawmakers just don't care. That argues for a localized approach to funding, with metro areas given latitude to raise money at the ballot box.

Different forms of that legislation have died in the House in the past two sessions after passing the Senate.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst told Bill McKenzie and me last week that he will put a local-option bill on the table again next year. He said there's no doubt the state needs more transportation dollars. He called the problem "critical."

TTI Do Nothing Cost Report

Since 2003, more than 300 Voices columnists have shared parts of their lives in columns that serve to change the way we view our communities and one another. They have shared ideas for how to make their communities better places to live, work and raise children. Transportation issues -- including support for rail, alternative ways of paying for streets and even bike trails -- are often hot topics with our Voices columnists. We care what they have to say because, by speaking out, they inspire change in our communities - and sometimes even inspire change in ourselves.

Volunteers write regular columns for one year, and they are the stars of the Sounding Off feature that runs on Sundays. They also participate in a writing workshop, town hall meeting, editorial board staff meeting and other special events. They also write frequent guest blog items.

And this month, we're looking for new Community Voices columnists. Unlike the Teacher Voices and Student Voices we select in the spring, a Community Voice can be anyone of any age or occupation. The only requirement is that you are willing to write persuasively and tell us something we don't know - about you, about your community, about how you see the world.

The deadline is THURSDAY, and applying has never been easier. Just fill out the online form found here: http://www.dallasnews.com/communityvoicesapply

To learn more about the kinds of columns that Voices volunteers write, visit the Voices page at Dallasnews.com. And don't forget that we've branched out. It's no longer just about writing. We've gone Hollywood with our Voices Videos (Oscars pending). A new video was posted this morning, so join the discussion.

The simmering Dallas-Fort Worth rivalry over transportation dollars is not over.

A group of "east side" members of the Regional Transportation Council met in state Sen. Florence Shapiro's office last month to talk about their communities getting their fair share, says Collin County Commissioner Joe Jaynes.

He's an RTC member and a skeptic of figures that purport to show a fair split of transportation money coming from Austin. It's supposed to be 70-30 in favor of the more populous Dallas TxDOT district. Jaynes questions numbers recently compiled by Michael Morris, transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments.

"East side" officials have been abuzz over the issue for awhile, and it boiled over this summer after long-time transportation advocate Grady Smithey of Duncanville wrote a guest blog for Dallas Transportation.

Two days later, Morris addressed the grievance with an elaborate presentation at an RTC meeting. Jaynes obviously isn't satisfied, so he called the caucus for Aug. 20 with Shapiro.

Chatter among some of the easterners is that Morris' planning apparatus has gotten too large and too powerful. The job should be regional coordination, not diversion of funds from one project in favor of another, critics say. The 41-member RTC board has become more of a rubber stamp than policy-setting board, some complain.

I don't see it entirely like that (although Morris typically way ahead of board members in asking for action on agenda items).

Dallas and Fort Worth have traditional rivalries for road funds. They have separate TxDOT districts and separate advocacy groups (the Dallas Regional Mobility Coalition and the Tarrant Regional Transportation Coalition). Since so many projects bridge the two districts, I think there has to be a strong hand in setting priorities, and that's why the RTC needs to have a strong say. You can't have Dallas and Fort Worth each going to Austin to angle for money.

One way the east has bulked up in recent months was the hiring of top gun transportation lobbyist Rider Scott.

We'll see how the DRMC comes out in the weeks to come in setting legislative priorities. Will they indicate suspicion and hostility toward the west?