If you’ve tried to go, say 4 miles, through town or maybe northwest between 3:30 and 7:00, you know it can take you more than an hour. However, we’ve not had a real research study to prove just how bad our traffic is… now, we do. LA and DC are still worse, but not by much and the real kicker is just how many of the top spots for horrible traffic go to Texas cities…
Los Angeles 1.38
Washington 1.30
Austin 1.28
New York/Newark, N.J. 1.27
Chicago 1.25
Houston 1.25
Dallas-Fort Worth 1.22
Boston 1.20
Average of 101 metro areas 1.20
Philadelphia 1.19
San Antonio 1.16
El Paso 1.15
McAllen 1.09
Corpus Christi 1.07
With any entity, whether a business or a government, you have to make investments continuously in infrastructure to not only maintain what’s being used now, you have to expand to cover the growth that will naturally (hopefully) occur. We haven’t been doing that in Texas because Texas is all about ‘bidness’ and ‘low taxes’, never mind the fact that taxes can be used rather effectively to foster enormous economic growth (take a look at the US from 1945 through 1972 and from 1993 to 2001). We’ve spent 30 years cutting or keeping our taxes low, not making critical and needed investments and instead coasting off what previous generations built. Now it’s all starting to crumble and go way over capacity, just at the time when we’re facing the nastiest deficit in our history.
This year, Texas voters painted themselves into a corner either by action or inaction. Some are going to feel the pain sooner than others but we’re all going to get hit with it eventually, even if it’s only while we’re sitting behind a steering wheel staring out at the world while moving at 2.5 miles per hour.