Overview
For the last fifty years, Texas has neglected passenger rail in favor of continual expansion of its road and highway network. While roads and highways are necessary parts of any effective transportation system, making it the end-all-be-all of our state’s transportation system has had disastrous effects.
Our state’s roads and highways are horrendously congested, with average daily commutes growing longer every year. Simply building more roads does little to help and, if poorly planned, can actually make the situation worse. Our employers, communities and state lose billions of dollars a year in productivity because of time spent sitting in traffic. More importantly, the average person wastes huge amounts of time which could be better spent at home with families or enjoying leisure activities.
Furthermore, the economic price we pay for our cars is enormous. In addition to car payments, we have to pay for gas, insurance, registration fees, repairs and maintenance. The average American family now spends about 30% of its income on automobiles. And massive amounts of our tax dollars go to the maintenance and expansion of our increasingly inefficient road system.
There are other costs associated with our overdependence on cars. Pollution caused by so much car travel reduces air quality and releases greenhouse gases. The continued expansion of the road system contributes to urban sprawl, which reduces our quality of life and inflicts terrible damage upon unique communities.
To deal with all these problems, TexPIRG advocates a comprehensive campaign to vastly increase the extent and ability of our state’s passenger rail system. We call on local leaders to expand or create light rail in our cities and to build commuter rail lines to link our cities to one another. We call upon the legislature to enact laws that will allow local communities the flexibility they need to properly fund passenger rail projects and to work to transfer freight rail off tracks within cities so that those tracks can be used for passenger rail.
According to transit experts, the average line of rail can move upwards of 40,000 people per hour. By contrast, the average lane of highway can only move about 2,500 people per hour and often costs more to maintain. It is worth noting that passenger rail benefits even those people who choose not to ride the train, because every person who rides the train equals one less car on the road.
While passenger rail cannot eliminate traffic congestion on its own, it certainly can provide a viable alternative for people who are tired of the problems associated with driving. It has also been demonstrated that efficient light rail systems can slow the growth of congestion considerably - in Baltimore and Sacramento, the growth rate of traffic congestion was cut significantly after the introduction of light rail.
Commuter rail lines between cities would also be very beneficial. Traffic on our interstate highway system continues to increase steadily, including an ever-rising proportion of transport trucks carrying NAFTA trade to and from Mexico. Using commuter rail to link specific hubs to one another, such as could easily be created between Austin and San Antonio, would greatly help alleviate this problem.
