This piece originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on Sunday, August 4, 2013.
We have a third special session of the 83rd Texas Legislature because the second ended without agreement on the last crucial issue facing it: transportation. But even if lawmakers had decided to spend more on roads, the state’s traffic congestion wouldn’t have been solved by money alone. The very structure of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) guarantees it will waste taxpayer dollars.
TxDOT is simply too big, too bureaucratic, and too centralized.
The problems start with a Transportation Commission that combines the functions of a board-of-directors and executive management, and routinely micromanages the smallest aspects of day-to-day operations. This marginalized TxDOT’s executive director. What’s more, each of the 25 districts is supposed to be autonomous, but instead they are tightly controlled by the Commission, whose authority stretches from awarding highway contracts to selecting projects for funding.
This is a recipe for failure, and failure has been the predictable result. In 2013, TxDOT missed 30 percent of its design project planning deadlines and came in above its design project budget 53 percent of the time.
Economist and political philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek contended central planning was incompatible with a free society and healthy economy because the information necessary to best allocate resources and arrive at a market price is only available to the parties to any given transaction, rather than government. Modern proponents of big government have always argued the increased complexity of the modern economy makes greater government intervention necessary. But Hayek argues the opposite: the very complexity of the modern economy requires that resource allocations be made as close to the “information” about supply and demand as possible.
Former Cato Institute chairman William Niskanen developed this idea further, arguing government should deregulate, debureaucratize, and devolve. In other words, government should deregulate as much as possible, privatize those government functions it can’t deregulate, and devolve to local government those functions that it can’t privatize. This pushes resource-allocation decisions as close as possible to on the ground supply and demand requirements.
Organizationally, TxDOT violates these principles: Texas transportation policy is overregulated; TxDOT runs too many things that private contractors could perform more efficiently, such as design and routine road maintenance; and the Transportation Commission micromanages a host of things that should be left to local authorities.
The Florida Department of Transportation offers a model of deregulation, debureaucratization, and devolution. The Secretary of Transportation reports directly to the Governor. As a result, the Governor can integrate the Department with other policies to create a coherent plan. The most important functions are carried out by the agency’s eight semi-autonomous districts, each of which has the functional and operational apparatus to serve as its own department. Florida’s Transportation Commission plays a purely advisory role focused on major transportation policy initiatives. It has no monitoring authority and is specifically prohibited from influencing day-to-day operations and contract awards.
By contrast, TxDOT is too heavily regulated. TxDOT only has authority to develop no more than three design-build transportation projects per year. The last five design-build contracts awarded saved taxpayers about $1.08 billion. This is a wasteful limitation.
The single most important thing TxDOT could do is to push as much as possible down to the local level as does its Florida counterpart, rather than having 25 weak districts that merely follow orders.
Instead, Texas’ 25 transportation districts could be consolidated into a dozen regional districts, with most important functions pushed down from department level into each of those regional districts. This approach may address some of the state’s major congestion issues by allowing regional officials to concentrate their resources where they will do the greatest good for the most people.
According to the Texas 2030 Committee, Texans spend an extra $6.7 billion yearly on gas and countless hours wasted in stop-and-go traffic. This “congestion tax” costs commuters $570 annually, and the cost can triple for commuters in metropolitan areas. Each Texan spends approximately thirty-two hours in traffic annually, sixty percent more than a decade ago.
Florida, on the other hand, has been able to decrease its congested conditions on their Strategic Intermodal System to a level not seen before 2004 – with a population growing nearly as fast as Texas’. Florida achieved this with a lower state motor-fuels tax, 16 cents per gallon, than Texas’ 20 cents for gasoline.
Experience and research have shown decentralizing, debureaucratizing, and devolving TxDOT and its authority will lead to a much more efficient decision-making process, save taxpayer money, and put us all on the road to a better transportation system.
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