Texas Republican Lobbyist News: Inadequate Roads Cost Texans Billions of Dollars.
The following is a digest of an article originally published at the Texas Tribune. We are publishing this summary as a public service for Texas citizens, Texas lobbyists, Texas Government Consultants, Texas Political Officials, and other interested parties.
People speculate a lot on how their money is spent, and on how the government spends their money. For Texans, one of the biggest drains on their income is due to roads and highways that are lacking. There is much discourse regarding where tax dollars should go. These funds are needed and deserved for Texas’s roadways. The problems that Texas drivers face are insufficient safety features, traffic congestion, and vehicle damage as a result of poorly maintained roads. For quite a while now Texas has been putting its road maintenance and updates on the back burner. These problems are beginning to arise. If people don’t pay for road service in tax dollars, they’ll pay for it in accidents, traffic, and medical bills. Let’s take a step towards taking preventative measures.
A recent study from Texas A&M University points out that traffic is projected to almost double statewide in the next ten years. Pavement quality is expected to decrease as much as 30% across Texas in the next decade. With business doing quite well in Texas, compared to other states, it’s putting a large strain on our roads. In order to care for these rapidly declining conditions, it would cost the state about 2 billion dollars a year. The hard part is, the cost is just going to keep rising as traffic and bad conditions increase.
“Lawrence Olsen, executive vice president of Texas Good Roads, an advocacy group that wasn’t affiliated with the TRIP study, said the costs of improving roadways are just the tip of the iceberg. Olsen warned of a ‘looming fiscal cliff’ coming for statewide transportation projects. According to Olsen, many of these are funded by bond proceeds or other short-term funding sources. ‘Very few of these projects are funded out of pure highway funds,’ which Olsen said are not adequate at current levels to maintain road quality, let alone to take on new projects.”
Texas is eventually going to have to deal with reality looming; new roads need to be built, and the ones we have need to be repaired. Hopefully, a progressive plan to fix these problems is on it’s way to development.
Read the original article here.