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Comments on TxDOT’s Draft Texas Statewide Multimodal Transit Plan 2050

Jay Blazek Crossley, Farm&City, November 20, 2025

Thank you to Marc Williams, Caroline Mays, and every employee of TxDOT, consultants, and stakeholders who contributed to this plan and to Governor Greg Abbott and members of the Texas House and Senate whose guidance and deliberations have contributed to the Texas Department of Transportation’s approach to providing the people of Texas with abundant access to safe multimodal transportation options, whether they live in rural, suburban, urban, small town, or metropolitan parts of Texas.

This draft plan is great and reflects meaningful work, collaboration, and attempts to address the issues that the people of Texas have asked TxDOT to address through the statistically valid survey included in the Connecting Texas 2050 Plan. I hope that the Texas Transportation Commission will adopt this plan in its final form and will then work meaningfully to achieve the vision and goals outlined in the plan and the balanced multimodal approach to transportation the people of Texas want.

I hope that the Texas Legislature will work with TxDOT and the Governor to improve our transportation planning, funding, design, execution, and decision making systems to provide Texans with greater freedom to travel with a substantial increase in the amount of attention and funding for public transportation in Texas. As outlined below, I hope that the final draft of the plan can provide decision makers with a meaningful framework to be able to fund and improve public transportation in the coming 90th session of the legislature in 2027.

My comments begin with my personal reflections that culminate in my big picture understanding of the current Texas transportation strategies. My childhood freedom to navigate Houston by transit in 1988, and my son’s very different experience in 2025, reflect ordinary patterns familiar to many Texas families. These stories highlight real gaps and opportunities in the system, but they are only two voices among millions. The statewide multimodal planning process must elevate and learn from the broad spectrum of Texans whose needs and daily experiences are far more varied than ours.

Following this narrative comment, I have included my initial analysis of the plan and recommendations. Farm&City is a 501c3 nonprofit organization dedicated to high quality urban and rural human habitat in Texas in perpetuity. Founded in 2017, this organization has always worked on a shoestring budget and contributed by collaborating with TxDOT and other levels of government and leaders and entities from across the state. Unfortunately, we have struggled significantly with funding over the last several years, and we have not had funds to pay staff since March 2025. I am working as a volunteer at this time. I say all this to explain that the analysis portion of these comments were aided by AI, allowing me to conduct basic analysis, assess the draft plan, and develop my recommendations. However, the bulk of the text is mine and the points and ideas are human initiated.

By the time I was 11, I was riding the bus around Houston with my brother and other kids and at times by myself. Both of my parents worked, so I was in control of my time every school day—from walking home to dinner—and all day long in the summer if there wasn’t camp or some event. We caught the Montrose/Main bus to the Astrodome or Astroworld. This was before the existence of the Red Line Light Rail line – the original section that takes you to Reliant Stadium, which is the most successful modern light rail line in the nation in terms of ridership per mile of rail investment. There was that freeway bus stop at the pedestrian overpass over 610 to get to Astroworld / Waterworld.

If you got to the Astros game early and stood around along one of the entrances where players went in and out, you could get Mike Scott’s autograph almost every game, and a handful of other players would stop by and sign our baseball cards. Back then you could get outfield bleacher seats for $1. You could get an Astroworld / Waterworld season pass for under $100 and go every day all summer long—riding all the rides you wanted or swimming all day. My first concert was seeing Richard Marx at Astroworld with my cousin Cat. We were really there for the opening act, Wilson Phillips. My Wilson Phillips T-shirt may still be in the attic at my parents’ house in Montrose.

For much of middle school, my weekend destination was the Galleria Mall, connected directly to my house by the 82 Westheimer bus—the greatest bus line in Texas. We’d sit on the sidewalk at the pole with the bus stop sign at Mandell. We had a ritual: you would try to roll a coin across all four lanes of Westheimer. Successful rolls—with larger denominations having a larger impact—felt like calling the bus, like beckoning a cat or dog.

We’d head to the Galleria early Saturday morning and hang out all day or into the evening. At any point, anyone could catch a bus home when they needed. The time I got busted stealing necklaces as gifts—one for the girl I liked, one for a friend—the head of mall security turned out to be a photographer who worked with my father. He handed me the telephone and had me call my dad. My brother and friends had disappeared. After some yelling on the phone, Dad told me to get home on the bus immediately. I walked to the stop, rode home, and got grounded for months, while my brother and friends got to stay at the mall longer and rode a later bus.

I tell this embarrassing story to illustrate the important developmental experiences that young Texans can have in public spaces if they have safe, reliable transportation options. Texas children will make mistakes and do foolish things as they grow. We should provide them a transportation system that keeps them safe and provides them freedom, and assumes they will make mistakes and be kids. This is a kind of freedom that public transportation can efficiently provide to Texans of all ages and abilities.

Because of Houston Metro’s transit funding, my parents had the freedom and ability to choose when to give my brother and me increasing access to the city—providing age-appropriate developmental benefits, allowing us to develop responsible habits to care for ourselves and function as free citizens of an open, democratic society. Their careers were not limited by needing to drive us everywhere, and child care costs were reduced because public transportation gave us safe access to public spaces – including for-profit public spaces – safely connected to residents across the region with a transportation system that can provide for pre-teens and teenagers, unlike our personal vehicle system unavailable to anyone under 16.

At 11, my son does not have the freedom in central Austin that I had in the 1980s in central Houston. His lack of transit access to public places is not caused by transit agency staff that are bad at their jobs or a story of government waste. If you look at ridership on transit compared to funding per capita for transit, Texas transit agencies are in line proportionally with transit agencies across the country, but they are on the side of the chart with the least amounts of funding for public transportation per capita.

What we have had in Texas during the 21st century is an extended period of radical austerity measures. While we’re the fastest growing economy in the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet, we don’t have enough resources available to provide what is considered basic units of civilization in most of the world – safe pedestrian infrastructure and public transportation.

My personal story is only one small window into what better transportation access can mean for Texas families. Stepping back from individual experience, the statewide numbers tell a clear and consequential story about the choices we have made—and the ones we have not.

Texas spends over $23 billion a year building and maintaining roads at all levels of government, largely from taxes and fees unrelated to road use. When George W. Bush left the Texas governor’s mansion in 2000, about 85% of road expenditures were covered by user fees. But under Governors Perry and Abbott, Texas dramatically increased the subsidy for driving—now a majority of our road spending, more than $12 billion a year of subsidy on top of about $11 billion from user fees.

Public transportation funding, meanwhile, totals only about $2.5 billion a year from all levels of government in Texas combined.

Some may feel that we shouldn’t fund transit because such a small percent of Texans commute to work on transit. But commuting makes up only about 15% of trips. While only 2% of commute to work trips in Texas are on public transportation, according to a recent TxDOT survey, 20% of Texans report having used public transportation in the last week. 100% of trips by kids that are between the ages of 11 and 15 – where that person had the freedom to travel on their own – were taken on public transit, walking, biking, or other low-speed, low-mass modes or perhaps in a few instances of a kid breaking the law and driving a car.

We need to invest much more in the freedom of Texas kids to travel independently with a significant increase in public transportation funding and many billions a year to make it safe for kids to travel by foot, wheelchair, bike, skateboard and all the ways kids could travel safely if there wasn’t threat of death from our motor vehicles.

The shift to heavily subsidizing driving received significant support from TxDOT staff and public dollars spent establishing the problem of congestion as the top concern of Texas transportation policy and articulating strategies, funding levels needed to pursue those strategies, and a complex system to allocate funds and attention across the state to meet perceived needs.

Texas has not invested similarly in understanding access and mobility needs that are not having slightly less traffic to experience while you’re in traffic.

In the 2030 Committee Report, TxDOT conducted a long planning process looking at transportation needs across the state. There is a public transportation chapter, which concludes with these recommendations:

“• Perform a comprehensive examination of federal, state and local partnerships to meet regional needs through coordination of funding and services.”

On the other hand, there are multiple chapters analyzing the need for investments in driving with on chapter on urban mobility concluding with the following recommendations:

“• Prevent worsening congestion; at minimum, do not allow urban mobility to fall below peer cities.

• Broaden the ability of urban regions to raise revenue without reducing state funding.

• Investment needed for “Prevent Worsening Congestion”: $171 billion total; $7.6 billion per year.”

Since the publication of this report, voters approved two constitutional amendments dedicating enormous streams of revenue exclusively to roads. With Proposition 1 in 2014, voters dedicated a portion of oil and natural gas severance taxes to the State Highway Fund (and the Rainy Day Fund) for constructing, maintaining, and acquiring right-of-way for non-tolled public roads. With Proposition 7 in 2015, voters dedicated portions of state sales taxes and motor-vehicle sales and rental taxes to the State Highway Fund for non-tolled roads and for reducing transportation-related debt.

These propositions locked billions per year into roads, with no equivalent constitutional, statutory, or planning support for public transportation following the 2030 report, published in February 2009. The draft TxDOT Statewide Multimodal Transit Plan does not yet provide the same level of analytical support for transit that TxDOT has historically provided for strategies focused on helping us drive. TxDOT should analyze, model, and present funding scenarios for public transportation with the same rigor, detail, and institutional support that it has historically provided for roadway funding.

Before the plan is finalized, TxDOT should give meaningful consideration to potential strategies that would expand high-quality public transportation options for Texans across rural, suburban, small-town, and metropolitan regions statewide. The final plan presented to the Texas Transportation Commission should clearly explain how public transportation in Texas would improve under different levels of investment, using consistent, transparent modeling so that elected officials and the public can understand what is possible.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) has taken an important step by preparing a statewide multimodal transit plan that recognizes the essential role of public transportation in Texans’ lives. Farm&City commends this work and supports TxDOT’s stated goal of developing a more balanced and multimodal transportation system that serves all Texans.

Most Texans live in metropolitan regions where the majority of our transit trips occur, yet state dollars for transit currently flow only to rural and small-urban systems. The plan, as written, does not attempt to assess the transit needs of the people who make up roughly three-quarters of our population in metro areas. This is not a minor omission—it is a structural gap that must be corrected in the final plan. To serve as a credible foundation for Texas’s future transportation system, the Statewide Multimodal Transit Plan 2050 should fully address the needs, funding realities, and potential solutions for all Texans, including those living in our major metropolitan regions.

For years, our state has done a good job identifying and funding the transit needs of rural Texans and smaller communities. TxDOT’s structure for transit districts was built around that purpose, and the state rightly invests tens of millions each year to help those residents reach jobs, schools, and healthcare.

What this draft plan now helps reveal is that the same kind of attention has not yet been applied to the public transportation needs of Texans living in our major metropolitan regions. The eight large transit authorities that provide nearly 90 percent of all transit trips in Texas receive no state funding in the biennial budget for the transportation needs of their residents—not even a dollar of the program funding that supports smaller districts. These agencies move millions of people every day—nurses, welders, students, veterans, and seniors—but state formulas and appropriations do not yet address their role in meeting statewide mobility goals.

This isn’t a criticism of anyone’s work—it’s the next step in building a complete, balanced, and modern transportation system. The current structure grew from legislative decisions decades ago, when metro regions were authorized to form local transit authorities funded by voter-approved sales taxes. That approach succeeded: Texas metros created some of the nation’s most efficient regional transit systems. But it also meant the state gradually stepped away from an ongoing role in meeting metropolitan transit needs. As rural and small-town transit became a higher state priority, the imbalance grew: today the State of Texas spends real money to meet the transportation needs of rural Texans, while spending nothing at all on the same needs of metropolitan Texans.

Of course, TxDOT already collaborates with metro transit agencies in important ways—on integrated roadway–transit projects, corridor improvements, and shared planning. And the Texas Transportation Commission (TTC) has discretionary tools, most notably the Texas Mobility Fund (TMF), that have been used effectively for multimodal projects. Roughly a decade ago, TMF dollars helped deliver the Downtown Austin rail station, Houston’s West Loop BRT connectors, and the El Paso Streetcar, demonstrating the flexibility and value of this approach.

Now is the time to make that commitment systematic. The Statewide Multimodal Transit Plan 2050 should include an explicit analysis of how much funding is available in the Texas Mobility Fund and outline a rapid, transparent methodology for working with all transit agencies to allocate a major round of projects. As an immediate step, the TTC should dedicate at least $250 million in TMF funds this cycle to support projects that advance the plan’s goals, distributed equitably by population among:

• $187.5 million for the eight Metropolitan Transit Authorities (MTAs) serving roughly three-fourths of Texans;

• $37.5 million for Urban Transit Districts (UTDs) serving mid-sized cities; and

• $25 million for Rural Transit Districts (RTDs) serving smaller towns and rural areas.

The TTC should also adopt a policy that no more than 50 percent of TMF expenditures go toward single-occupant-vehicle strategies, reserving the remainder for multimodal investments that improve access, safety, and efficiency across modes. This proportional, transparent approach would show that Texas is serious about implementing its multimodal vision and committed to meeting the transportation needs of all Texans—rural, urban, and metropolitan alike.

This is not about taking resources away from rural areas; it’s about modernizing an outdated funding structure so that all Texans benefit. Rural Texans deserve the dependable service the state helps fund today, and metropolitan Texans deserve that same partnership—because all of us depend on the health and efficiency of our regional economies.

At the same time, when federal, local, and state spending are combined, Texans in rural areas still have the least total funding per capita to meet their transportation needs. The plan should include a meaningful assessment of what it would take to meet the needs of both rural and urban transit agencies, side by side. Regional Transportation Coordinating Committees (RTCCs) across the state already adopt annual plans identifying local mobility needs. TxDOT should build on that foundation—working with these RTCCs in the same structured, collaborative way it works with metropolitan transit agencies, using consistent planning and performance tools.

Finally, any large-scale Texas Mobility Fund program should be allocated proportionally among all transit providers—rural, small-urban, and metropolitan alike. The goal isn’t to pit communities against each other, but to ensure that every Texan—whether they live in a town of 2,000 or a metro of 2 million—has an effective statewide public transportation strategy that meets their needs and supports their region’s prosperity.

I believe the people of Texas want the 2027 Texas Legislative Session to end with a real solution—one that allocates billions of additional dollars each year to public transportation. The TxDOT Statewide Multimodal Transit Plan needs to seriously entertain the idea that Texans might want this. The plan should give the Legislature a reasonable framework for considering that question: laying out the scale of need, illustrating realistic options, and providing analytical tools to help legislators evaluate trade-offs and design the details.

That doesn’t mean the plan should dictate outcomes or advocate a number. It means the plan should do what good planning is supposed to do—inform elected officials with facts, credible analysis, and a clear understanding of the costs and benefits of different paths forward.

Taking this step does not contradict Texas’s fiscally conservative values—it fulfills them. Market solutions work best when policymakers have accurate information, when externalities are measured honestly, and when funding mechanisms reward efficiency and performance. It is entirely consistent with Texas’s political and economic framework for TxDOT to analyze and model funding strategies such as value capture, corridor-revenue sharing, local options, and user-fee reforms that keep control close to the people and reward effective projects.

A planning process that takes this approach—clear-eyed, transparent, and rooted in respect for Texans’ expressed priorities—will make Texas stronger, safer, and more competitive. It’s time to look forward, together, and plan the transportation system Texans actually want and deserve.

Recommendations

1. Revise the draft plan to explicitly include analysis and scenarios for major metropolitan, urban and rural transit needs and funding options.

2. Conduct a full assessment of total transit funding needs—rural, urban, and metropolitan—using consistent performance metrics.

3. Remove all analytical, bureaucratic, and planning barriers to the Texas Transportation Commission being able to equally allocate a meaningful amount from the Texas Mobility Fund – at least $250 million – across all transit categories as an early implementation step in support of this plan and the stated wishes of the people of Texas as articulated in the Connecting Texas 2050 Plan.

4. Commit to balanced planning, ensuring that no more than half of Texas Mobility Fund expenditures or comparable discretionary resources like Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality funds are devoted solely to single-occupant-vehicle strategies.

5. Provide the Legislature with clear analytical tools to evaluate potential funding mechanisms—value capture, local options, and user-fee reforms—so that decisions in 2027 can be made on facts, not assumptions.

Basic Analysis That Informs These Comments

1. Ridership and Transit District Types

According to TxDOT’s 2023 Texas Transit Statistics Report, approximately 90 percent of all transit trips in Texas occur within the eight large Metropolitan Transit Authorities (MTAs)—the agencies serving Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, and Denton County. The remaining 10 percent of trips occur in Urban Transit Districts (UTDs) and Rural Transit Districts (RTDs), which together serve less than one-quarter of the state’s population.

Despite this distribution of ridership and population, state transit funding in the biennial budget—roughly $80 million per year—is directed entirely to UTDs and RTDs, while MTAs receive none. This structure assumes that large metro agencies already have sufficient local resources through sales taxes, yet in reality they struggle to meet overwhelming demand and are constrained by statutory tax caps and funding limitations.

2. Per-Capita Spending by Type

When federal, state, and local sources are combined, the disparity in total per-capita transit funding across Texas is extreme. Even with strong local commitments, residents of major metros still receive far less total transit investment per person than those in smaller urban or rural regions, simply because their systems serve exponentially more riders and trips with no state support. Farm&City’s analysis estimates the following approximate per-capita public transit funding levels in Texas (2023):

Transit Type

State Funds

Total Funds
(all sources)

Share of Texans Served

Rural Transit Districts

~$27 per capita

~$175 per capita

10%

Urban Transit Districts

~$17 per capita

~$210 per capita

15%

Metropolitan Transit Authorities

$0 state

~$150 per capita

75%

These figures demonstrate how the absence of state funding for MTAs distorts Texas’s transportation priorities. The people and businesses that generate the most economic activity and travel demand are supported by the least comprehensive public transit funding framework.

3. Public Opinion and the Connecting Texas 2050 Survey

Both the Statewide Multimodal Transit Plan and the Connecting Texas 2050 long-range transportation plan cite public input showing that Texans overwhelmingly support a balanced approach to transportation—including transit, walking, and bicycling options alongside roadway investments. Participants in TxDOT’s statistically valid statewide survey identified congestion, safety, and lack of transportation choices as key concerns. Across regions, respondents emphasized the need for reliable and affordable public transportation options, particularly in growing metropolitan areas. The people of Texas have expressed a clear vision: a transportation system that offers freedom of choice, fiscal responsibility, and access for all.

____________________________

Jay Blazek Crossley

Executive Director, Farm&City

713-244-4746 | jay@farmandcity.org

www.FarmAndCity.org