Statewide traffic fatalities remain high and big highway projects dominate transportation funding, but a diverse set of mobility advocates known as the Texas Streets Coalition is banding together to overhaul the state’s transportation priorities.
Through a set of bills at the Texas Legislature, the recently formed coalition has played a key role in advancing reforms to TxDOT and state road safety law during the 88th legislative session.
“We have succeeded at completely changing the discussions [in the Lege],” said Jay Blazek Crossley, a member of the Texas Streets Coalition. “At the very least, lawmakers, all the transportation people know that they have to talk about safety.”
Their advancements come in striking contrast to how much of the session has played out. This session, conservative lawmakers have harped on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts at universities as a product of “politically correct” culture. Yet the Texas Streets Coalition is optimistic about a bill changing the state’s language from car accidents to car crashes – a call among road safety advocates who say car crashes are not accidental. And in a session that has sought to blur lines around how the state engages with the public on border enforcement, the coalition convinced TxDOT to shed a layer of opacity by requiring TxDOT contractors to identify their connection to the state agency when engaging with the public.
While a good number of the advocates are from Austin and Houston, there are folks pressing for change from other parts of the state too, including Amarillo, El Paso, and the Rio Grande Valley. Finding bipartisan support for these initiatives might seem like an uphill battle in Texas when conservatives tend to oppose increasing funding for non-highway projects like bike lanes, sidewalks, and public transit – a key priority for the coalition. However, the group points to momentum built in recent years as reason for optimism.
A Speech and a Tragedy
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, in his speech to the Texas Transportation Commission shortly after he entered office in 2016, called for the need for a “paradigm shift” in state transportation policy. Turner, a Democrat, informed the TTC of how the state’s highway widening projects had failed to resolve their stated aim of reducing congestion, according to a story in Streetsblog.
“We need greater focus on intercity rail, regional rail, High Occupancy Vehicle facilities, Park and Rides, Transit Centers, and robust local transit,” Turner said. “As we grow and densify, these modes are the future foundation of a successful urban mobility system. It’s all about providing transportation choices.”
For Blazek Crossley, the comments marked one of the first times that a powerful figure in Texas publicly laid out a mobility vision that included things like investment in transit and safer streets. Tragedy on a Houston-area road the year after Turner’s speech accelerated a sense of urgency to put that vision into action.
Gina Torry has watched the video of an SUV striking her sister, Lisa Torry Smith, and nephew many times. She’s seen it so many times that she’s formulated hypotheses about what was going through the driver’s head—the aggressive left turn near a school, not calling 911, and the moment in which she wondered if the driver considered fleeing the scene.
“The driver told the police that my 6-year-old nephew, who can’t defend himself because he’s a child, was running wild through the streets and that my sister was chasing him. And my sister was killed, so that would have been it without that video. That would have been the story,” Torry said.
Instead, she said her nephew was walking behind her sister when the SUV struck them near the center of the crosswalk. In a deeply twisted bit of irony, the pair were walking to Jan Schiff Elementary School in Missouri City—named for the local civic leader who had been killed while using a crosswalk.
Torry, who lives in Minnesota, wanted to know what Texans thought about the lack of protections in crosswalks. “It’s just one of those things that simply has been left off of the books in terms of the law since the time that cars were able to drive on the roads,” she said. “I’ve spoken to Texans all over the state, and they were shocked to know that once they stepped into a crosswalk, there was absolutely no protection for them.”
Torry leaned on her experience working for the United Nations Security Council on projects involving the protection of women and children in armed conflict, which had taught her the importance of engaging with everybody. So, as Republican-led restrictions on abortion and voting rights garnered headlines during the 87th Legislative Session, she worked with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to rectify what she saw as an inconceivable gap in Texas law.
The Lisa Torry Smith Act became law in 2021, making it a criminal offense for a motor vehicle to kill or injure a pedestrian in a crosswalk, and Torry now leads Citizens for Road Safety’s Stop and Yield Campaign to advocate for road safety in Fort Bend County where her sister was killed.
Carrying Momentum
Representative Terry Canales from the Rio Grande Valley and chair of the House Committee on Transportation has filed several bills this session around transportation, including one that would create a $400 registration fee for electric vehicles. Passed by both houses, the bill seeks to boost funding for road projects, which currently rely heavily on regressive gas taxes. Canales, a Democrat, is looking for wins elsewhere, including on road safety, but he added, “I always assume that nothing will have bipartisan support until it does.”
Another of his bills would address the growing movement to shift the language from accidents to crashes. For mobility advocates, an accident implies no one was at fault (including the people who designed the roads). The result is that thousands of deaths and serious injuries on roads get labeled “accidents,” which lessens the sense of urgency around the issue.
“We call it an accident, and who said it was?” Canales said. “We’re using terminology that’s not correct, and … words have meaning.” The bill passed in the House and is awaiting a vote in the Senate.
The “Crashes not Accidents” movement embodies some of the ways that the Texas Streets Coalition wants to alter how Texas thinks about safety on the roads. Another bill awaiting a Senate vote would remove a policy requiring pedestrians to walk on the left side of the road when there is no sidewalk available. Blazek Crossley said walking on the left side of the road is not necessarily bad advice, but repealing the code is a step toward removing laws pushed by the auto industry in the 1950s that criminalized walking.
Another of Canales’ bills that has passed the House would give TxDOT greater leeway to lower speed limits in certain situations, including roads under construction and inclement weather. Mobility advocates are encouraging any legislation that can make a dent in a growing road safety crisis. TxDOT data shows 4,479 people died on Texas roads last year, a slight decrease from 2021 but still up 15% from 2020.
Canales is hoping to gain a better sense of where statewide transportation is headed through a 2045 planning study. While he sees road building as the “most economically feasible way to get people from point A to point B in Texas,” he also said that investment in mass transit is necessary to accommodate growth in large cities and eventually statewide. “We can’t pave our way out of this mess,” Canales said. “When you look at mobility in the future, are roads going to be the only answer?”
“We can’t pave our way out of this.”
The Texas Streets Coalition also proposed a constitutional amendment, HJR 77, which sought to diversify how TxDOT spends its money. TxDOT’s Legislative Appropriations Request stated that less than 1% of its funds come from non-dedicated state highway funds, leaving the transportation agency with limited state dollars to spend on non-highway projects. Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, co-author of HJR 77, noted earlier in the session that the amendment offered an opportunity to work with Republicans.
“Reducing traffic and congestion shouldn’t be a Democrat or Republican issue,” Alvarado said. “Our cities are growing, our state’s growing.”
However, HJR 77, the coalition’s core bill, did not receive a vote in the House or Senate. The coalition is pushing for the House and Senate Transportation Committees to study funding options for multimodal transportation—the idea of having transportation options ranging from walking to biking to driving—that would be more likely to pass next session.
In addition to reforming TxDOT funding, the coalition wanted to reform how TxDOT interacts with the public. In the midst of a contentious battle around TxDOT’s I-45 highway expansion in Houston, Jasmine Gaston gave testimony in favor of the project to the Texas Transportation Commission in 2021. Molly Cook, a co-organizer with Houston-based and Texas Streets Coalition-associated Stop TxDOT I-45, also attended that TTC meeting. She felt that something was off about Gaston’s testimony.
“After talking to her, she explained that the relocation agency had come to her and said, ‘This is what we want you to say. We’re going to pay you to get down there, and we’ll bus you to get down there,” she said. “It was all part of their effort to manufacture community support.”
Gaston returned to the TTC months after her first visit with a new perspective on the project.
“The last time I was here, I felt like a fish out of water. Everyone was all dressed in business casual and knew the ropes, if you will. I was paid by Go I-45 Texas to take my for-the-people-yet-well-spoken’ self down to Austin to oppose so-called elites fighting the expansion,” Gaston told the commissioners. “But today I want to be sure that, on record, I do not support the I-45 expansion that would cause hundreds to be distraught and displaced.”
While Stop TxDOT I-45 initially formed to oppose the I-45 project, it recently broadened its mission to address statewide issues. Cook led a push for a bill that would require TxDOT contractors and subcontractors, like the ones that interacted with Gaston, to identify their association with TxDOT. Before the bill got a hearing, TxDOT agreed to make contractors identifying their connection to TxDOT an agency policy moving forward.
Reforming TxDOT is also a priority for Timothy Ingalls. Ingalls, a land manager of the Frying Pan Ranch in Amarillo, said TxDOT’s work on I-27, I-40, and State Loop 335 have cut through many areas of the city that could be developed with walkability in mind. The SL 335 project involves a piece of his property that TxDOT acquired through eminent domain, which presents drainage challenges for his ranch.
Ingalls is hoping to change the state’s transportation ecosystem. After graduating high school, he took time to travel, living in Beijing, New York, and Salzburg. Those experiences and exposure to Strong Towns, a non-profit focused on reframing development in North American cities, made him reflect on how land development should work. He said walkable urban development could “improve the tax base for the city. It could create a better quality of life for people living here. It could create more social cohesion because we’re sort of socially disconnected. We’re a small town, but oftentimes, we’ll go months without seeing one another because there’s not much public space, there’s not much gathering space.”
Ingalls has maintained optimism around the influence mobility advocates can have on state policy.
“I think when you have a group like the Texas Streets Coalition that’s trying to proactively engage both from a friendly way and from a somewhat challenging way… to get TxDOT to think more about their policy, I think that’s always a potentially fruitful space,” he said.
