Former TTC Chair David Laney calls for Multimodalism
Laney called traffic gridlock in Texas cities “a permanent condition” that “threatens our state’s principal urban economies. “Texas won’t successfully move into the future on roads and highways, but must adopt other modes of transportation to move people and products, state lawmakers were told Thursday. “We must be more innovative,” former Texas Transportation Commission Chairman David Laney told the Senate State Affairs Committee.
Laney, appointed last month to the Amtrak board by President Bush, acknowledged that the Texas-Mexico borders bad roads and bad infrastructure are “unique” and that his advice “is not intended to disregard their needs.” But his pitch was clearly to direct transportation planning and funding to larger urban areas, primarily Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. Highways in those cities have reached capacity, he said, adding that by 2025 60 percent of the state’s population will live in those urban centers. “We’re doing the entire state a disservice by not adequately investing in our urban transportation systems,” Laney said.
And Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Dallas, who chaired the hearings here Thursday, called the transportation woes in Texas a “crisis,” and said lawmakers and policymakers need “to not only focus on highways.”
Sen. Kenneth Armbrister, D-Victoria, had a contrary view. “Texans still like pickup trucks,” he said, adding that calls for alternate forms of transportation amount to a “build it and they will come” theory. The political reality, he said, is “what gets support is what people want.”