Lawmakers turned to toll roads to boost the Texas economy and address population growth without raising taxes, but the consequences have adversely affected some drivers.

The Dallas Morning News - By Yamil Berard
May 13, 2024

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Every day, thousands of drivers jump on toll roads to ease their commutes to work and school.

Toll roads overlook international bridges and crossings on the Texas-Mexico border, they connect drivers to airports all over the state and they circumnavigate urban cores by way of loops and tunnels.

Texas has so many toll roads that it has earned the distinction of building more miles than nearly all other states combined. Picture this: If you stretched the state’s 852 miles of toll roads across the eastern U.S., they would pass through 13 states — from Maine to South Carolina, a yearlong Dallas Morning News investigation has found.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

Toll Trap is a three-day series exploring how the state's tollway system impacts drivers across the state. Our investigation found that Texas in the last 20 years has built more toll roads than almost all other states combined. The state also aggressively penalizes drivers with unpaid toll bills - even sending their cases to local courts every day. The state, unlike many others, also offers few discounts to drivers who feel entrapped by the toll roads that surround them. Investigative reporter Yamil Berard and data journalist Shuyao Xiao spent months examining Texas' tollway system. The journalists read thousands of pages of legislative reports, transportation studies, as well as financial statements and audits for toll roads operated by Texas' three largest toll agencies since 1998. They spoke with dozens of urban planning specialists, tollway advocacy groups, public policy researchers and mobility engineers and examined roadway and toll data from state and population density information. They filed and read reports from open records requests and attempted to speak to all 22 members of the House and Senate transportation committees along with Gov. Greg Abbott and other high-ranking current and previous elected state leaders.

Since 2001, Texas has built nearly as many tollway miles as the rest of the US combined

The high concentration of toll roads came about because state leaders disdained higher taxes but needed a way to prepare for an influx of new residents. But now those same roads are adversely affecting drivers all over Texas and are being denounced by some of those same elected officials at the state Capitol, The News’ investigation found.

Toll roads have engulfed some communities, the examination found, making it difficult for residents — especially those who live in middle- to low-income neighborhoods — to avoid them or travel easily without them. They have also brought complaints from motorists and some local judges about excessive fees and unfair treatment by some of the state’s largest toll operators.

Each year, thousands of drivers are hauled into court for unpaid fees. Some have their car registrations yanked and others are sent to jail even when they have proof the fees they were charged are incorrect. These practices make Texas one of the country’s harshest and most unforgiving states for unpaid toll fines, the investigation revealed.

Even more troubling is that the evidence most often used to convict drivers for unpaid toll fees may not hold up in court, several national legal and transportation analysts told The News. That’s because the penalties are based on an image of a vehicle’s license plate and not proof that shows the identity of a car’s driver.

“You have to prove in a criminal case beyond a reasonable doubt that a person drove a vehicle through without paying a toll,” said Lisa Foster, a retired California superior court judge who is now co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, an organization that works to ensure fines are equitably imposed and enforced. “You can’t prosecute a car, you have to prosecute people for doing things illegally.”

These are just some of the findings of The News’ investigation.

Video: How Texas’ explosive growth led to a toll-building spree

Investigative Reporter Yamil Berard breaks down the affordability, safety and management of toll roads throughout the state and in North Texas. See full article to view... 

For its review, The News read thousands of pages of legislative reports, transportation studies and financial statements and audits for toll roads operated by Texas’ three largest toll agencies since 1998. More than two dozen urban planning specialists, tollway advocacy groups, public policy researchers and mobility engineers were interviewed.

The News also examined roadway and toll data from the Texas Department of Transportation and population density information, filed and read reports from dozens of open records requests and attempted to speak with all 22 members of the state House and Senate transportation committees, along with Gov. Greg Abbott and other high-ranking current and previous elected state leaders.

Texas has the most toll operators in the U.S.

Texas toll operators, both public and private, include the North Texas Tollway Authority, the Harris County Toll Road Authority, TxDOT and others.

Among The News’ other findings:

• Texas leads the U.S. in the number of tollway operators — and has 128 toll facilities that include bridges, turnpikes, U.S. routes, interstate highways, expressways, airport connectors, parkways, ship channels, loops, tunnels and turnpikes, according to TxDOT.
• North Texas has more toll facilities than any other region in the state. In Dallas County, toll roads make up nearly one-third of all major thoroughfares. They account for 22% of all roads in Collin County, 17% in Denton County and 16% in Tarrant County, according to toll highway data from TxDOT.
• About 1.4 million people in North Texas live in areas where tollways are within a one-mile radius of their homes and their free road options — often several miles away from their homes — are among the state’s most congested. The concentration of toll roads in the region also disproportionately impacts residents in predominantly moderate- to low-income neighborhoods where the median household income of about $55,000 is less than the state median of $73,035 a year, according to the 2022 American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau.
• North Texas is the epicenter for enforcement action for unpaid fees.
• A disproportionate number of people cited by Texas courts for failure to pay toll fees are Black, even though Black people make up only 13% of Texas licensed drivers, according to an analysis of 10 years’ worth of data voluntarily provided by municipal and justice of the peace courts to the Texas Department of Public Safety and obtained by The News under the Texas Public Information Act.
• In North Texas, tickets for unpaid toll fees now exceed legal cases for other disputes heard in some of the region’s justice of the peace courts and at least two judges told The News that toll operators are often inflexible with drivers with large balances.
• State lawmakers gave up most of their control of toll roads to the private and public entities that own and operate them. That lax oversight has led to at least one major publicly exposed safety risk with fatal consequences. A crash during the February 2021 ice storm where six Texans died on a toll road near downtown Fort Worth was caused by the operator’s failure to monitor and treat the elevated section during freezing rain, as well as a lack of safety coordination between the Texas Department of Transportation and the private tollway operator that owns the North Tarrant Express, according to the final investigative report by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Video: Local lawmaker opposes private toll roads in North Texas

State Rep. Ramon Romero, D-Fort Worth, a member of the House Transportation Committee, explains why he is opposed to private toll roads in North Texas. See full article to view... 

“We were sold a bill of goods,” said state Rep. Ramon Romero, D-Fort Worth, a member of the House Transportation Committee who represents the community that experienced the tragic car pileup, the deadliest in Texas history. “We were just looking for how to find money. We now know that this was the wrong way to do it.”

Yet while he and several other lawmakers told The News they regret approving so many toll roads, there’s a strong chance more will be built.

Texas’ population surpassed 30 million people in 2022 and is expected to reach 47.4 million by 2050, according to state demographer Lloyd Porter of the Texas Demographic Center.

The state is ill-equipped to serve millions of additional drivers in the future without more toll roads, state Rep. Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, told The News.

Earlier this year, Canales urged Texas Speaker of the House Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, to appoint a group of legislators to examine the state’s toll system. If his request is approved, a committee would ultimately make recommendations for potential reforms during the 2025 legislative session.

“It’s the confusion, the great disparity from toll to toll, the various toll setting agencies, the private and public entities,” Canales said. “It’s a whole hodgepodge and there’s no uniformity and that, in and of itself, creates distrust.”

Total tollway miles by state

This represents the length of a given road and is used as the measure of tollway miles in this graphic.

Toll operators, however, emphasize their economic clout.

North Texas Tollway Authority executive director James Hofmann, who declined an interview and then requested questions in writing, said one significant impact of toll roads is the increases in property values nearby. This increase, he wrote, helps local governments collect more tax money to support their communities. From 2007 to 2019, within five miles on each side of NTTA roadways, property values more than doubled to $334 billion, Hofmann wrote, citing an internal study he provided to The News. NTTA owns and operates five toll roads, two bridges and a tunnel used by more than 10 million motorists every year.

“It was an unbelievably great economic development thing,” said Michael Morris, a regional planner who has worked for the North Texas Council of Governments since 1979 and since 1990 has served as director of transportation for the 12-county metropolitan planning organization.

“You’ve got to remember Dallas-Fort Worth is growing at a million people every seven years,” Morris said. “The magnitude of growth, we’re talking 4, 5 million people. Just think of all the infrastructure we need.”

Every vehicle on a toll road is one less vehicle on free congested roadways, and that reduces traffic and congestion, Jori Liu, spokeswoman for the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, said.

People also need to remember that toll roads are a personal choice, she said. Everyone has to pay taxes, she said, but toll fees — they’re optional.

How it started

To understand the state’s tollway system, it’s important to understand why toll roads were ever built.

In the 1950s, people were desperate to find a quick way to connect downtown Dallas to downtown Fort Worth. North Texas leaders knew they couldn’t rely on money from the federal government to build new roads, and they didn’t want to raise taxes to pay for them either.

So the Texas Legislature in 1953 created the Texas Turnpike Authority, an independent entity, to build toll roads and bridges throughout the state.

In 1957, the state’s first toll road was unveiled on what is now Interstate 30, then called the Dallas/Fort Worth Turnpike. Proceeds from the turnpike were later used to build a second toll road, the Dallas North Tollway, in 1968 to connect downtown Dallas to Collin County and northern Dallas to Denton County.

By the 1980s, Houston leaders also wanted to relieve congestion, so Harris County commissioners asked voters to endorse tolls there, and loops of them were built.

A decade later, the Legislature abolished the Texas Turnpike Authority and created a new division within the Texas Department of Transportation. In 1997, a new state law created the NTTA, which received assets from the defunct Turnpike Authority.

Until then, other than TxDOT, only the NTTA in Dallas and the Harris County Toll Road Authority had the power to build tolls, transportation officials told The News.

Caption: Cars drive along the LBJ TEXpress Lanes below I-635 in Dallas, February 8, 2024.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

By the early 2000s, TxDOT had no plans to rehabilitate or expand its highways, and the state didn’t want to raise taxes for transportation needs, said former state Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Austin, who served at the time as head of the House Transportation Committee.

State lawmakers’ concerns about Texas’ transportation issues were growing more serious after news that technology company Dell — then Austin’s largest private employer — planned to expand into a $200 million office and manufacturing facility in Tennessee. Company executives divulged that its headquarters needed to reside in a region with a highway system that ensured speedier deliveries to East Coast customers, according to news reports at the time.

A few years later in 2003, federal law under then-President George W. Bush removed restrictions that blocked governments from using private financing to support infrastructure projects. This opened up opportunities for TxDOT to explore road construction with the private sector.

An overwhelming enthusiasm enveloped the Governor’s Mansion when officials learned that the private sector might be the solution to their transportation woes, Krusee and others said.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry fields questions about the planned Trans Texas Corridor, while visiting the Texas Department of Transportation Office in Tyler, Texas, Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2002. (D.J. Peters / AP)

That’s when Rick Perry, who had assumed the office of governor when Bush was elected president, set his sights on transforming the state into the southwestern economic hub of the U.S., said Bill Miller, a longtime Republican political strategist in Austin.

The way to do that, Perry told lawmakers and the public, was to build toll roads to connect business interests and commerce to the rest of the world.

“It was an explanation that was easy to remember and it had some plausibility,” Miller said.

Perry knew the cost to build roads was more than what the state generated from its motor fuels tax, said Robert Poole, an MIT-educated engineer. Poole met with Texas leaders to discuss partnering with the private sector when he served as director of transportation policy for Reason Foundation, a libertarian research organization in Southern California.

“Congestion was going to just really kill the economic thing if Texas didn’t do some major investments in it,” Poole said.

The deep dive

By the 2000s, tolls were all the rage. Lawmakers passed a frenzy of laws allowing local governments to approve toll roads without permission from the Texas Transportation Commission. That’s also when toll operators were handed the power to criminally pursue drivers for unpaid tolls.

Between 2001 and 2021, Texas built more than 628 miles of toll roads, records show. And with Ric Williamson, appointed in 2004 as chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission, and Perry guiding the way, TxDOT set aside $9 million to market toll roads to the public.

The state also paid for key TxDOT officials to fly all over Europe, including the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Italy, to examine their tollway systems, according to news reports at the time.

“With revenue-sharing, there is always a nervousness that the private sector is going to make money. It will and that’s OK, that’s what we expect,” Phil Russell, then division director for TxDOT, told New Civil Engineer, an industry publication, in January 2007.

Most of the private operators’ deals didn’t involve any state money. Private operators paid the design and construction costs. In return, they collected toll fees on the roads as part of lease agreements they held with the state. The contracts, known as concessions, were for 50 years. After 50 years passed, the contracts stated that private companies would transfer the operation, maintenance and toll collections of the roads back to the state. Texas lawmakers could then decide if they wanted to continue collecting fees. Today, three Texas metropolitan areas have at least one private toll road project with an expiration date beyond 2060.

After he saw so much support for private tolls, Krusee, the Perry ally who served as chairman of the House Transportation Committee at the time, worked to expand them, giving the state’s counties and regions the authority to borrow billions of dollars from investors to build their own.

“I didn’t want to create a monopoly where TxDOT got to decide what your region was going to do,” he told The News. “I wanted every region to determine its own fate.”

In addition to the NTTA in Dallas and the Harris County Toll Road Authority in Houston, eight regional mobility authorities were created in different corners of the state from Central Texas to Cameron, and also in Grayson and Hidalgo counties and Northeast Texas, near the Sulphur River, the Alamo and Camino Real areas, TxDOT records show. Six additional public toll road operators were also created in Waller, Montgomery, Fort Bend, Brazoria, Chambers and Collin counties, TxDOT records show.

North Texas built tollways at a faster rate than any other region in the state

From 2011 to 2022, construction of tollways in the DFW area has outpaced that of Houston and the state as a whole

All of the regional agencies were set up as county toll authorities, and they established their own safety and construction standards. Some counties and cities embellished their toll roads with landscaping, guard rails, art sculptures and provided more visible signage or roadside assistance.

Tollway operators also didn’t overlook the opportunity to lobby for more laws that guaranteed their ability to collect toll revenues. Over a decade beginning in 2001, criminal penalties and other laws were introduced that permitted operators to block vehicle registrations and impound vehicles.

Meanwhile, North Texas — where the private sector built more toll roads than any other region — ended up with more than 100 miles of toll lanes under contracts signed from 2007 to 2016 that raised prices when congestion on the nontolled roads was at its worst.

North Texas has the most toll facilities

Toll facilities include bridges, tunnels, parkways, expressways, roads, turnpikes, ship channels, interstates and highways.

Morris, North Texas’ No. 1 regional planner and an engineer, said the strategy to raise prices on tolled lanes during peak traffic has kept traffic congestion under control.

It was “the D-FW miracle,” he said.

Limited oversight

The enthusiasm for tolls lasted for years, but began to change after some lawmakers realized why toll road companies were so eager to build roads in the state.

“Texas made a mistake,” said former state Rep. Joe Pickett, D-El Paso, who led the House Transportation Committee in 2009 and 2015.

In 2007, lawmakers started voicing strong opposition to the terms of the transportation deals. That included anti-toll activists such as Terri Hall, founder and executive director of Texans Uniting for Reform & Freedom (TURF), a grassroots organization that formed that year to oppose tollways that were not backed by voters.

That year, Cintra — a private toll company — won a bid to build a portion of a new toll road in Collin County.

Under the contract, the company, Madrid-based Cintra (Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte) S.A., offered to pay the state $2.7 billion for the tollway project that would cost roughly $500 million, state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, said. Nichols served as a commissioner for TxDOT until 2006 when he was elected to the Senate and is now chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.

As part of the details of the deals, Nichols said he noticed that the state would be forced to hand over toll revenues for 52 years. That’s when he said he understood why private operators wanted to build toll roads in Texas.

Caption: Taxpayer advocate Terri Hall is the founder and director of both Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom (TURF) and Texans for Toll-free Highways. She has been a vocal supporter for greater transparency in tollway billing and pricing.(Stephen Spillman / Special Contributor)

Said Nichols: “Why would somebody, for a project that’s only going to cost $500 million, why would you write a check for $2.7 billion?

“The answer was the revenue stream over the next 40 years was $34 billion,” he said.

About the same time, he realized that state leaders had overlooked other important contract provisions on previously approved tollway projects — “dirty details,” Nichols called them.

For example, the contract blocked TxDOT from expanding the capacity of nearby free lanes connected to the toll roads and deterred the state for decades from buying the toll roads back from the private companies that built them. In other words, TxDOT would not be able to build additional free lanes to add more capacity for drivers for 52 years.

That provision alone would have been catastrophic for Collin County, one of the fastest-growing counties in Texas, Nichols said.

TxDOT ultimately rescinded Cintra’s bid for construction of State Highway 121, Nichols said.

Another important detail that Nichols and other lawmakers discovered in most of the state’s toll road contracts was their lack of transparency: Most private operators didn’t have to disclose information to lawmakers about their financial or safety records.

A 2014 Texas A&M Transportation Institute study — the last independent comprehensive review of tolls in the state — highlighted that lack of transparency. “In some cases, data were not readily available from public sources or not received from the specific tolling agency,” the study found.

In 2019, state legislators tried to obtain more information by enacting a law to force public toll operators to disclose certain financial documents, including their expense and revenue statements.

However, lawmakers did not have the authority to require all tollway operators to submit their financial statements publicly, The News’ investigation found. For example, 2021 data showing Texas tollway operators collected more than $2.1 billion in toll revenue — of an estimated $19 billion for the U.S. as a whole — does not include revenue from private tollway operators, as well as some public tollway systems, according to the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association.

To add to the gaps in transparency, the state doesn’t collect any data to compare the performance of toll roads, including their costs or vehicle volumes. That would be difficult, according to the authors of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute study, because operators use different methods to calculate their toll revenues. While payment from a driver with a toll tag is recorded in real time, payment from a driver who pays by mail is recorded when that payment is received, according to the study.

Some lawmakers think some of the lax requirements and mandates on toll operators initially were purposeful. As elected officials, they could tell voters who complained that they weren’t responsible for pricing or safety concerns, Pickett said.

Mass casualty wreck on I-35W and Northside Drive in Fort Worth, Texas on Thursday, February 11, 2021. (Lawrence Jenkins / Special Contributor)

Evening commuters use the TEXpress Lanes on I-35W (southbound, center right) where a 130-car crash occurred and six people died in 2021. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

The lack of state oversight surfaced as a significant concern after the deadly crash during the 2021 ice storm. State lawmakers, including leaders of both the Senate and House Transportation committees, said they demanded but were not provided with a copy of video footage that showed the tollway before the crash occurred. They sought the footage to see if the company had protected the toll road and the adjacent free lanes with sand before the crash.

The company that operates the road, North Tarrant Express Mobility Partners, led by Cintra, declined interview requests but in emailed responses executives said they “cooperated in a timely manner” with state leaders, including the governor’s office, after the crash on Interstate 35W.

Through a spokeswoman, Abbott declined to comment and referred questions about the state’s tollway system to TxDOT.

A TxDOT spokesman did not agree to an interview and did not address most of what the newspaper asked in writing. Tolls were seen “as a tool in the funding toolbox to address congestion and mobility issues,” spokesman Adam Hammons wrote.

TxDOT cannot comment on its role in any future efforts at toll reform, Hammons wrote.

“TxDOT is only a resource for the Legislature and is prohibited from lobbying for any legislation,” he wrote.

Looking ahead

Canales and other House members worry that despite what they’ve learned, Texas will soon face the same predicament: not having enough money to build and expand highways as when state officials first approved toll roads to prepare for explosive growth decades ago.

Even with the $6 billion the state collects annually from taxes approved by voters in recent years, it will be short on money for roads for the millions moving to Texas every 10 years, Canales said. He cited a 2023 study by the American Council of Engineering Companies of Texas that says the state is underfunding road construction projects by $8.5 billion a year.

“Texas is in a very dark spot and it’s going to take some very forward-thinking, open-minded people to even begin to dig our way out of it,” Canales said.

In the study he hopes will still launch this year, the committee could require toll operators to provide more insight into how they manage these roads, Canales said.

Another focus could be how to accommodate drivers who live in areas surrounded by toll roads where the free options are either miles away, in the opposite direction or prone to heavy traffic.

For example, The News’ investigation found those who live in Little Elm, The Colony, Hebron and Carrollton and are near the Dallas North Tollway must travel at least 2 miles east toward Frisco to access the free State Highway 289.

For those who commute from Arlington, Fort Worth, Grand Prairie and Irving on State Highway 183 or I-30, drivers can avoid congested roads by heading north to use the President George Bush Turnpike. But if they want to avoid paying, they must continue to drive east about five miles to reach Texas Loop 12, which is notoriously congested.

For residents in Cross Roads, a small town east of Denton, almost every trip south entails a toll. That’s because the fastest way out of the area is the Lake Lewisville Toll Bridge.

Drivers with a toll tag will pay $1.47 — $2.94 without a toll tag — to cross the bridge and it will take them 24 minutes to travel roughly nine miles to Interstate 35E in Hickory Creek, where they can then start the drive south to Dallas or southwest to one of the affluent suburbs of Tarrant County, such as Southlake or Grapevine.

However, a driver who wants to avoid the bridge has to drive north to U.S. Highway 380, west to Loop 288, south to I-35E. Then, they must drive on I-35E to get to the same point in Hickory Creek. The 18-mile drive could take 50 minutes or more during rush hour.

For many drivers, a $1.50 toll to cross a bridge makes a lot of sense — especially if they don’t have to pay it often. It’s why, in hopes of saving time and money, many people across the state invest in toll tags.

Last year, 6.7 million North Texans purchased toll tags, NTTA officials said. Toll tag customers averaged 188 toll transactions in 2022, according to the NTTA.

Those drivers include Demara Morrow, the chief financial officer of a small Dallas millwork company; Shane Hardin, a superintendent of a national construction company with offices in Dallas-Fort Worth; Tom Wilder, the district clerk of Tarrant County, and disabled Army veteran Morris Shepard of Mesquite.

They all have one thing in common: They thought a toll tag would make their lives and commutes easier.

They were wrong.

Part 2: Texas has some of the most aggressive laws in the books for toll violations. It is among only a handful of states that criminalize drivers for unpaid fees and where courtrooms regularly issue arrest warrants over the debts.

Why This Story Matters

Millions of Texans rely on toll roads daily in a state that has built more paid thoroughfares over the past two decades than almost all U.S. states combined. The affordability, safety and management of these roads impact us all, especially as some leaders admit more are likely coming to handle substantial growth throughout the state and in North Texas.