Texas Offers Practical Transportation Lessons For The U.S. (From InsideSources DC Journal)

The full text of this article is available below and in InsideSources DC Journal at the link here.

With travel in America becoming increasingly challenging and congested, it is important to find timely, practical solutions. Texas offers clear and intriguing lessons why expanded air transportation is a compelling alternative to often glamorized high-speed rail.

According to the Texas governor’s office, the state’s population increases by 1,500 people daily. After growing faster than any other state over the last two decades, it is now the second-most populous. Texas has added $1 trillion to its gross domestic product over that time. However, the state also faces some serious challenges as it attempts to accommodate millions of new residents.

Transportation infrastructure, especially within the Texas Triangle (Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin-San Antonio), is one of its most significant challenges. The I-35 and I-45 corridors, connecting Dallas-Fort Worth with Austin-San Antonio and Houston, respectively, are driving nightmares.

More than 50,000 people travel the road between Houston and Dallas daily. Texas Department of Transportation’s North Houston Highway Improvement Project estimates there are 39 million person-hours of traffic delays annually. The project broke ground in 2024 and has a $13 billion price tag.

Understandably, there have been many companies attempting to solve the Texas Triangle’s regional transportation problem. The market, with 150,000 daily intercity travelers, generates serious interest for those who believe they can devise automobile-alternate transport modes.

The decade-and-a-half Texas Central Railway  project provides unique insight into the scale and difficulty of the problem. The original rail company was founded in 2009 under the thesis that a Japanese-style bullet train could cut the travel time from three and a half hours (of driving) to 90 minutes. The initiative garnered significant support, including from Gov. Greg Abbott.

The high-speed rail line would have been built with elevated grade separation, eliminating the need for intersections and allowing trains to travel 200 mph. The initiative raised hundreds of millions of dollars before construction.

However, as the rail program progressed, cost estimates for the Texas Central Railway ballooned to more than $30 billion. The rail line had become a 240-mile-long viaduct. Artificially adding a new dimension to travel is not easy or cheap. As costs rose, the Trump administration withdrew support, effectively killing the program.

Fortunately, for Texas, there is another option. One that does not come with a $30 billion pricetag or extreme legal and engineering complications. Only one human invention has efficiently brought travel solutions into a new dimension: the commercial airliner.

The Texas Triangle’s sprawling urban centers, combined with flat geography, provide ample space for airfields and air infrastructure. There are already three major expansions happening at the DFW,  Austin-Bergstrom, and San Antonio airports, adding 70 gates in total.

These airport expansions require no new physical infrastructure between runways. Air travel, by definition, uses grade separation. It does so at 10 times the speed of automobile traffic and over twice the speed of bullet trains. The cost-effectiveness of air infrastructure compared to rail is apparent; it is the difference between building a two-mile concrete runway or thousands of miles of rail line.

Air travel has obvious strengths in speed and infrastructure, but many wrongly believe it has a commensurate weakness in efficiency. They base this judgment almost exclusively on the high fuel consumption of aircraft. What they are missing is the key metric: passenger miles per gallon, or PMPG. It is calculated by multiplying the vehicle’s miles per gallon by the number of passengers it carries. This measures vehicle efficiency per traveler.

For example, the Boeing 737, the most prolific American commercial airliner, gets less than 1 mile per gallon. However, because it holds 200 passengers, it achieves more than 100 PMPG. Yes, the “gas-guzzling” airliner doubles the PMPG of a Toyota Prius with its typical lone commuter. This is one reason Southwest Airlines, the world’s largest 737 operator (founded and headquartered in the Texas Triangle), can keep ticket prices low.

In infrastructure costs, speed and per-passenger fuel costs, air travel dramatically outperforms cars in all categories. It outperforms rail in all but fuel costs. Because the airline industry is highly competitive, unlike rail services, these low operational costs translate directly to lower ticket prices for passengers.

Commercial air travel is a better intercity transport solution than any other mode, in Texas and nationwide. Demand for commercial airliners will continue to increase as the population in the Texas megaregion surges.