Texas
Texas drivers vexed by toll road payment problems got little relief from state lawmakers
/static.texastribune.org/media/files/8d087223f7011e439d076858b1b20d9d/1217%20Toll%20Roads%20SK%20TT%2001.jpg "Texas drivers vexed by toll road payment problems got little relief from state lawmakers")
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Robert Witchel carefully avoids toll roads every time he drives from his home in Northwest Travis County to the Veteran Affairs clinic in Southeast Austin.
His way takes him half an hour longer — sometimes even an hour with traffic — but he swore off pay roads about five years ago, ever since he racked up about $600 in unpaid tolls and late fees he says he didn’t owe.
Despite having a TxTag electronic sticker issued by the Texas Department of Transportation for automatic toll payments, he wasn’t told for more than a year that his account was not being charged. It took several calls to customer service to find out that his payment method was outdated. In the end, he paid $120 to settle the debt and decided to leave Texas’ toll road system forever.
“It’s a scam,” said Witchel, a U.S. Coast Guard veteran.
For years, Texas drivers like Witchel have complained about toll payment problems like double billing, rejected automatic payments, erroneous charges and invoices with hundreds of dollars in late fees and fines. Toll authorities have acknowledged issues and solved some of them, but others have persisted.
Lawmakers have been hesitant to intervene in the state’s toll road system, a mishmash of agencies and contractors that generates more than $2 billion a year and has improved mobility in Texas’ largest metropolitan areas, but often forces drivers to pay to get from one point to another — and deal with the frustration of an unexpected bill.
During this year’s regular legislative session, lawmakers filed at least nine toll-related bills, including proposals that sought to cap fines and fees, eliminate misdemeanor charges for delinquent users and make toll roads free to use once the bonds issued to build them are repaid. Only one of those bills, House Bill 2170, became law. It requires toll entities to notify users with electronic tags when an automatic payment is rejected. The law takes effect Sept. 1.
The Texas Department of Transportation and the North Texas Tollway Authority said they took no official position on the failed toll-related bills discussed during the session.
Activist groups that seek reforms to the state’s toll roads say the new law will be an improvement, but they expressed frustration with the lack of a statewide limit on how high fees and fines can go. Toll operators, for their part, say they are receptive to user experience issues, but in the past they’ve argued for keeping harsher penalties to deter nonpayment. Transportation experts say regional authorities also resist changing how they operate toll roads because they’re a reliable economic resource that helps pay for other mobility improvements.
Fees, fines and the Texas Legislature
Texas has a fragmented tollway system. TxDOT operates 13 out of the 42 toll roads in the state, not counting border crossings and bridges or High Occupancy Vehicle lanes. The rest are managed by county or regional toll authorities, which are independent government agencies responsible for building, operating and maintaining certain roads in their jurisdiction. They can issue bonds to build roads and recoup the cost through tolls, or they can partner with a private company that pays for part or all of the building costs in exchange for a profit from future tolls.
The biggest toll entities in the state are TxDOT, NTTA in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Harris County Toll Road Authority in the greater Houston area and the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority in the Austin metropolitan area. Some of them, like TxDOT, NTTA and HCTRA, issue their own electronic tags. Most of these tags can be used on any toll road in the state.
When a car with an electronic tag passes through a toll booth, an automatic charge is made to the user’s account. If the payment is rejected, the toll entity sends an invoice by mail. However, many drivers have complained that they didn’t receive their bill on time or that they didn’t know they owed any money because of a problem with their automatic payments. And if they don’t pay on time, late fees start accruing and may lead to bills of hundreds of dollars.
HB 2170, the only toll-related law passed this year, requires each toll entity in the state to notify users immediately by mail, email or text message when a payment is rejected. It also mandates toll entities to send the invoice by mail with a clear message outside the envelope indicating it contains a bill that must be paid.
“The public is not adequately notified that these hidden fees are getting into these bills,” said Rep. Bobby Guerra, D-Mission, who authored the bill. “They only know that they take their toll and all of a sudden they’re getting all these crazy bills and they are outrageous.”
The legislation received bipartisan support because it was the least controversial of the toll-related proposals filed this year, Guerra said. Other proposals failed to garner sufficient support because they affected the state’s tolling business model more directly, he said.
One of the failed bills was Senate Bill 316, authored by Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, and supported by Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom, a group critical of the state’s tolling system.
The bill would’ve capped late fees to $6 per invoice and $48 over a 12-month period. The Legislature passed a similar law in 2017 capping late fees to the same amount, but it affected only tolls managed by TxDOT. This resulted in varying fee criteria among toll entities, sometimes subjecting drivers to different rules when moving within the same city.
In the Austin area, for example, there are five toll roads managed by TxDOT and six by CTRMA. Since 2017, TxDOT has charged a $4 late fee per invoice, less than the cap by law. By contrast, the CTRMA charges a $15 late fee per invoice. According to CTRMA’s website, a driver may face a bill of up to $550 in fees and fines, plus the unpaid tolls, after 120 days of nonpayment.
Following the approval of the 2017 law, now-suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a nonbinding opinion saying the cap should apply to all tolling entities, but some like CTRMA and NTTA did not adopt it. When the law went into effect in 2018, CTRMA’s then-executive director Mike Heiligenstein told news station KXAN-TV that he agreed there should be some sort of cap on late fees but preferred to keep an amount that was “painful enough” to incentivize people to pay tolls.
SB 316 also would’ve eliminated misdemeanor charges for nonpayment, reduced them to civil offenses and capped fines to a maximum of $25 per unpaid toll. Under current law, a toll user can face criminal charges after 120 days of late payment. And drivers who accumulate 100 or more unpaid toll charges within a 12-month period can be listed as habitual violators. This might block drivers from renewing their vehicle’s registration or ban them from toll roads. A car that circulates on a toll road it has been banned from may be impounded.
TxDOT said in a statement it has not filed a misdemeanor case with the courts since 2017.
Terri Hall, founder and director of Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom and no relation to Bob Hall, applauded the passage of HB 2170 but blamed toll entities for stopping SB 316.
“The entities don’t even try to reach out to drivers and tell them that there’s a problem because they have a financial incentive to let all those fines and fees start backing up,” Terri Hall said. “They can make tons of money off drivers by having this problem happen.”
House Bill 3843, which would’ve instructed the Texas A&M Transportation Institute to conduct a study of the state’s tolling entities focused on billing practices, error rates and customer complaints, also failed during this year’s regular lawmaking session.
Other failed toll-related bills include a moratorium on tolls for one year, a discount program for seniors and a proposal to eliminate tolls once tolling entities have earned enough to pay off the bonds they issued to build those highways. A similar bill to eliminate tolls also failed in 2021.
“Working hard to fix bugs”
Tolling entities said they have improved their services in recent years.
In NTTA’s case, customer service was the key, said Arturo Ballesteros, the entity’s director of government affairs. Ballesteros said NTTA had already implemented most of the measures in HB 2170 before the law passed, although it needs to further improve its text message notification system. One of the most recurring problems reported to NTTA was failed payments when users’ credit or debit cards expired. That was solved when banks started renewing cards automatically, he said.
TxTag has also been criticized by users and lawmakers for billing problems. Since 2013, it has changed software vendors multiple times and fined two of them for failing to comply with the terms of their contract.
In 2020, TxTag implemented a system upgrade that led to technical problems and user complaints. A year later, TxDOT canceled the contract with the vendor, IBM, and paid back $11.7 million to drivers for overcharges associated with the system upgrade.
TxTag has had problems with technology over the years but has been solving them since getting a new vendor in 2021, according to Randy Machemehl, professor in transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and former director of the university’s Center for Transportation Research.
“Technology is getting better every year,” he said. “TxDOT is working hard to fix bugs.”
TxDOT said it is unaware of any widespread issues currently affecting drivers. TxTag notifies users when a payment is declined and alerts them 25 days before a credit card on file is set to expire via email, text or phone. The agency said that TxTag was already sending out these kinds of notifications before HB 2170 was passed and has made other improvements like hiring more customer service representatives, enabling web chat and providing additional training.
The Central Texas Turnpike System, which handles TxDOT’s toll roads in Austin, has also made improvements to its automated payment system, according to two studies released by the entity. In 2018, more than 600,000 payments with electronic tags were rejected; that number dropped to nearly 90,000 in 2022, representing 0.15% of all TxTag transactions that year.
Still, Machemehl, a self-proclaimed toll supporter, said toll operators should be careful when sending invoices for unpaid tolls. Drivers don’t respond well to receiving a bill for hundreds of dollars as a result of technological errors. Fines are meant for drivers who actually failed to make a payment and should not be sent out when the toll operator’s system made a mistake, he said.
“They should show respect for people,” Machemehl said.
“Its own money machine”
Tolls generate extra resources for regional transportation authorities, which explains why they resist getting rid of them, said Rob Stein, a specialist in urban policy and professor of political science at Rice University.
The current toll system “created its own money machine,” Stein said. “If you build more toll roads, developers and grocery stores will build in those areas. You not only get more people living around the toll but also sales tax revenues and property taxes.”
NTTA made more than $1 billion in tolls in fiscal year 2022, according to financial statements. HCTRA earned more than $800 million in the same period, TxDOT nearly $500 million and CTRMA about $175 million.
The money collected from tolls pays for road maintenance, operation costs and the bonds issued to build them. When private partners help build the roads, profits are also shared with them. And when there is still a surplus, it can be used in non-road projects. The Harris County Toll Road Authority, for example, approved a plan last year to use its surplus to build pedestrian and bike trails in the county.
Tolls were a solution to road expansion underfunding, said Andrew Waxman, a UT-Austin professor and economist who studies the links between environmental outcomes, urban policies and inequality. Waxman pointed out that gas taxes have historically been used to pay for road construction. But those taxes have a flat rate of 20 cents per gallon sold in the state, which means the money that comes from them does not go up with gas prices and is not updated for inflation.
Over time, the funds available for roads have lagged behind construction costs, and the gap has widened as electric vehicles become more popular, Waxman said. In response this year, Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 505, which creates a fee for electric vehicle registration. Money raised from those fees will go into the state’s highway fund and is meant to compensate for the loss of gas-tax collection. The law goes into effect Sept. 1.
Toll roads are also promoted as a way to improve traffic flow, Waxman said.
“The conventional approach to reducing congestion is to add more lanes. The problem with building wider roads … is that the additional space is filled up with more cars,” he said. “Another way to address that is to charge people to use the road, increasing the cost rather than expanding the supply of space. That’s not something that people are very happy to hear.”
Toll roads in Texas continue to expand. According to a 2022 TxDOT report, there are more than 30 toll projects under construction or being planned, which would add about 300 more miles to the nearly 900 miles of toll roads that already exist in the state.
Disclosure: Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority (CTRMA), Rice University, Texas A&M Transportation Institute and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
The full program is now LIVE for the 2023 Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 21-23 in Austin. Explore the program featuring more than 100 unforgettable conversations coming to TribFest. Panel topics include the biggest 2024 races and what’s ahead, how big cities in Texas and around the country are changing, the integrity of upcoming elections and so much more. See the full program.
A classic college football rivalry returns after more than a decade and with plenty on the line as Texas visits Texas A&M on Saturday night. Here’s what the oddsmakers are predicting for the game.
Texas improved to 6-1 in SEC play and stayed atop the conference standings after knocking off Kentucky, and needs to win this game in order to earn a place against Georgia in the SEC title bout.
Likewise for the Aggies, but they’re coming off a four-overtime loss against Auburn that dropped the team to 8-3 overall and 5-2 in conference games.
What do the wiseguys expect as the Longhorns and Aggies meet this weekend?
Let’s check in with the early predictions for Texas vs. Texas A&M in this Week 14 college football game, according to the oddsmakers.
Texas is a 6 point favorite against Texas A&M, according to the updated lines posted to FanDuel Sportsbook.
The book set the total at 48.5 points for the game.
And it lists the moneyline odds for Texas at -230 and for Texas A&M at +195 to win outright.
Texas: -6 (-110)
Texas A&M +6 (-110)
Over 48.5 points: -110
Under 48.5 points: -110
Texas is 6-5 against the spread (54.6%) overall this season …
Texas A&M is 3-8 (27.3%) ATS in ‘24 …
Texas is 2-2 against the spread in road games …
Texas A&M is 2-5 ATS at home …
Texas is 1-4 against the spread in its last 5 games …
A&M is 2-6 ATS in its last 8 home games …
Texas is 4-1 against the spread in its last 5 games played in Week 14 …
The total went over in 5 of Texas A&M’s last 6 games …
The total went under in 6 of Texas’ last 7 games and 7 of its last 9 road games …
A&M is 3-10 ATS in its last 13 games on a Saturday …
A plurality of bettors expect the Longhorns will take care of the Aggies on the road, according to the spread consensus picks for the game.
Texas is getting 63 percent of bets to win the game and cover the narrow point spread.
The other 37 percent of wagers project Texas A&M will either win outright in an upset or keep the game under a touchdown margin in a loss.
The game’s implied score suggests a narrow victory for the Longhorns over the Aggies.
When taking the point spread and total into consideration, it’s implied that Texas will defeat Texas A&M by a projected score of 28 to 22.
Our early pick: Texas A&M +6 … Strange things can happen at Kyle Field under the lights, especially as this intense rivalry game is resurrected, and with so much on the line, so asking for a greater than touchdown margin might be too much, and this is a game the Aggies can outright win.
When: Sat., Nov. 30
Where: College Station, Tex.
Time: 6:30 p.m. Central
TV: ABC network
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Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.
If you or someone you know has a gambling problem and wants help, please call 1-800-GAMBLER.
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Follow College Football HQ: Bookmark | Rankings | Picks
In late October, protestors in Houston watched as officials wheeled a trough out into the middle of St. Emanuel Street and each scooped out a ceremonial shovelful of sand.
The officials were ostensibly there for a symbolic groundbreaking for the North Houston Highway Improvement Project, which will widen or rebuild around 25 miles of Interstate 45 in the heart of Texas’s largest city. For the protesters, though, the bulldozers that loomed in the background of that photo-op were a very real threat of the harm soon to come to St. Emanuel Street, and the estimated 1,079 homes, 344 businesses, five places of worship and two schools that will be razed to make way for the highway.
“Half of that street is going to be gone,” added Erin Eriksen, an organizer with Stop TxDOT I-45. “Half of those businesses are going to be torn down. And TxDOT was basically thumbing its nose at these places that were going to be destroyed because of this project.”
According to official analyses, though, the destruction of St. Emanuel Street and so many like it isn’t enough of an “environmental impact” to justify canceling the I-45 project, even though it will dramatically exacerbate pollution, flooding, and inequality in the disproportionately low income communities of color through which the expansion will largely run.
And that’s probably because the Texas Department of Transportation wrote those official analyses itself.
‘A fox guarding a hen house”
Thanks to a little-known loophole in federal law known as the “NEPA assignment” program, DOTs from Texas and six other states — Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Ohio, and Utah — are temporarily “assigned” the responsibility of conducting what are normally federally overseen environmental assessments (the states must reapply every five years when their authority expires. Texas’s authority expires this year, and members of the Texas Streets Coalition are urging advocates to comment on whether it should be rescinded before Dec. 9.)
In theory, NEPA assignment is supposed to help responsible state DOTs build projects quickly, without having to wait on a single understaffed federal agency to work through a backlog of proposals from across the country before giving the green light on simple repaving or repair. Some argue that it also gives environmentally progressive states an opportunity to conduct an even more thorough analysis than the feds would do on their own.
In car-dominated Texas, though, NEPA assignment is essentially a “fox-guarding-the-henhouse situation” — and its consequences shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, argues Heyden Black Walker of Reconnect Austin.
In Walker’s native Austin, for instance, advocates say that Texas DOT misleadingly “segmented” the expansion of a single intestate known as I-35 into three smaller projects along the exactly same road, hiding the staggering impacts the expansion would have for the region on the whole — and, advocates say, violating federal law. Walker says the “9,000 pages” of official documents about the project also didn’t adequately consider the highway’s impacts on air pollution, and failed to study whether railway investments could address the same problems the expansion was meant to solve.
That the I-35 expansion received even that degree of scrutiny, though, is something of an outlier.
Texas activists found that between 2015 and 2022, only six TxDOT projects receive a full-blown “environmental impact statement,” an exhaustive process that details exactly how the agency will mitigate the harm it will cause. A staggering 130 projects, by comparison, only received a far-simpler “environmental assessment,” all of which resulted in a “finding of no significant impact,” or FONSI, which is pronounced like the shark-jumping character on “Happy Days.”
Cumulatively, though, those “insignificant” projects displaced a stunning total of 477 homes and 376 businesses, and consumed $24 billion. And advocates say that lack of oversight is particularly damning for a state that would rank eighth in the world for carbon dioxide emissions if it were a country, and that polluted nearly twice as much as second-ranked California in 2019.
“The things that NEPA was intended to protect us from — from inordinate displacement, from worse air quality — Texas is failing on all of those metrics,” said Peter Eccles, director of policy and planning at LINK Houston, a transportation advocacy group. “Since TxDOT entered NEPA assignment in 2014, displacements have skyrocketed across Texas, dwarfing the national average in terms of how many households are displaced for freeway projects, as well as the number of counties that are no longer in attainment for criteria pollutants. … It’s not working as intended.”
If the federal government was conducting the NEPA process, advocates argue that Texas might face stricter parameters for what constitutes a “significant” impact of a highway project, rather than letting the state write off families losing their homes and residents getting sick as unfortunate but necessary evils. And maybe, bad projects might even be stopped before they start.
“TxDOT is setting up its own environmental reviews, setting its own parameters, and then self-grading its own performance by the parameters that it sets,” said Bobby Levinski, an attorney with the Save Our Springs Alliance. “And we don’t have that federal oversight that used to exist where, if you did have a disagreement over what the current state of the science is, [you might have] a technical expert at the federal level who could say, ‘No, you didn’t quite do a good enough job looking at, say, this air quality aspect.’
“That check no longer exists,” he continued. “And at the end of the day, they’re going to give themselves an ‘A.’”
NEPA Assignment Under Trump
Levinski and the rest of the coalition acknowledge that some might be wary of handing environmental power back to the federal government — especially with Trump returning to the White House.
Project 2025, which many believe will serve as the incoming president’s playbook, promises to restore regulations limiting environmental review that Trump put in place the last time he was in office, as well as “frame the new regulations to limit the scope for judicial review of agency NEPA analysis and judicial remedies.”
Advocates in Texas, though, say they’re already living in a world where NEPA has been badly watered down — and because of their state’s special authority, Washington was powerless to intervene. Restoring federal oversight, they argue, is a critical first step to making things right, followed by voting in a presidential administration that takes NEPA seriously.
“Here in Texas, we’ve been facing basically a mini-Trump administration, anyway, with our governor,” said Katy Atkiss, facilitator for the Texas Streets Coalition, referring to Gov. Greg Abbott. “He appoints the Texas Transportation Commission, which is basically five old white men — none with transportation experience. So I feel like we’ve been working in a similar environment anyway. We’ve had several conversations with DOT and other federal representatives throughout the course of of the year, and while they are extremely sympathetic, basically, they said, ‘We believe you, but there’s nothing we can do.’”
Until Texas’s NEPA assignment is revoked, all advocates can do is sue to stop bad projects — though with the president picking many of the judges, that’s an increasingly bleak prospect, too.
“With Trump being in office, the courts aren’t getting easier either,” added Levinski. “[And] making the public be the enforcer of NEPA, I think, puts a big onus on the residents of Texas to go up against the giant Goliath that is TxDOT on every single case. … We need some sort of measure of oversight. You can’t just write off the entire state of Texas.”
The members of the Texas Streets coalition acknowledge that getting their state’s NEPA assignment revoked won’t be easy — and if it can’t be done, they hope USDOT will at least make some common-sense changes.
The state might still be allowed do its own environmental assessments, but not on massive highway projects that displace hundreds of residents. The feds also might force the DOT to wait at least 30 days to collect public comment after they make changes to their plans, or submit to “an annual NEPA compliance audit” to ensure they’re not flouting federal laws. At a minimum, they could acknowledge that granting states like Texas the ability to do their own environmental review even as they’re suing to hide their greenhouse gas emissions from the public seems like a pretty obvious flaw in the system.
At the end of the day, though, advocates say we need to address the shortcomings of NEPA itself, which still doesn’t factor in the power of induced demand — and still offers all states too many opportunities to build destructive highways, even when the federal government is grading their projects.
“I think that NEPA assignment and its abuses by TxDOT are a symptom of the larger failings of NEPA as a whole,” added Eccles. “NEPA was very well intentioned at the time [it was written], but certain states like TxDOT have gotten very good at gaming it to rubber stamp projects that they want to do regardless. Contrast that with the NEPA burden that the Federal Transit Administration puts on transit projects; it’s much more rigorous, and it ends up slowing down those projects significantly. We need to have a clearer picture of what projects benefit the environment and which projects harm it.”
State Rep. James Talarico on school choice fight
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is confident that school choice legislation will pass during the next legislative session, but Democrats say they won’t roll over without a fight. FOX 7’s Rudy Koski talks to vocal voucher opponent State Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, about the fight ahead and if there is room for common ground.
When the Texas Legislature gavels in a new session this January, we will see another round in the battle over school vouchers.
Earlier this month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott held a news conference claiming victory on the issue. Abbott says he has the votes to pass vouchers, which has become one of his legislative priorities.
Abbott actively campaigned against rural Republicans who opposed his school voucher plan in the previous legislative session.
“There was a tidal wave of support for those House candidates that I supported,” the governor said. “We will ensure that every parent has the right to choose the school that is best for their child.”
Gov. Abbott says he has 79 solid votes for school vouchers. A bill needs 76 votes to pass the Texas House.
Voucher opponents, like State Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, are not giving up the fight.
State Rep. James Talarico
Talarico talked with FOX 7’s Rudy Koski about the upcoming debate and if compromise on the issue is possible.
State Rep. James Talarico: “I think the fight to save public education will be the number one issue in the next legislative session. A majority of the counties in the State of Texas don’t have a single private school in them and the cost of the voucher doesn’t even cover the full cost of tuition at most private schools in Texas, so working class families, like the ones in my district, or my former students on the west side of San Antonio, they can’t take advantage of this voucher scam, and so instead the vast majority of the money will end up going to wealthy families who are already sending their kids to private school.”
Rudy Koski: “The governor has spent the last several months doing what some would describe as a revenge tour, going after rural Republicans who were part of this pro-education, bipartisan blocking coalition. They are gone. You have lost them. He says he has the numbers. Are you throwing up the white flag?”
Rep. Talarico: “Not at all. We didn’t lose all of them, despite the onslaught of big money and big lies into these Republican districts you still had pro-public education Republican legislators survive and are coming back to the Capitol this session. I’m thinking about Drew Darby and Stan Lambert and Gary VanDeever, despite the victories that the governor may have scored in this election cycle, this should not be mistaken for a mandate on private school voucher scams. The governor didn’t campaign on vouchers. The majority of Texans, according to the latest polling, reject private school voucher scams.”
Rudy Koski: “Is there ground for compromise in this debate?”
Rep. Talarico: “I think a voucher is bad public policy no matter how you cut it. I will never support a voucher scam, but if my colleagues in the House, Republicans and Democrats, if we can all agree that we need to fully fund our neighborhood public schools, then I will work with anyone to make that a reality.”
You can watch Texas: The Issue Is every Sunday night on TV and anytime on FOX LOCAL.
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