Ben Wear has a nice entry on his Statesmen pseudo-blog about the myth that gas taxes fully pay for highway construction, indicating that in the past, the legislature directly contributed to highway construction from the general fund. Didn't we just pass a five billion dollar general obligation bond for TXDOT? Highways don't pay for themselves, even if you only compare gas tax revenues to construction and maintenance costs. Gas taxes generally pay for less than half of the construction and maintenance costs of any new highway. If you take costs associated with congestion, sprawl and global warming into account, highways look like an even bigger waste....

Travis County added 31,739 residents between July 1, 2006 and July 1, 2007 according to estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. Only eight counties in the country added more, including four in Texas (Harris, Tarrant, Bexar and Collin). On a percentage basis, Williamson and Hays counties were among the fifteen fastest growing counties and Travis was in the top 100....