A report from the Heritage Foundation Transportation and Smart Growth division reveals that Texas has been the greatest overall loser. On average for the past fifty years, Texas has received on average less than $0.80 per dollar submitted to the highway trust fund.

Texas Biggest Loser

While recent years have seen a slight improvement over that average, Texas still only received less than $0.84 on the dollar in 2005.

Allocations to the states are based on a formula that attempts to measure need based on qualitative measures, such as miles of road and number of licensed drivers, resulting in the transfer billions of dol­lars from states in the South and the Midwest to the Northeast, the Mountain West, and Alaska.

Ronald Utt, the report’s author, noted that a “perverse consequence of the donor- donee misallocation is that most states on the losing end are experiencing above-average population growth rates and thus have a greater need to build new roads because of the increasing numbers of motorists. By contrast, winner states are generally experiencing below-average population growth and thus need fewer new roads.

Between 2000 and 2006, the U.S. population grew 6.3 percent, while among donor states, Texas’s population increased by 12.9 percent, South Carolina experienced a 7.7 percent increase, and Georgia’s population increased by 14.4 percent.”