Transportation

For residents across the Greater Houston Area, traffic congestion is rarely just about sitting in a slow-moving line of cars. It can mean leaving home earlier, arriving late to work, missing family time, delaying deliveries or struggling to reach school, medical care and other everyday destinations.

The Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC) is now asking the people who experience those challenges firsthand to help guide the region’s next approach to congestion management.

H-GAC’s 2026 Congestion Management Plan survey invites travelers in Brazoria, Chambers, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, Liberty, Montgomery and Waller counties to share where and how they travel, when traffic is most difficult and what problems they encounter along the way. The online survey takes about 10 minutes to complete and is open to drivers, public transit users, bicyclists, pedestrians and freight operators.

The feedback will become part of a regional planning process intended to identify practical ways to improve how people and goods move through one of the nation’s largest and fastest-changing metropolitan areas.

Why the H-GAC congestion survey matters to residents

Transportation data can show how fast vehicles are moving or how long a roadway remains congested, but it does not always explain how those conditions affect a parent getting to day care, a worker traveling between counties, a small business waiting on a delivery or a resident trying to use transit.

H-GAC officials are using the first round of public engagement to better understand those real-world experiences, including recurring traffic backups, unpredictable delays, difficult intersections, transit access, freight movement and concerns about walking or bicycling.

Public input will supplement technical information already being reviewed by transportation planners. During a June virtual public meeting, project representatives emphasized that local experience can reveal trouble spots that may not stand out clearly in regional datasets, particularly on smaller roads or in rapidly developing suburban and rural communities.

Residents are being asked to help answer several basic but important questions: Where is congestion happening? When is it at its worst? What makes a trip unreliable? Which transportation improvements would make the greatest difference?

Those answers could influence which strategies receive greater attention as the plan moves forward.

Regional travel delays have been increasing

Documents prepared for the Congestion Management Plan show that several important measures of regional traffic performance have worsened in recent years.

The percentage of interstate travel considered reliable declined from 77.8% in 2021 to 65.3% in 2025. During the same period, annual peak-hour excessive delay increased from 13.5 hours per person to 17.9 hours within the Houston urbanized area. Reliability on non-interstate National Highway System roads also declined, although those roads continued to perform above the region’s adopted 70% target in 2025.

Average commute times increased from 28.8 minutes in 2021 to 31.1 minutes in 2024, while the share of commuters driving alone rose from 70% to 72%. Planning documents indicate that single-occupancy vehicle travel remains especially common in outer suburban areas, where transit, carpooling and other transportation choices may be more limited.

The trend matters beyond individual inconvenience. Longer and less predictable trips can affect worker productivity, emergency response, freight costs, air quality and the reliability of services residents and businesses depend on.

The planning team has also found that the region’s five most congested major corridors remained largely unchanged between 2021 and 2025. They include portions of Interstate 610, Interstate 69/U.S. 59, State Highway 288, Interstate 10 and Interstate 45.

At the same time, congestion is not limited to Houston’s urban core. H-GAC’s analysis found that delay increased in outer areas between 2022 and 2024 as population and development continued to spread into surrounding counties.

What is a Congestion Management Plan?

A Congestion Management Plan, often called a CMP, is an ongoing process for measuring transportation performance, identifying congestion problems, evaluating possible responses and tracking whether those responses work.

It is not simply a plan to build more highway lanes.

Federal rules require large urbanized areas to maintain a congestion management process, but the 2026 H-GAC update is being developed as a broader, multimodal effort. The plan considers cars, buses, trains, freight, bicycling and walking as connected parts of the regional transportation system.

Transportation planners generally divide congestion into two categories.

Recurring congestion is the predictable traffic residents may encounter during the morning or evening commute. It can result from bottlenecks, limited road capacity, poorly coordinated traffic signals or heavily used access points.

Non-recurring congestion is caused by less predictable disruptions, including crashes, construction, severe weather, flooding, disabled vehicles and major events. These incidents can turn an ordinary trip into a much longer one with little warning.

The Congestion Management Plan is intended to examine both types.

Possible solutions go beyond building roads

H-GAC’s planning materials outline a wide range of strategies that may be considered as the Congestion Management Plan is developed.

Potential approaches include improving traffic signal timing, clearing crashes and disabled vehicles more quickly, expanding traveler information systems, supporting carpool and vanpool programs, improving transit travel times and creating safer connections for people walking or bicycling.

The plan may also evaluate how transportation investments affect freight movement, air quality, evacuation routes and the region’s ability to recover from hurricanes, floods and other major disruptions.

Safety is expected to play a larger role in the updated plan. Possible performance measures include the number of people killed or seriously injured in crashes, locations with frequent crashes and roads where severe collisions happen most often.

Other proposed measures would examine truck delays, transit ridership, average commute times, access to walkable areas, traffic signal coordination, incident clearance times and the vulnerability of transportation routes to flooding or other emergencies.

The broader goal is not to promise that congestion can be eliminated. In a growing region, traffic demand changes as new homes, jobs, schools, businesses and entertainment destinations open. The planning process instead focuses on making travel safer, more reliable and more efficient with the resources available.

H-GAC coordinates planning across a growing region

The Houston-Galveston Area Council is a regional organization through which local governments cooperate on issues that cross city and county lines.

Its full 13-county service area includes Austin, Brazoria, Chambers, Colorado, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, Liberty, Matagorda, Montgomery, Walker, Waller and Wharton counties. More than 100 cities participate in the organization, along with counties and independent school districts.

H-GAC does not function as a city or county government. Instead, it provides a forum where local leaders can coordinate on shared concerns such as transportation, public safety, economic development, environmental planning and emergency preparedness.

That regional structure is particularly important for transportation. A daily trip may begin in one city, cross multiple jurisdictions and end in another county. Congestion on a highway, freight corridor or evacuation route can affect residents and businesses far beyond the location where the delay begins.

H-GAC’s programs operate under the policy direction of a Board of Directors made up of local elected officials from across the region. Its stated mission is to support cooperation among local governments while promoting orderly development and the safety and welfare of residents.

The Congestion Management Plan focuses on an eight-county transportation planning area within that larger service region.

What happens after the first survey round

The 2026 Congestion Management Plan began with a project kickoff in June.

Round 1 of public engagement is focused on documenting existing transportation conditions, identifying mobility needs and understanding the congestion concerns residents encounter today.

During Round 2, H-GAC plans to present possible congestion management strategies and ask the public which ideas should be prioritized or revised. The project schedule calls for a draft plan by Sept. 30, 2026, followed by a final Congestion Management Plan by Oct. 31, 2026.

After strategies are identified, planners will develop an implementation approach and examine possible funding sources. The final report is expected to provide a framework for future transportation decisions rather than authorize a specific roadway project on its own.

H-GAC has stated that the current study is focused primarily on managing the existing transportation system, not proposing entirely new roadways.

How to take the H-GAC Congestion Management Plan survey

Residents and travelers can complete the survey through the Engage H-GAC website at:

engage.h-gac.com/2026-congestion-management-plan/surveys/h-gac-congestion-management-plan-survey

The survey takes approximately 10 minutes.

Accessible meeting materials, language assistance and interpretation services are available upon request. Questions about the project may be directed to H-GAC Principal Transportation Planner and Project Manager Alan Rodenstein at 713-993-2407 or alan.rodenstein@h-gac.com. 

For people who regularly plan their day around traffic, construction, transit schedules or unpredictable delays, the survey provides an opportunity to place those experiences directly into the regional planning record.

Stay tuned to My Neighborhood News for updates as H-GAC moves into the next phase of the 2026 Congestion Management Plan.

By Tiffany Krenek, My Neighborhood News 

Tiffany Krenek has been on the My Neighborhood News team since August 2021. She is passionate about curating and sharing content that enriches the lives of our readers in a personal, meaningful way. A loving mother and wife, Tiffany and her family live in the West Houston/Cypress region.