WHO SETS THE AGENDA ON HOUSTON TRANSPORTATION? “Who decides Texans will depend on cars?” asks freshly-former Houston Tomorrow director Jay Crossley this week. Crossley notes that several of the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s meetings in the last few months, which collectively mulled over how to use more than $48 billion for transportation projects in the country’s most racially diverse city, were — as is the norm — “overwhelmingly dominated” by white men. “Why does this matter?” Crossley asks, before answering himself: “In the Houston region, there are still some places where non-Hispanic white people are the majority (at 55 percent) — and that’s everywhere that is more than ten miles from a major job center. It should come as no surprise that those low-density, car-dependent areas claim far more than their share of the region’s transportation projects, and that those projects are disproportionately tilted toward people in cars.” Crossley also notes that while long-term plans for the region call for more mass transit, most of the projects actually getting funding in the short term are still going toward car infrastructure. To change things up, Crossley calls for state and local transportation decisionmaking groups to be more open to “women, people of color, and people whose livelihoods don’t involve real estate or cars.” [Houston Chronicle] Photo of office building at 3555 Timmons Ln., where HGAC monthly public meetings are held: Unilev