If you have driven anywhere in the city of Denton over the past few years, you have noticed it. Orange barrels. Lane closures. Freshly churned earth where sidewalks used to be. Here is my opinion, formed by watching this city tear itself apart and rebuild wider: we are committing more than $1 billion to projects that will worsen our air quality, and we are doing it while congratulating ourselves for having a climate plan.
The scale is hard to overstate. A $583 million I-35 widening that runs through January 2029. A separate $584 million I-35E/W Split project will span nearly five years. Denton County has allocated another $295 million from a road bond for roughly 120 additional projects since 2023. All told, state and county agencies have committed more than $1.4 billion to major road projects affecting Denton—work that will reshape the city’s streets well into the next decade. The justification is familiar: Denton’s population has grown about 26 percent since 2020, and the roads must keep up. Addressing that growth often requires immediate capacity improvements, even as longer-term solutions are harder to implement.
In August 2024, Denton adopted its first Climate Action Plan, committing to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. It is, in many ways, an admirably honest document. It identifies transportation as the single largest source of community emissions, 53 percent of the total, and states plainly that getting people to drive less matters more than switching to electric vehicles. Passenger cars account for more than 85 percent of all driving in the city. The plan knows what the problem is. The construction program unfolding across the city reflects a different set of priorities.
Denton’s predicament is not unique; it is a local expression of a statewide structural problem. During the 89th session last year, the Texas Legislature allocated $39.9 billion to TxDOT for the current 2026–2027 biennium, marking the largest transportation budget in the state’s history—with state law requiring that nearly all of it flow to roads. A proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed highway funds to be directed toward transit-oriented projects was left pending in a House subcommittee and did not advance. Meanwhile, the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act—nicknamed the Deathstar bill—has narrowed the space cities have to pursue local policy that departs from state priorities. (The law is currently being challenged in court by the cities of Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso). The state builds most of the roads. It also limits many of the alternatives available to cities. Municipalities like Denton are left to write climate plans against a structural current they did not create and cannot redirect alone. Much of this reflects long-standing state funding structures and rapid population growth, rather than any single policy decision. And the research makes clear that the current runs in one direction: toward more driving, not less.
The research on this is unambiguous. Adding road capacity leads to more driving, not less congestion—a well-documented phenomenon called induced demand. New lanes make driving cheaper and more convenient, so more people make more trips. Traffic fills the new space. Studies consistently find that a 10 percent increase in highway capacity produces roughly 10 percent more driving within a decade, canceling out congestion relief and generating additional emissions. And more sprawl means more car ownership, longer commutes, and higher household transportation costs for the families who can least afford them. Transportation research has documented this dynamic for decades, yet public investment still tends to favor expansion.
This is not an abstract debate for those of us who live here. Denton sits inside a metro area that ranks third in the world for transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions and already violates federal air quality standards for ground-level ozone, the pollutant that triggers asthma attacks and sends children and the elderly indoors on bad air days. By June 2025, the region had already recorded six unhealthy ozone days. Nor is this a distant policy concern: It is a daily public health reality. More driving means more ozone-forming pollution in a region already struggling to meet federal air standards.
The tension does not live only on the construction sites. In July 2025, just months after the Climate Action Plan was adopted, the City Council directed its utility to explore a new natural gas plant. Mayor Gerard Hudspeth said he did not see 100 percent renewables as a goal of the plan. Energy planning, like transportation, often involves balancing reliability, cost, and long-term sustainability. The city’s own Climate Action Plan cites research showing that compact, walkable development reduces household costs, emissions, and infrastructure spending—yet the dashboard shows transportation improvements at only 30 percent completion, the slowest of the three goal areas. Denton wrote a plan that diagnosed the problem correctly. Then it kept doing the thing the plan warned against.
Population pressure is real, and much of this construction is driven by state and county decisions Denton cannot fully control. But the city still holds levers it is not using. It can prioritize sidewalk and trail funding at the same urgency it funds road bonds. It can align development approvals with transit access rather than car dependence. And it can ensure that its positions on state-level highway expansion are consistent with its net-zero commitment.
That choice has a concrete cost. Ground-level ozone—the pollutant that keeps children and the elderly indoors on bad air days—is already a documented crisis in this region, and every additional lane mile compounds it. The Climate Action Plan already identifies the tools needed to change course. The question is how consistently those tools are applied in practice. The orange barrels will eventually come down. The question is whether Denton will use the years of construction ahead to make different choices, or simply wait for the next plan to also go unread.
The post Denton Promised Net Zero. Then It Kept Building Roads. appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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