Under a bill filed by state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, self-driving cars like the one Google drove around Texas last month would have to have a licensed driver behind the wheel and meet minimum insurance requirements.

State Sen. Kevin Eltife, R-Tyler, wants Texas voters to approve a constitutional amendment to temporarily increase the state sales tax to pay off the Texas Department of Transportation's debt.

Grissom begins a gripping series on mental health and criminal justice, Hamilton and White on the Senate’s defense of UT-Austin, Murphy’s interactive look at public school test scores, Ramshaw finds the governor digging in on the Medicaid expansion, Rocha and Dehn visit a weapons maker with Ted Cruz, M. Smith explores another angle on unpopular standardized testing, Batheja on a car that drives right past state laws, Aguilar reports on the other immigration problem, Aaronson on a break in the race for a cancer cure: The best of our best for the week of February 18-22, 2012.

A Google self-driving car drove itself around Austin and across Texas over the last week. State laws don't yet appear to address the futuristic technology.

The speaker of the House dampens expectations for vouchers, tax breaks and transportation without ruling any of those things out. And the lieutenant governor unpeels another layer of problems he says arose from a campaign manager's embezzling.

A planned interstate highway stretching from South Texas to Michigan remains decades away, but Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday that lawmakers should find more money for the project and ones like it.

The Texas Department of Transportation is taking proposals for privatizing its information technology system, part of a larger movement by the agency toward outsourcing many of its functions.

Ongoing school finance litigation will likely prevent the Legislature from discussing education funding issues this session, two Republican budget leaders said at a TribLive event Thursday. 

In search of new revenue for road construction and maintenance, Texas lawmakers are weighing whether to raise fees on electric cars, a move that is gaining ground in some other states.

Momentum is growing for Texas lawmakers to commit large amounts of money to address the state's long-term infrastructure needs, particularly water and transportation.

An upcoming expansion of the Panama Canal will boost Texas exports but not do as much for imports, according to a report commissioned by the Texas Department of Transportation.  

Drought, oil and gas production, fast lanes and toll lanes made headlines in 2012 in the Tribune. Here's a look back at the year's biggest stories on energy and the environment and transportation.

TIFIA, a popular transportation-focused federal loan program, has $17 billion ready to dole out and Texas is jumping at the chance to tap billions of dollars in credit.

For this week's nonscientific survey of insiders in government and politics, we asked about big-ticket infrastructure issues — whether lawmakers will approve any of them and where they might look for money. 

Already a fixture in Houston, toll lane projects are set to spread to cities across Texas. Officials in urban areas say the lanes are a key way to address congestion, but some deride the projects as "Lexus lanes."

Amid a lack of public financing to meet the state's transportation needs, Texas officials are increasingly looking to toll projects, some boosted by investments by private firms. 

Before anything can be done on transportation funding, What constitutes a budget diversion? Is a fee increase the same thing as a tax hike? The debate over transportation funding next session could hinge on how  

More cities in Texas are passing texting-and-driving bans, but some say such laws are ineffective and infringe on personal freedom.