Tory Gattis agrees with me that Perry's veto of the so-called "smart growth" bill was a good idea.
Tory, however, disagrees with me on one point: he thinks TxDOT's control over infrastructure in metropolitan areas is basically a good thing. Tory's point is that our highway system is a network that connects places and therefore needs a "master architect" rather than cities going their own way. Without some form of central control, we'd get NIMBYism run amok and be stuck with the equivalent of planned communities' cul-de-sacs rather than the connectivity of street grids.
I don't think this is right, as long as infrastructure decisions are made at the metropolitan level. Left to themselves, individual cities might indeed seek to shift infrastructure to neighboring cities, which would set off a battle of NIMBYs. But metropolitan areas want to be connected to other metropolitan areas. Their citizens want to be able to get places and good connections are essential to a city's economy. As long as metropolitan areas have control over their roads, they'll have the power to curb NIMBYism.
The better analogy is downtown Houston's tunnels. Developers have linked their office buildings to the tunnel network without central planning. They could have shorted the network by scrimping on their own infrastructure -- by building very narrow tunnels, for example -- but they haven't; later additions have matched the quality of the earlier ones. (Or "had" as of the mid-1990s. I confess I haven't been in the tunnels in 14 or 15 years.)
Local control works just fine as long as we use the right definition of "local."
