For an agency that's spent decades guiding freeway expansion, it was a stark admission for members of the Houston-Galveston Area Council's transportation policy council.

"Future growth and the resulting travel is expected to surpass our ability to meet regional mobility needs by relying solely on increased roadway capacity," the agency's staff wrote.

Facing a future in which 14.2 million people will live in the eight-county Houston area in 2050, transportation planners are proposing a special task force that will work on the region's long-range transportation plan so that high-capacity transit can start to gain a foothold after years - perhaps decades in some cases - without traction in car-crazed Houston.

The regional transportation plan is updated every five years, for a 25-year period. The current plan, approved in 2015, covers until 2040. The next version will reflect plans for highway, transit, bicycle and maritime projects for 2020 to 2045.

Changing congestion: Mobility and more at a crossroads in Houston

Though plans always have some bold transit components - ranging from commuter trains to major expansions of Metropolitan Transit Authority's light rail system - they rarely proceed in earnest.

"Some of them have been in three or four editions of our plan and they are no farther along than they were 15 years ago," said Alan Clark, director of transportation planning for the area council, which acts as the local metropolitan planning organization responsible for doling out federal transportation funds.

The transportation council could approve the creation of the task force at its next meeting on March 24. The current proposal is for the task force to be comprised of transportation board members, transit officials and others, with two co-chairs, one of whom is from transit.

The task force would wrap up its work in August 2018 and hand the findings over to the transportation council and H-GAC staff to help shape the 2045 Regional Transportation Plan.

Clark said the task force will not merely repeat work done in the past by others, such as Metropolitan Transit Authority or the Gulf Coast Rail District - both agencies that have researched commuter rail and its potential connections to other public transit.

The final product, meanwhile, might be less about where exactly mass transit should go and more about what it is going to take for Houston to actually do it. Clark said one stated goal of the task force is a fresh assessment of what demand exists and is likely to exist for transit and what are the realistic costs of building it versus the benefit.

"We are not going to take that for granted," Clark said. "We are going to try to quantify what that investment might be."

After years of investment in new light rail lines, the Houston area doesn't have more money for rail. Metro officials have said they are exploring options, as they begin work on their own regional transit plan, also a long-term look at possible rail and bus rapid transit options.

Whatever is chosen, Metro chairwoman Carrin Patman said the agency will likely go back to the voters for permission to spend more money. Patman said she didn't want to rule out a 2017 election, noting many voter-approved portions of Metro's 2003 referendum remain incomplete.

"We didn't ever have enough money to do it all," she said.