Tax is often a dirty word in Texas, which might make a recent analysis of the true costs of commuting resonate with Houston area residents since they’re paying the third highest per-worker “sprawl tax” in the country.

In reality, there is no sprawl tax, but that is what Daniel Hertz – a graduate student at the University of Chicago and fellow at the urban think tank City Observatory – calls his analysis of the additional costs not adequately factored into suburban growth and development. Hertz summed up to disparity in a blog post on Thursday.

What if we could quantify some of these same issues from a city-friendly angle—measuring not the cost of congestion, which suggests that the solution is to build highways until every car is free on its own field of asphalt (a solution, by the way, that we know doesn’t work), but the cost of sprawl: of patterns of building that make people travel longer because their home, work, and other destinations are so physically far from each other?

To factor the sprawl tax, Hertz took the average commuting distance in the nation’s 50 largest metro areas and then considered the difference in distance comparing those distances to more densely-developed metro areas. For Houston, where the average commute is 12.2 miles, that’s a 4.7-mile difference from the preferred distance Hertz set.

Based on AAA’s standard for car ownership and operations of 58.1 cents per mile, the added distance Houstonians drive means roundtrip, they’re spending $1,376 more annually than someone with a shorter commute.

Hertz then factored for something studies rarely include when they talk about traveling by car: Value for lost time. With that, figuring someone’s time is worth $15 per hour, Houston’s “sprawl tax” swells to $2,878, behind only Atlanta and Nashville.

"In the 50 largest metro areas, sprawl costs commuters 3.9 billion hours per year, or more than 50 hours per year per commuter,” Hertz wrote. “That means sprawl makes the average commuter spend over two entire days per year traveling to and from work unnecessarily.”

Though Hertz’s work damns Houston – well known for its loose development restrictions and suburban growth – skeptics think some of the scorn is undeserved.

“I object to the label – sprawl tax – because it implies you have no choice (taxes are not voluntary),” said Tory Gattis, co-founder of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, who blogs on Houston development and transportation issues. “In these cases, people are explicitly choosing to live further out, whether for a bigger, more affordable house or better neighborhoods or schools.”

In Houston, where housing prices are increasing in many neighborhoods inside Loop 610, the tradeoff some middle-class workers are making is cheaper, easier transportation close to work, or cheaper housing farther away. Many factors influence that decision along the way.

Gattis, however, noted a reverse-correlation between a low sprawl tax and real estate prices on Hertz’s analysis.

“The big metros that are low on their sprawl costs also have some of the highest housing costs in the country; those people are definitely not living at a lower cost,” he said in an email. “Maybe someone should calculate an ‘urban housing tax’ or ‘smart growth tax’ for metros that restrict new development and push up prices.”