Imagine for a moment that you’re a city exterminator, and for part of your day you breed cockroaches and set them free. That’s one way to look at how DART, the Dallas area's mass transit agency, seems to be using public funds to pay for moving billboards that advertise its own services. Isn’t the mission of DART, at least in part, to relieve congestion and pollution?

The posters over at D Magazine’s Front Burner have spotted trucks with ads promoting the public transportation agency rumbling around the city—and during rush hour in ozone season no less. In a way, it’s a novel idea: What better way to cajole people into riding the bus or train than by making Dallas’ traffic problem even worse?

It might be even a better-than-novel idea if the trucks were shipping equipment/paper/bureaucrats from one part of Dallas to another and the good people at DART had the bright idea to slap some self-promotion on the truck. Here's the problem: The sole purpose of the trucks is to drive around what essentially is a billboard advertising DART.

Oddly, the agency is currently boasting of a record-setting number of riders for the third straight month. So does DART really need to let people know it exists?

The agency’s pollution-spewing publicity stunt merely adds insult to grievous injury after DART last year managed to underestimate the cost of a $1 billion new suburban rail line by — wait for it — $1 billion. (Why is it that Texas agencies seem to run through massive amounts of money with all the care and precision of an Iraqi lawmaker?) Even worse, the agency appears to have taken its time informing its board of directors about its adventures in accounting, which didn’t seem to anger any of the directors. Though two seemed a tiny bit peeved. So there’s that.

DART’s president, Gary Thomas, blamed the cost overrun on inflation, which last time we checked didn’t register at 100 percent. But, continuing with our theme of apathy here, no one in power really called him on it. That's the problem with agencies whose leaders represent so many jurisdictions: Because they're accountable to everyone, they're accountable to no one.

So how exactly does DART plan to scrounge together that additional one billion to pay for its suburban rail?

According to the Dallas Observer’s Jim Schutze, who nearly popped an ulcer trying to obtain tapes of the bureaucracy's public meetings, DART plans to save money by delaying construction of a new rail line in downtown Dallas.

Which brings us back to where we started: The agency clogging up traffic during rush hour with trucks promoting services that it now plans to slash to make up for a project that is running $1 billion over budget. Think about that the next time you're stuck behind a moving billboard. The road rage is on us.