© 2008 The Associated Press
April 5, 2008
AUSTIN — A crowd marched through the heart of downtown Austin to the state Capitol on Saturday to protest Gov. Rick Perry's plan for 4,000 miles of toll roads across Texas.
The Trans-Texas Corridor, a proposed network of superhighway toll roads, rankles opponents who characterize it as the largest government grab of private property in the state's history and an unneeded and improper expansion of toll roads.
Rally participants carried signs with slogans like "No TTC!" and "Whodoes TTC benefit?" while listening to the band the Texicans play "The Trans-Texas Corridor Blues," the Austin American-Statesman reported for its Sunday editions.
"In a nutshell, we are against it because of the devastation it's going to cause rural and urban landowners, the effect it will have on the middle class and the consequences it will have on our liberty," said Hank Gilbert of Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom.
Texas Department of Transportation officials and Perry have defended the project as necessary to address future traffic concerns in one of the nation's fastest-growing states. They also say the project is vital because of insufficient road revenues from the state gas tax and the federal government.
Cost of the project has been estimated at approaching $200 billion, and it could take as long as 50 years to complete.
Supporters of the corridor and toll roads say they are the only way the state's growth can be accommodated without hiking gasoline taxes.
"Texans need and deserve real solutions to our growing traffic challenges, not just blind opposition to new lane and highway construction," said Bill Noble, a spokesman for Texans for Safe Reliable Transportation, a pro-toll roads group. "Every day we delay building new roads means higher construction costs and more frustration for drivers."
Texans protest TxDOT's plans for corridor, tolls
Trans-Texas Corridor PING!
Money phrase, “Who does it benefit?”..
What a mile deep pile of horse s—t. How many hundred million or billion gallons of gas do Texas citizens buy each year? Each gallon garners at least $0.50 cents in transportation dollars, perhaps a lot more. Let’s remember that gasoline is probably taxed several times along the say to the pump, where it is taxed again.
Yes large highway projects cost billions, but the state doesn’t have to sit down and draft a check for the project in advance. It can pay as it goes, and borrow upon future tax revenues. Ten, twenty or even thirty years of taxes will buy you a awful lot of highway.
I’m here to tell you, these super highway corridors are going in if they have to be built over the grave sights of tens of thousands of Texans in the process.
And you folks thought this was representative government, answerable to the people.
LMAO
Welcome to reality. We’ve lost major portions of our representative government, and are losing more every day.
It’s time for the sheeple to ban together and speak with a unified voice when it comes to nonsense like this.
Why should we build a massive corridor so that Chinese goods can be offloaded at Mexican ports, just so we can put more U.S. citizen out of work? Honest to God folks, where does it end.
I’ve certainly had enough. Has anyone else?
U. S. politicians, U. S. corporations, the Mexican government and Mexican citizens to the citizens of Texas...
“All your corridors are belong to us.”
Here’s the problem, plain and simple:
Among TXDOT’s stated goals are to decrease pollution and congestion. Yet these corridor plans condense traffic, causing just the opposite to happen.
We need to DISPERSE traffic across Texas rather than continuing to CONDENSE traffic in the same areas, particularly DFW.
I-35, for example, is crowded and unpleasant to drive. In many areas, it has reached capacity. Vehicles driving north on I-35 are all sent through DFW.
I’d like to see honest statistics on how many of those vehicles actually are headed to DFW and how many are just going through there because it’s the only freeway that takes them where they want to go.
A driver who wants to get from San Antonio or Austin to Oklahoma City could get there just as easily if there was a good road to Wichita Falls. Same with Houston to Tyler on the way to Tulsa.
Oklahoma already has turnpikes that start at the Texas border at Wichita Falls and Paris/Hugo. TXDOT should link to them.
West Texas is underserved. Towns there would grow and keep industry and their schools if they had highways.
But because of all the lobbying, hollering, demanding, and yammering from business interests in DFW, all roads are built through or around the same old spot. And North Texas continues to get too much traffic and too much pollution, federal air quality sanctions, congestion, headaches.
Our state is being raped, skewered, to serve international shipping interests. It is not to benefit Texas or those of us who live here.
The TTC needs to be completely scrapped and a better plan developed with smaller divided highways throughout the state where they’re wanted and needed, linking communities that want them, dispersing traffic and exhaust, and serving the populace not the politicians.
Let Chinese and Mexican goods travel, if they must, through the arid and untillable deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. And send Rick Perry to oversee construction.