It’s a crappy stretch of road, that serves as a warning. “Get ready, you are about to cross the Sabine River and enter the Third World.”
Sumbody oughtta do sumthin’ ‘bout that.
Last time I drove to Houston, in May 2014, I spent an hour sitting in my car on I-10 in Beaumont not moving.
I heard later 3 people died in the wreck that caused the traffic jam.
“which saw an average of six crashes a day in 2016 “
That’s an astonishing amount.
.
Dem Cajuns just don’t know how to drive.
We used to go to Nawlin’s all the time and that I-10 stretch was so loooooong and borrrrrring. People need to get their collective heads outta their collective arses and pay attention!!
I drive it frequently and it can be a pretty tough stretch of road to drive. Needless to say, I don’t care for it much, but it’s the major throughway between Houston and the Louisiana line.
Lots of construction, 75mph speed limit, lots of traffic, including heavy truck traffic.
All it takes is just one inattentive driver and boom; there’s a wreck.
IF I’m heading eastbound and I can at least make it to the east side of Beaumont (Vidor), I’ll take 12 to 190 and on into Kinder, LA. It’s a lot slower going with traffic lights, small town cops, 2-lane roads, etc., but it beats getting injured/killed in one of I-10’s infamous wrecks.
A couple of months later and I wasn't surprised: the driving in southeast Texas looks a lot like the driving in Russian dashcam videos.
Every day I see morons driving 25+ miles an hour faster than the average rate fly all the way from the left lane across several lanes of traffic to make an exit, or someone else suddenly decide they want to stay on I10 and veer left at the last minute to escape an exit ramp.
In town, there's always the great "left turn from the right lane" or "right turn from the left lane."
All without signals, of course.
On the major roads in Dallas, you'll probably average 2-3 crashes a day.
As bad as it is, I think the stretch of I-35 from Dallas to Austin is worse. Brrr
One of the questions that I’ve always wondered about is why it’s necessary to have, say, 12 major projects going on in Texas with light funding, so that they take an average of 15 years to complete (i.e., 180 project-years of traffic disruption).
Why not fund the projects better, so that you get them done faster - say in 5 years (tops)...so you triple the funding for each project, but cut the number of simultaneous projects down to 4. Then the disruption over 15 years is just 60 project-years, one third of the disruption, but just as much work completed. If you get the average down to 3 years, then just 36 project-years.
I realize there’s a limit to how fast a project can move, but I suspect most major projects, if optimized for speed can easily done in 5 years, if not 3 years. Now it will make the construction zones at any one time a lot longer (like 25 miles at a time, rather than 5 miles), but it doesn’t help much to have most of the highway free of construction, but still have a choke point where the work is going on. Just go there with a bunch of equipment, tear up everything at once, rebuild everything at once, AND BE DONE - and at no extra cost.
For decades!