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.
Couldn’t find anything to argue about there. Good post.
Thanks, but no thanks, to your suggestion for Arizona.
You are a day late and a dollar short, as we are getting our own corridor.
Our corridor will connect to Punta Colonet on Baja so that China can sent millions and millions of containers bypassing American labor.
TTC gets all the publicity while Canamex gets built. All eyes are on Texas; CANAMEX flies pretty much under the radar.
So fear not, Arizona too, is being skewered! Before it’s over most states will be.
Union Pacific railroad wanted to put their new route right across prime agricultural lands..NOT the desert. They faced opposition. So much for transparency...now UP isn’t talking.