The only question is - do you want to spend some $11.00 to use the toll road.
Posted on 02/14/2019 10:50:08 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
AUSTIN, Texas — Deep in the heart of Texas is an artery that's been clogged for decades.
According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, the portion of Interstate 35 that runs through downtown Austin is the third-most congested highway in Texas.
About a quarter of a million cars in the Austin area use it daily.
Gabrielle Guevara, a New Orleans native who works as a nurse at the Austin Cancer Center in Georgetown, drives on I-35 every day.
She describes her commute home as "frustrating."
"When I first moved here in August, I thought it was going to be about the same. Then school got back in session for UT, and traffic was horrendous," Guevara said.
Her drive south is fine, until she gets near the highway deck split downtown, where two lanes take drivers below and two lanes above.
"It had stood for and marked Austin as a great dividing line,” State Sen. Kirk Watson (D - Austin), whose district swaths both east and west Austin, said.
Before it became an interstate, I-35 was East Avenue. Under the city's 1928 plan, white communities lived west of it and black communities lived east of it.
"[It's] not just a concrete scar, but a scar on the city,” Sen. Watson said.
Work to turn the road into a highway began in the 1950s. By 1962, construction was complete.
In 1974, the state built an upper deck from Airport Boulevard to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
“That was the last major improvement to the corridor,” Brian Barth, the project planning director for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), said.
Barth said, at the time, “It was the most efficient way to add capacity."
Now?
"It's just horrible traffic,” Guevara said.
(Excerpt) Read more at kvue.com ...
PING!
My first memory was of the I35 concrete walls and bridges being first poured and lifted. I was age 3, it had just turned 1959, we were just north of San Antonio going to my grandmother’s house in Austin..
Construction ain’t stopped ever since.
Austin has only itself to blame. Not TXDOT, not FedGov, just themselves.
“If We Don’t Build It, They Won’t Come” was a stupid long term strategy when it came to roads and growth.
I laugh at their traffic problems.
Houston laughs at Austin’s version of traffic.
It only took TXDOT 30 years to re build I 35 in Hillsboro.
Of course they rebuilt it 5 times.
But wait, there is more! They are going to do it again.
“If We Don’t Build It, They Won’t Come” was a stupid long term strategy when it came to roads and growth.
I wish I had thought to tell him, “They’re ALREADY here.”
Houston is just a crappier version of LA; dangerous, congested, filled with the entitled class, and smoggy. LA at least has decent weather and the silver lining of your waitress being the former homecoming queen dreaming of making it in show biz... Houston has the advantage of being within a state that has not gone completely nuts.
I was on Houston’s ‘mixmaster’ one night in the late sixties when a large dog ran out in front of me. Had he jumped, he would have come through the windshield and killed me. Luckily for me, he only put a large dent in my front bumper.
It was so late, there was no other traffic or things might have gotten real interesting.
Not to worry. AOC will have those cars all on the junk pile within ten years or my name isn’t Bernie Sanders. (Which it isn’t)
In 1974, the state built an upper deck from Airport Boulevard to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. ************************************************************
Correction: That elevated north/south deck from the very start to the very end took somewhere around 15 to 20 YEARS to complete. NOT 1 year.
I was stationed at Fort Hood, about an hour north of Austiin from 2007-2012. Avoided driving through Austin like the plague.
Took the Toll 130/45 bypass around Austin when we went to San Antonio. Cheap at twice the price to avoid traffic and cruise at 80 mph.
Maybe for that part of I-35 inside Austin. But I drove it many times back and forth to Georgetown (suburb North of Austin) in the mid 1990s and that segment was being expanded, always under construction.
Seems silly in retrospect if they were adding capacity to bring more people from the suburbs into the city that they didn't also expand parts of the highway inside the city.
““That is, by no means, funding the entire project,” Barth said. “We think the entire project, preliminary estimate, is about $7.5 billion.””
If you build 30 miles of tunnels maybe...and maybe that’s not a bad idea if they’re talking about express lanes that bypass the entire city.
As it is, US290 in Northwest Houston was going to have a stupid tollway down the center, but thankfully two things happened: TXDOT now builds highways that can be reconfigured, meaning it’s all one giant slab, from shoulder to shoulder. That way if you want to have a mostly-unused 4-lane toll road down the center, you simply put up the dividers and the toll collection system. But if you want to change it, say to more free lanes and just a reversible carpool lane in the middle, that’s easy, just move the dividers - which is just what they did, as the state and Harris county could not agree on how to divide the spoils from the toll road, so the state simply made the lanes free.
And yes, it was done quickly, by highway expansion standards, pretty much starting around 2013 and finishing up last year.
The only question is - do you want to spend some $11.00 to use the toll road.
In 1974, they should have built that double-decker highway from Georgetown to Buda, with MAYBE three exits!!
If they were smart, they would do that NOW!
“If We Don’t Build It, They Won’t Come” was a stupid long term strategy when it came to roads and growth.
I laugh at their traffic problems.
Amen! I lived in Austin in the late 80's and early 90's, and "If we don't build it, they won't come" was the prevailing attitude among city leaders.
You could see the problems coming from a mile away, but the hippies in local government would not budge.
They got what they deserved.
- chud (now living happily in San Antonio)
Growing up in Central Florida the joke was.
What’s the definition of I-4?
A highway connecting Daytona Beach to Tampa with a parking lot called Orlando.
Although Houston’s highway system is an adventure depending on time of day and I-5 can be a nightmare between Tacoma and Seattle.
Some of the best open road driving is going east on I-80 late May in Wyoming on a full moon reflecting off the last snow on the ground or going west on I-90 through South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana or going west on I-20 in Texas and seeing the oil rigs as one passes Midland-Odessa or I-10 Northwest of San Antonio is a great drive too. A beautiful drive was I-84 going west as it snakes along the Columbia River heading towards the leftists compost heap of Portland, at Times Mt. Hood looked like it stood in the middle of the river as the sun was setting.
Houston’s highway system is an adventure all by itself.
Add in illegals who can’t read English, heavy rain, and never ending construction.
One of my favorite drives was taking a great loop
from Seattle to Colorado Springs and south to Amarillo,
then west on I-40 through New Mexico, Arizona to the Pacific Coast HWy back up to Seattle.
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