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 ...
The only time I experienced smooth sailing driving through Houston was driving at 2:00 AM South on I-35 connecting East to I-10. LOL
How many traffic lanes are there now from Katy to Houston? 6? 8? 10?...... and still not enough.
“...do you want to spend some $11.00 to use the toll road.”
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On a weekday, h-ll yes. I detest traffic. I live near Stuttgart, Germany now and the traffic jams (stau- which means “stall”) are horrific. The A8 autobahn can be as bad as I-35 in Austin (chronically under construction), but there is no bypass option.
Even smaller roads are packed. A 24 minute drive to work can become a 70 min odyssey with bad timing and an accident in the wrong place.
Smooth sailing indeed.
Since I-35 goes nowhere near Houston.
Typo- I actually took I-45 from DFW to Houston where I picked up I-10.
Yeah. I knew you meant I-45.
But in true FReeper fashion - I had to troll you.
Just a little.
LOL true
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