Still it would suck trying to haul thousands of containers through that traffic. There is a rail line that parallels 45 though. Thanks for being an election judge. Lord knows we need them.
“Still it would suck trying to haul thousands of containers through that traffic.”
AFAIK most containers (and cars) being shipped travel by rail to and from a port rather than by truck. The only exceptions would be those with an ultimate destination of less than 100 miles or 1-container shipments to small businesses. Long-haul rail shipment is orders of magnitude cheaper than roadway shipment. If you are a wholesaler or manufacturer in Dallas, getting 20-200 containers at a time, it costs less to put them on a train to Dallas and have your trucks take them to your warehouse from Dallas than to have 20-200 trucks pick them up on the coast and drive them to Dallas. (Now if you are a small software house in Dallas getting a single container of your packaged software made in China, then a trucking it from Houston or Galveston might make sense, but I am not sure.)
So if Galveston had bet heavily on containerization in the 1960s and become *the* container port of the Texas Gulf Coast, I don’t know if you would really have much more truck traffic on I-45 between Galveston and Houston. It mostly would have gone by rail. (Crossing Hwy 3 might be a bear though — with all those extra trains . . . )