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| From 2010 03 High Five |
Texas is on pace to have the first road building project to feature a road wider than it is long. OK, maybe that's exaggerated, but it has the ring of truthiness.
After the jump, the evil genius scheme behind Texas's road building plans.
Lake Highlands Today reports the official opening of the Cottonwood Trail, connecting 35 miles of trails from downtown Dallas to Plano. A key segment of the trail winds through the High Five interchange at LBJ Freeway and Central Expressway. You can view photos of my year-ago sneak peek at this island of calm in the middle of the rushing currents of automobile traffic here.
A key sentence from the Lake Highlands Today article: "Construction plans did not include the trail and, had the interchange been built without it, there would have been no way to add a trail afterwards." Insane, right? A $261 million dollar highway interchange in a densely developed urban area designed without a means for bicyclists or pedestrians to safely navigate through the interchange. Every road project should at least comprehend the possibility of accommodating trails and rails.
DART already has the Red Line route that parallels Central Expressway from downtown Dallas to Plano, so it's less important for Central Expressway itself to include a rail line. But how about that $2.7 billion reconstruction of LBJ Freeway between Central Expressway and IH-35E? Six lane toll tunnel. Eight free lanes above. Improved frontage roads. Did you see anything in there about leaving room for light rail lines just in case Texans ever wake up to the benefits of mass transit? I didn't. On the bright side, this makes the existing Cotton Belt line more attractive as a light rail route.
Now I learn that state legislators are considering a $4 billion road widening project for IH-35E from Dallas to Denton County. Four tolled lanes. Eight regular lanes. Four to six frontage lanes. To what purpose? To make the cotton fields in Denton County more accessible, to attract more new homeowners to build out the prairie, to fool drivers into thinking that new lane construction will finally result in uncrowded highways, to line the pockets of developers.
While the legislators are turning to public/private partnerships to invest billions in new toll roads, the same legislators are slashing the money for public schools in Texas -- ironically, by about $4 billion, more or less the same amount needed for that megaroad project. Let's see: neglect planning for hiking and biking trails, neglect public schools, pour money into wider and wider highways. Maybe it's all part of an evil genius plan to make Texans fat, dumb and happy.
By the way, if new roads are going to be built anyway, I'm all for tolling them, but I'm not in favor of tolling schools.