Everything's Bigger in Texas
Even the proposed multimodal toll roads:
The project grew to consist of four “priority segments:” new multimodal toll roads up to 1,200 feet wide paralleling Interstates 35 and 37 from Denison in North Texas to the Rio Grande Valley; a proposed I-69 from Texarkana to Houston and Laredo; I-45 from Dallas-Fort Worth to Houston; and I-10 from El Paso to Orange on the Louisiana border. But the exact routes are years away from being designated.
With construction, land acquisition and other expenses, the cost was estimated in 2002 at up to $183.5 billion, all of it to be put up by private investors, state officials say. No existing roads would gain tolls.
I can't even imagine a 1200-foot-wide road. That's a quarter-mile!
(h/t Matski)
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This was Governor Perry's one big idea, and from here in Austin, I'd give you 10-1 odds against any segment of this from ever being built. For one thing, the toll road around here (SH130) which would serve as part of the TTC-35 is just a normal (for Texas) roadway - none of this quarter-mile-wide nonsense.
And of course, the stuff about rail is widely known to be fakery which was supposed to get train folks enthused. Didn't work; it was pretty clear they were, if they built anything at all, only going to build the road part.
Cool picture of Texas road-bloat here.
That's fantastic.
But if they just build a few more roads all the traffic will just go away, right? ... right?
I believe that's San Antonio.
What you're seeing there is why you should never, ever, ever build freeways with frontage roads unless there's no other choice. In Texas, they actually view the frontage roads as a feature, not a bug, amazingly enough - even though they require five-and-six-level interchanges once the "funnel everybody through an inefficient 4-full-phase traffic light" solution grinds to a halt.
My Texan relatives regardless of political affiliation view the TTC with mild contempt to outright hostility. And most of them aren't opposed to new local road construction in the slightest, so like M1ek, I don't how see anything approaching the descriptions will get built.