by Sonny Williams, Editor of Quarter Horse News
Each day, I make the dreaded drive down Interstate 35 to go to work in Fort Worth. Each day, I slug through the snarl and sludge of ceaseless traffic, which intensifies my growing desire to commit hari-kari, or at least incites a vehement curse of the highway gods. Certainly, we in Texas need more lanes, more roads, more rails, more something to deal with the ever-expanding urban population and growing international commerce. Yet how do we solve our transportation needs without carving up the countryside like some congratulatory cake? Or should the construction of a superhighway-rail-utility corridor even concern us?
Read the rest of this comprehensive article with quotes from Chris Lippincott, media-relations officer for TxDOT HERE.
4/25/2008
Trans-Texas Corridor: Your land is their land
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2 comments:
A very lengthy and informative narrative of the whole TTC fiasco. Some of it is so naive to be almost beyond description. We need transportation expansion in Texas just as any other state needs transportation expansion, period. The population is growing and the traffic is growing. So what? Guess what? There will be congestion, no matter what you do. But, for the state to let a foreign entity contract for building a corridor and collect tolls for the next 50 years is assinine, period! All the talk about this being Perry's vision is interesting. If this is all that he can invision happening over the next 50-years, he is very, very near sighted. Transportation modes have to change, or we will end up walking or maybe being able to take a bicycle, as fuel cost will be out of the question. If continued, the bicycles will all be made in China, so it will probably be multi-modal, walking and bicycling, since the quality of the bicycles probably won't be too hot! The people that could afford to drive and pay for fuel will have the added benefit of paying for tolls! Have you seen tolls being reduced? Do they ever plan to drop the tolls after the highway is "paid for". I know, people say a highway is never paid for. That is like saying a car is never paid for. Maintenance is a fact of life and the planners can't project the cost of that, they need to be fired. This is not a regular highway, as the interstates of the past. In some counties, there will be a 1200 ft wide corridor zipping through the county with NO entrance or EXIT to use the damn thing. Somebody needs to have their head examined if they can say that a fenced off wide "transportation route" ripping up valuable and productive farm and ranch land, going for miles with no entrances or exits, will benefit anyone except the "toll takers". People are being run over by this political and special interest piece of crap and they attend meetings and listen to people bitch, but I think it is going to take more than that to stop this thing. This is the most un-American endeavor that I can recall. The point about making the Panama Canal deeper and wider for ships from China and India to pass, may be true, but what about the deepwater ports in Mexico ? That is where the cheap crap from those countries are going to land, and God only knows what else will be included. I really think there are enough stupid polticians that do not see any danger of a WMD coming into the country and doing untold damage. You can damn well bet they will not accept any blame for endorsing this boondoggle. We need to use that deep water port to export 95 % of the politicians that so poorly represent us. Nope, we don't need the TTC as designed, any of it ! We need to just come up with a simple solution, use the damn right-of-ways that are sitting there now alongside most of the interstates, widen them if needed, and provide entrances and exits so the thing is accessible. 90% of the resistance to this whole thing would be largely solved. For those interstates that go through cities, build a loop around the city, period. If you want to toll that loop, fine. Kind of like SH130 around Austin started out. Except instead of looping around Austin, the damn thing ended up on the other side of Seguin, about 45 miles from San Antonio ! Now they call it a shortcut to Austin ! We have many acres, and I would like to see the numbers on that, of right of way on the main interstates and state highways, that are simply just sitting there, as liabilities (gives us something to burn fuel mowing grass), water, put out grass fires and no other use. What are we saving them for? In closing, I can only say that if plans for the Perry Monolith of TTC's keeps going forward as planned, within 50 years most of them will be used for parking lots to be used for parking "cars and trucks" to use other forms of transportation. The main problem - Perry is just plain stubborn, says everyone else is uninformed, and pretends to be some guru of transportation, and runs over the politicians that dare stand in his way. They used to call these people dictators, but have since renamed them. Kind of like a bad tooth, hurts bad, causes some of the neighboring teeth to ache or go bad and needs to be PULLED, BAD!
Mrs. Clinton joins McCain in seeking a gas tax holiday .. seems pro-toll to me:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/4/28/03322/1182/827/504632
Here's hoping that the last of the three, Obama, might at least refrain from that particular madness.
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