In Texas — because everything’s stupider down that way — the governor has proposed “The Trans-Texas Corridor Project”, which would be a 4,000 mile highway a quarter mile wide, costing $175B and taking 50 years to build.
Proving anew that everything’s big in Texas, they would be megahighways corridors up to a quarter-mile across, consisting of as many as six lanes for cars and four for trucks, plus railroad tracks, oil and gas pipelines, water and other utility lines, even broadband transmission cables.
So it’s a big-ass road where rail runs along with automobiles. This is bad.
The new rail lines could also lower the risk of chemical spills in urban areas, said [Governor] Perry spokesman Robert Black. “We have hazardous materials running through our city centers because of a rail system that was built 100 years ago,” Black said.
Oh, great, so instead, let’s make sure that a chemical spill shuts down the whole freaking transportation corridor for the state of Texas. Somehow that’s better.
I don’t care how bad traffic is in rural Texas. (And, based on my experience, it’s not much of a problem.) $175 billion is just stupid. There are far better uses for that money than a bigger road. Building bigger roads to lessen traffic is like buying a bigger belt to lessen obesity. It’s dumb.