Lubbock, Texas is a city of about 250,000 smack on the middle of the Caprock – an oil and agricultural rich perfectly flat region in West Texas. The city is also in the process of getting its third freeway, named for retired Texas Tech basketball coach Marsha Sharp. What’s the deal with naming freeways after people who are still alive? I thought you weren’t supposed to do that. Click any images for larger versions. Anyway, here is a bit of Lubbock…

Loop 289 encircles the city to interstate standards, it could easily be a 3-digit interstate. The Marsha Sharp freeway will connect downtown with the sprawling southwestern area. The two meet at a stack currently about 90% complete, its pretty tall, to boot.

The freeway itself carries US 82, US 62, and SH 114 for all or part of its length. It is in various stages of completion, there is a map at the end of this post showing the open portion. It is about 2 miles long and depressed in a trench, near the Texas Tech campus. The freeway is being built in three stages – with the final stage an interchange with IH 27 which will not be done for about 3 more years. Here is the official website for the freeway, with a lot of good information. Something to note is the “windy man” shown on the freeway website has been removed. Some locals at one of the hearings decried it as a ‘pagan symbol’ and it was vandalized soon after it was put up. The state took it down, noting that it cost a lot more to remove it than it had to put it up in the first place.

Marsha Sharp Freeway will replace Brownfield Road, which is currently a very busy arterial with a lot of traffic lights. The old road had two frontage roads built on either side, with the new freeway being built in the center. During construction, many arterial roads are closed off and traffic on the west side of Lubbock is currently pretty bad.

The freeway has something of a Spanish theme, with a lot of arches on the retaining walls. This is so it can match the spanish theme of the adjacent TTU campus.

Loop 289 is a fairly good freeway, especially on the south side of the city. This is where most of Lubbock’s retail areas are, the Chili’s, the mall, Home Depot, etc.

IH 27 runs north/south on the east side of Lubbock. As most of the sprawl is to the west, this is not a very busy freeway. It is consistantly 6 or 8 lanes and never has any traffic on it, according to the locals. Its a very concrete facility and was rebuilt in the late 90s. The ROW is very wide and it stays a good distance away from any retail or major attractions.

In case you were wondering how IH 27 ends going southbound, it does so in the usual Texas fashion. One minute its there…

… and the next minute it has miraculously vanished!