They either buy right of way and do nothing with it forcing people not to build and 30 years go by and nothing has been done and the place looks like a war zone. Or plan to buy the right of way, don't, then say they now can't buy it because it's too expensive. What I would like is somewhere in the middle. Like, say, buy the right of way and then build the road on it? I don't know. Sounds too simple to me.
I have no problem with a state like Texas buying up the right of way to build a freeway in the future and then waiting 10, 20 or even 30 years before actually building the freeway. The practice is at least still a forward looking practice.
There's two reasons to take that approach. The first is not having enough funding to build the freeway project entirely at once. The second reason is current traffic levels on that corridor might not yet be high enough to build the freeway immediately, but forecast growth would make the freeway a necessity eventually.
I don't agree that corridors with freeway ROW preserved look like war zones. Usually the medians just have a lot of grass and maybe some trees. Kell Blvd in Wichita Falls looked just fine to me before they built Kell Freeway. A widening project on TX-114 was just completed in front of Texas Motor Speedway. The finished result doesn't look like an eye sore. I just wish TxDOT had did more of that to TX-114 all the way to US-287 rather than just four lane most of it. And they still have the 2 lane bottle-neck going under a railroad bridge and FM-156.
I just wish other states like Oklahoma had already been copying that approach. Metro OKC is getting badly boxed in with development making something like a Kilpatrick Turnpike loop around OKC increasingly impossible to build. The same goes for US-69 through Eastern Oklahoma. That is an extremely heavy volume commercial truck traffic corridor, arguably one of the heaviest in the US that's not yet an Interstate highway. US-287 in Texas between Amarillo and Fort Worth has a lot of truck traffic, but that road wouldn't be very difficult to upgrade into an Interstate due to many parts of it already having a really big median.
This is what I am talking about:
https://www.google.com/maps/@30.2340334,-97.8712439,3a,75y,358.71h,72.08t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snw1ImG3HRcDpyWdtFlR0ew!2e0!7i13312!8i6656Its hard to see all the foundations because of our May and June rain that caused the weeds to grow. Give it a month or two and the grass will die and you can see the lovely concrete foundations with all the lovely "street art galleries". It's all good!!! There was a really neat country/general store on the west side of Old Bee Cave Rd. that they bulldozed......15 years ago. If they just did it, cool. If they did it 3 years ago, okay. But it has looked like this crap for ever. There is a creek on the north side of US 290, which is a bum camp, and without the buildings in there, you can see all the rift raft. The only improvement in the bulldozing was getting rid of the crappy hotel. There was a neat strip mall that was built to look like buildings from the late 1800s and a neat resturaunt. They have been gone for at least 10 years:
Here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@30.2342575,-97.8638912,3a,60y,357.87h,81.3t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5_QpmUhpCyDzHtOMUOEpFw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656Don't get me talking about the stupid intersection they put there.
The awesome two story German building that was across 290 from there was torn down in the mid 80s....for the freeway that still isn't there.
I grew up here, and my folks still live there, and you want to tell me this area that looks like Cold War Russia is good?
I am all for tem building right of way for future development, but until you have the funds to build the road there, let the buildings there stay and have the businesses rent the property until you have the money, bulldoze then build your highway; you could make some money too off of having the lot for rent. That way you have the right of way, and it doesn't make the neighborhood look like crap by bulldozing the businesses and having vacant lots.
I guess what I would have liked to have seen was for the right of way to have been bought in the 1960s, like it should have been, and the businesses build outside the right of way. Instead what happened was the right of way bought in the mid 1980s after the businesses already built there, and it was way more expensive to buy, so TxDOT spent all their money acquiring right of way.
I understand planning for the future is tough, but I Think everyone could have seen that Austin was going to grow in the 60s from the hippie movement, and that it doubled in size in 10 years.
Now about the subject in hand, The same thing has gone down. This is just the most egregious example.
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Topic: Amarillo: new I-27/Loop 335 project proposed (Read 46002 times)