Holy moley!!!! Look at all them corridors! How's a poor ol' state supposed to choose? And how the the hell did Beaumont get to be part of all this? It's just.......all so confusing! How did this mess get started in the first place? .....fuggetaboudit, Jake.....it's just Texastown!
There's one word for what the power players are dreaming about: pork.
Also notice that a corridor spur down US 83 from Eden to Junction copies what several posters here have iterated is a proper Port-to-Plains alternative; how it got sucked into the planning for this E-W corridor must be an interesting story -- unless some of the corridor promoters actually read this forum (cue the "Twilight Zone" theme).
The "L" shape of the path from San Antonio down to Junction (eating up what could be I-27) is stupid. I'd prefer a I-27 extension from San Angelo to Junction (as opposed to going through Sonora to Del Rio) in order to create a direct corridor from San Antonio up to Lubbock and Amarillo (and potentially Denver). But running the road through Eden in an L-shape is NOT the way to do it. It's just another visual example of how this jagged, saw-tooth shape I-14 corridor is really screwed up. Nothing direct at all. It's like making a freeway corridor follow the squares of an agricultural section line road grid. But we gotta include every town within 50 miles of the corridor in the highway party! Porky porky pork!
The Texans know their pork and like it (their penchant for brisket notwithstanding!). We all know it and recognize it, but applying our internal
a priori concepts to such a statewide activity is like banging one's head against the wall -- and I, for one, ain't no masochist! They're going to keep developing and building their long-distance corridors regardless of anyone outside of the area not served by such a facility yelling and screaming
foul! IMO, what we as observers
can do is make suggestions as how the corridors they've outlined can be optimized to serve as many folks -- and regional needs -- as possible. As far as the Eden cutoff is concerned, Bobby's made the point on previous occasions that a diagonal San Angelo-Junction alignment would be optimal to direct traffic toward San Antonio. But my previous post, on which he's commenting, was an entreaty for a joint view of
both corridors planned for West Texas -- the Port-to-Plains I-27
and I-14, and how to optimize their interaction within a workable network. Because I included that corridor in the discussion -- and it has a specific set of points to serve within its description, including both San Angelo and Del Rio, I took that segment of the composite corridor
that way; optimizing traffic down to San Antonio wasn't part of either corridor's "brief" -- although, despite it not being completely direct, something down US 277 from San Angelo to Sonora is a hell of a lot better than anything that exists today when it comes to that San Antonio connection. BTW, one thing to notice is that Texas alignments tend to stick to existing routes rather than posit new-terrain routings; perhaps their misadventure with the Rick Perry half-mile-wide corridor concepts that tended to eat huge swaths of land wherever they were laid out has intimidated both the promoters of the newer and more pointed corridors like I-14; they avoid anything that looks like it includes massive property acquisition. However, when actually deploying the routes, they'll pick the more efficient path; the "zigzag" I-14 stuff in the Triangle will get straightened out a bit in the final plans (the selection process of the corridor segment east of Belton/Temple is an indicator of where their head's at in this case). Expect something between Temple and Hearne that cuts off a few corners (although they'll probably cross the Brazos floodplain along US 79, since the river is largely channelized at that point).
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Topic: I-14 in Texas (Read 144978 times)