North Houston Highway Improvement Project

[TXtoNJ]

Yeah, New Urbanism is just fine, and doesn't interfere with anyone's life who's not named FritzOwl.

[Anthony_JK]

Well, I'm a strong critic of some of the more extreme "kill all freeways" New Urbanists, but there is something positive about their approach in favoring more balance in transportation choices, and making neighborhoods more user friendly for walkers and bikers. I only wish they would understand that people aren't leaving their cars any time soon.

[Plutonic Panda]

The idea we shouldn't widen freeways because they'll need to be widened again in the future is absurd, IMO. Eventually self driving cars will also be able to relieve some capacity issues being more efficient in moving as well as being to drive faster. There are many human elements that create traffic jams such as rubbernecking and reckless driving which can lead to accidents and thus traffic congestion.

The Katy freeway also has a bottleneck downtown which you didn't mention. It's about the limit in terms of what is financially possible today but in theory you could double the capacity by building a second deck or tunnel and that hasn't been done. Maybe in the future new technologies will become a reality that can substantially reduce the cost of infrastructure. That's long term thinking, not we should be widening freeways like Texas does because they'll just become clogged again in the long run.

[vdeane]

Well, I'm a strong critic of some of the more extreme "kill all freeways" New Urbanists, but there is something positive about their approach in favoring more balance in transportation choices, and making neighborhoods more user friendly for walkers and bikers. I only wish they would understand that people aren't leaving their cars any time soon.

There aren't really 'new urbanists' anymore, there are just planners. Modern city planning started with cars and planners like George Kessler or Le Corbusier who designed places that were meant to facilitate movement by cars and ignored most other factors. The revolution of new urbanism just started taking into account that pedestrians existed. It's so thoroughly incorporated into planning now that no one really uses 'new urbanism' anymore except in a historical sense. We just moved from "cars only" and diversified into "cars and other stuff" like what took place before modern planning. Induced demand has led to other options being considered like spreading out road/street options and creating alternatives both to save money and give people the best quality of life. This is the way it works in essentially every country except this one and the Gulf States.

Planners in Texas (I am in my 10th year of being one) are essentially rubber stamps for sprawl, and when you widen a freeway it induces both sprawl and demand and creates a feedback loop leading to constant widening. At some point using freeways as the only option for large scale transport infrastructure becomes impossible simply because of the engineering and ROW requirements. So with the Katy (IH10 west) widened to one of the world's widest freeways we found out that's about the limit to what you can do, and it hasn't really helped with traffic in the long term. The numbers on IH 45 are saying, yeah, you can widen all of this but if we look back historically to similar projects it's not helped.

There aren't planners that are anti-freeway that I know personally. It's just a tool in an arsenal that you can choose to use or not. People aren't leaving their cars but you have to balance that with types of movement that people use and want to use. How do you take into account the considerable part of the population that can't drive or can't afford cars? Young people who just use uber? Or long haul interstate traffic? I know this is a road forum and there are people here like "widen!" and "moar freeway!" but it's a lot more nuanced than that.

Define "helped with traffic".  If the backup is over a smaller area or shorter period of time, I would consider that an improvement, even if there's still a backup, but many advocates against car travel will point to that and call it a failure.  There's definitely also a push to get people into more active modes of transportation over cars rather than simply accommodating people who would rather not or who are unable to drive, too.

[Bobby5280]

Planners in Texas (I am in my 10th year of being one) are essentially rubber stamps for sprawl, and when you widen a freeway it induces both sprawl and demand and creates a feedback loop leading to constant widening. At some point using freeways as the only option for large scale transport infrastructure becomes impossible simply because of the engineering and ROW requirements. So with the Katy (IH10 west) widened to one of the world's widest freeways we found out that's about the limit to what you can do, and it hasn't really helped with traffic in the long term. The numbers on IH 45 are saying, yeah, you can widen all of this but if we look back historically to similar projects it's not helped.

Sprawl is happening in this region of the country regardless if freeways get built or not.

I can point to multiple examples here in Oklahoma where ODOT, OTA and various local city organizations completely goofed up certain very important corridors because they chose not to plan at all. The suburbs of Yukon and Mustang are growing at a fairly rapid pace, more than just about any other location in Oklahoma. Yet various groups utterly failed to plan for that growth. So now we have an idiotically stunted South "extension" of the Kilpatrick Turnpike, all curvy and stupid for all the new properties it had to dodge. Meanwhile, the OK-4 and OK-9 routes where the Kilpatrick Turnpike should have been extended are quickly getting covered up with development. Pretty soon any kind of substantial upgrade will be impossible, much less a new freeway or toll road. They'll be ordinary surface streets overrun with traffic signals.

The Dallas Fort Worth metro has multiple corridors that are probably now impossible to upgrade because sprawl got to those corridors before any freeway. US-380 between Denton and McKinney has turned into a big mess. It didn't have to be if TX DOT bothered to pay attention to that area 30 years ago. They knew the sprawl was advancing that direction way back then. The best case scenario for US-380 now is maybe a couple short segments of limited access, but stop light intersections out the ying-yang everywhere else. Freeway sized ROW could have at least been reserved along TX-114 from the Texas Motor Speedway complex to Rhome and US-287. Now that's all getting covered up with one massive housing development after another plopping right in there. It won't be long before there are loads and loads of traffic signals along that highway.

Speaking of Katy Freeway, the problem with that location is not the super wide freeway at all. It's the HORRIBLE SURFACE STREETS. It's an outdated 40-50 year old street grid design with no traffic filtering whatsoever. Every side street, every parking lot entrance and every driveway dumps right out onto the main roads in that part of Houston. Much of the rest of Houston has the same problem. Add to that countless numbers of traffic signals. Drivers have to get to the outer fringes of Houston to find any surface streets that can go 100 yards or more without a driveway or side street connecting to it or a traffic signal every couple blocks.

There aren't planners that are anti-freeway that I know personally. It's just a tool in an arsenal that you can choose to use or not. People aren't leaving their cars but you have to balance that with types of movement that people use and want to use. How do you take into account the considerable part of the population that can't drive or can't afford cars? Young people who just use uber? Or long haul interstate traffic? I know this is a road forum and there are people here like "widen!" and "moar freeway!" but it's a lot more nuanced than that.

Planners may not be overtly anti-freeway. But plenty of lawmakers are, either from a political angle (which is common on the coasts) or from an angle of being cheapskates (that's Oklahoma).

I'm all for building sidewalks and isolated bicycle paths. But I really detest so-called "shared use" lanes on streets where bicyclists are expected to share the road with cars. That policy is 100% out of touch with reality. Riding a bicycle on city streets in most parts of this nation is currently a very risky, dangerous thing to do. The law may say bicyclists have just as much right to a lane as a car. But what good does the law do for a bicyclist after he has been killed by a car whose driver was too busy looking at his phone rather than the road? Real bike paths cost money. Unfortunately places like many parts of Oklahoma don't want to blow money on that kind of thing. Lawmakers are being cheap. And I think they see bicycles as some kind of politically "progressive" kind of thing, so they automatically hate that. Places like Lawton (where I live) can feel like a throw-back to the 1980's.

[DJStephens]

The bike lane thing here (las Cruces NM) is awful as well.  There have been bike lanes striped on many of the increasingly clogged main thoroughfares in town.   While parallel, safer arterials exist.
Narrowing of main lanes to 11 feet (US 70 / N main street) has occurred.  To squeeze in a bike lane. Road diets have been undertaken, often where there should have been widening to a five lane cross - section.   
And the thing is - little to no bikes are seen.  Where are they?   Most bike enthusiasts are in the foothills of the mountains around town, on their BMX style bikes.  Or on old Hwy 28, which goes through farmland south of Mesilla.   Certainly seems counter-intuitive.   Everyone else, including most of the students - are in their cars.   

[Chris]

Define "helped with traffic".  If the backup is over a smaller area or shorter period of time, I would consider that an improvement, even if there's still a backup, but many advocates against car travel will point to that and call it a failure.

I wonder if there is any data about this regarding the Katy Freeway. It is often pointed out that it didn't entirely eliminate traffic congestion, and this would then be considered a 'failure', but if it is down from say, a brutal 7-8 hours per day to 2 hours in each direction, this is a huge gain.

If you look at the Congestion Index for 2019, Houston is only the 20th most congested urban area in the U.S, despite being the 5th largest Metropolitan Statistical Area in the country. So it pulls below its weight for congestion despite being 'notoriously' car oriented.

Worldwide, Houston is only the 224th most congested city in the index, which is actually quite impressive. Out of the cities with a similar or greater population, only Dallas ranks lower on the list.

[vdeane]

I believe the complaint was that TXDOT didn't plan for how to upgrade the road to account for the developments, not that TXDOT didn't get the developments stopped.  Which brings up another point: sprawl often happens with no road upgrades.  So if the sprawl is coming anyways, wouldn't we want the roads to keep travel times from growing too much, rather than have congestion become much worse?  It seems like many Urbanists actually prefer the latter, as a way to punish people for living in surburbia and driving rather than in dense urban development and walking/bicycling/riding transit.

[Plutonic Panda]

I believe the complaint was that TXDOT didn't plan for how to upgrade the road to account for the developments, not that TXDOT didn't get the developments stopped.  Which brings up another point: sprawl often happens with no road upgrades.  So if the sprawl is coming anyways, wouldn't we want the roads to keep travel times from growing too much, rather than have congestion become much worse?  It seems like many Urbanists actually prefer the latter, as a way to punish people for living in surburbia and driving rather than in dense urban development and walking/bicycling/riding transit.

Be careful or you could find yourself as the New York guy who he'll screenshot and use during one his presentations. Lol

The tired old "widening freeways is akin to buying a bigger belt to fix obesity"  trope prevails yet again. Lots of questions and comments he dodged. I just when my question regarding latent demand and the distinction between it and induced demand will ever be answered because after 10 years of studying urban planning and infrastructure(not in school) I've never had an answer to that.

If this were NYC id say yeah induced demand would be more of an issue if not showing that people would prefer to drive if it was more practical there. How many people drive in Houston again? Yeah I'd say growth tends to add more traffic and demand for bigger infrastructure.

[Bobby5280]

I love the Oklahoma guy who argues that big freeways should plow through cities and then complains about the street grid being wonky, that's fantastic cognitive dissonance. I'm actually going to save a screenshot of that and use it in my next AICP presentation. Let me know if you want a username credit.

Be sure to bring along your own strawman as a prop to use in your presentation to misinterpret my statements or just make up more $#1+ I never said.

I never said anything about plowing a freeway through an already fully developed urban area (aka a "city").

If you want to discount the effect surface designs have on traffic patterns that would make me wonder if you're actually a planner at all.

Houston in particular is famous for surface street gridlock. And it does contribute to jams that back up on the freeways. What do you expect will happen when traffic that is trying to exit an Interstate can't do so because of gridlock at the end of the exit ramp? The traffic light might be green, but if you have cars in your way you won't be able to move. That is indeed a factor on why the Katy Freeway expansion hasn't miraculously solved traffic problems in that part of Houston. I can tell you from my own driving experience there that the surface streets in that area really SUCK. It's a f***king free for all. Every alley, driveway, parking lot or whatever connects to the main roads. And you can't drive much farther than throwing distance before hitting another traffic signal.

As a comparison, take a look at Colorado Springs. It is badly under-served by freeways. But at least they have some limits applied to what can directly access a main surface arterial such as Powers Blvd. BTW that road was intended to be a freeway, but got down-graded. They at least applied some strict limits to the number of streets crossing Powers at grade. Traffic signaled intersections are spaced fairly far apart. Entrances to parking lots of businesses are confined to lesser side streets. Residential subdivisions have only so many ways in and out. If Houston had more controls like that in place the traffic on the freeways and surface streets would move much better.

It's great how you say Mustang and Yukon are growing and the DOT didnt plan for it.

It doesn't take a genius to be able to forecast urban growth, the resulting traffic needs and make plans for it like planning where new highways might be needed in the future or existing roads expanded. Texas has usually been pretty good at that sort of thing. At least they were in the past.

In Wichita Falls what is currently Kell Freeway was just a surface street in the 1970's. They widened it to a divided street with a huge median and it stayed that way until the late 1980's when it was finally time to start building the freeway. They got the ROW secured many years earlier when it was easy and far less expensive to do so. Several super highway corridors in DFW were built-out in the same manner.

Various parties here in Oklahoma could have copied that approach, specifically in the case of Yukon and Mustang. They knew the growth was coming back in the 1990's when they could have started reserving room on S Sara Road. ODOT and OTA did a little bit of that on OK-4 just South of Bridge Creek going to the H.E. Bailey turnpike extension. They built a new pair of bridges over the Canadian River. But they didn't follow through on anything else. And even the OTA's spur going from I-44 to Norman stops miles short of I-35. It's all half-a$$ nonsense. BTW, I don't mean to make it sound like I'm letting the buck stop at them. The biggest jerks in the situation are the politicians giving ODOT, OTA or various city planners their marching orders, funding (or lack thereof).

The thing that is really going to suck (and be much more costly) is ODOT, OTA, OK State or who ever may eventually be forced to build out that Kilpatrick outer loop the original way intended in reaction to bad traffic problems. They'll be stuck having to "plow" a new super highway through already developed areas. That's a whole lot worse than having the freeway ROW reserved ahead of all the development.

[Plutonic Panda]

So IH 45's widening is in response to a need. The question being asked is when do you stop adding lanes. Once you make it 26 lanes, history has shown it will not mitigate what you're trying to mitigate, and if you make it 36 lanes you get the same eventuality.

You don't stop but I am highly skeptical as society evolves with new technologies we ever need to have a 50 lane highway. That's simply fear mongering at its finest.

[Plutonic Panda]

If you want to discount the effect surface designs have on traffic patterns that would make me wonder if you're actually a planner at all.

It's clear as day this person already have a huge bias but I wondered the same until I realized some of the urban planners I've talked to are quite frankly comical, some of the things they say. I've been legitimately baffled of the fact these people are employed by the government and in charge of planning the future. You'd hope one day citizens will wake up and realize these dumbass principles like using induced demand against freeway widening is a bunch of bullshit and demand better planning.

I'm not holding my breath but I'd be nice to LA realize that during my lifetime.

[vdeane]

I believe the complaint was that TXDOT didn't plan for how to upgrade the road to account for the developments, not that TXDOT didn't get the developments stopped.  Which brings up another point: sprawl often happens with no road upgrades.  So if the sprawl is coming anyways, wouldn't we want the roads to keep travel times from growing too much, rather than have congestion become much worse?  It seems like many Urbanists actually prefer the latter, as a way to punish people for living in surburbia and driving rather than in dense urban development and walking/bicycling/riding transit.

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by urbanist.... people who live in cities? Planners? Does the Houston city planner care about the Sugarland city planner? no. Urban planners would be pro-less-travel time because it causes less wear and tear on infrastructure and produces less carbon with less idling engines.

Sprawl will happen with no road upgrades but it will not be as economically viable due to travel times and utility extensions. Katy would have still been sprawly without IH 10's widening, but by much less. This is easy to witness in most American cities. Sprawl followed new freeways. Now freeways have to follow sprawl, but it's not the DOTs fault.

There's a big development in Wylie called Inspiration and they just plopped it there without mentioning anything to TxDot except a pipe relocation... and the only way in or out was on FM 2514. The developers made millions, and you guys are like "buT th DOT dIdNt pLaN!1" So now there are big traffic jams on FM 2514 every day and no money for the DOT to do anything about it. Maybe you should blame the developer? Or the city for approving it? A turn lane was eventually added, of course at the cost to the taxpayer and not the developers.

So IH 45's widening is in response to a need. The question being asked is when do you stop adding lanes. Once you make it 26 lanes, history has shown it will not mitigate what you're trying to mitigate, and if you make it 36 lanes you get the same eventuality.

Urbanists would basically be those who are trying to push people out of suburbia and cars into denser areas using bikes and transit to get around, especially those pushing for things like freeway removals.  Not that I'm not necessarily talking planners here per se (although the two groups often overlap), but primarily advocates (like the people who come up with Freeways Without Futures, or Streetsblog and the like).

Also, nice way to put words into my mouth.  I was commenting on what the other person said that it appeared you misunderstood, not to say that I think the congestion is the fault of TXDOT.  That said, I'm not sure how things are in Texas, but in New York, we have things like Highway Work Permit review and SEQR review that means that developments shouldn't be happening along state highways without NYSDOT knowing about it.  That turn lane you mention sounds like something we might require a developer to do to get approved to build an access to our road.

I actually grew up in a metro area that would seem to be a counter-example to the "sprawl follows freeways" argument.  Back when the freeways were being built, planners assumed that the west side of Rochester would grow a lot and that the east side was pretty much built out.  That's why I-490 runs parallel to the Thruway for a long time heading west (and NY 531 heads towards Brockport) while I-490 dives straight to the Thruway on the east side and NY 104 heading to Webster in the northern part of the metro is the only freeway heading east.  That didn't pan out, and as a result, I-490 is still pretty rural through Chili and Riga, while people on the east side can find themselves further from the freeway than the "Outer Loop" is from downtown and driving down arterial roads to get everywhere.

[rte66man]

It's great how you say Mustang and Yukon are growing and the DOT didnt plan for it.

It doesn't take a genius to be able to forecast urban growth, the resulting traffic needs and make plans for it like planning where new highways might be needed in the future or existing roads expanded. Texas has usually been pretty good at that sort of thing. At least they were in the past.

In Wichita Falls what is currently Kell Freeway was just a surface street in the 1970's. They widened it to a divided street with a huge median and it stayed that way until the late 1980's when it was finally time to start building the freeway. They got the ROW secured many years earlier when it was easy and far less expensive to do so. Several super highway corridors in DFW were built-out in the same manner.

Various parties here in Oklahoma could have copied that approach, specifically in the case of Yukon and Mustang. They knew the growth was coming back in the 1990's when they could have started reserving room on S Sara Road. ODOT and OTA did a little bit of that on OK-4 just South of Bridge Creek going to the H.E. Bailey turnpike extension. They built a new pair of bridges over the Canadian River. But they didn't follow through on anything else. And even the OTA's spur going from I-44 to Norman stops miles short of I-35. It's all half-a$$ nonsense. BTW, I don't mean to make it sound like I'm letting the buck stop at them. The biggest jerks in the situation are the politicians giving ODOT, OTA or various city planners their marching orders, funding (or lack thereof).

I like the way you keep dragging out the Kilpatrick SW extension as an example of poor planning.  The plans are irrelevant. Any road map of the 60's will show you what ODOT wanted to do. As always, there wasn't even enough money to 'reserve' RoW given the competing priorities.  Unless ODOT was willing to step in and buy the land, they had no legal way to prevent the development. That ship has sailed. you should go ahead and bury that horse 6 feet under and leave him there.

[Plutonic Panda]

It's great how you say Mustang and Yukon are growing and the DOT didnt plan for it.

It doesn't take a genius to be able to forecast urban growth, the resulting traffic needs and make plans for it like planning where new highways might be needed in the future or existing roads expanded. Texas has usually been pretty good at that sort of thing. At least they were in the past.

In Wichita Falls what is currently Kell Freeway was just a surface street in the 1970's. They widened it to a divided street with a huge median and it stayed that way until the late 1980's when it was finally time to start building the freeway. They got the ROW secured many years earlier when it was easy and far less expensive to do so. Several super highway corridors in DFW were built-out in the same manner.

Various parties here in Oklahoma could have copied that approach, specifically in the case of Yukon and Mustang. They knew the growth was coming back in the 1990's when they could have started reserving room on S Sara Road. ODOT and OTA did a little bit of that on OK-4 just South of Bridge Creek going to the H.E. Bailey turnpike extension. They built a new pair of bridges over the Canadian River. But they didn't follow through on anything else. And even the OTA's spur going from I-44 to Norman stops miles short of I-35. It's all half-a$$ nonsense. BTW, I don't mean to make it sound like I'm letting the buck stop at them. The biggest jerks in the situation are the politicians giving ODOT, OTA or various city planners their marching orders, funding (or lack thereof).

I like the way you keep dragging out the Kilpatrick SW extension as an example of poor planning.  The plans are irrelevant. Any road map of the 60's will show you what ODOT wanted to do. As always, there wasn't even enough money to 'reserve' RoW given the competing priorities.  Unless ODOT was willing to step in and buy the land, they had no legal way to prevent the development. That ship has sailed. you should go ahead and bury that horse 6 feet under and leave him there.

You'd have a point if the type of bullshit that caused the road to be the way it is didn't still exist in Oklahoma. Can you name me a single initiative in the entire goddamn state where there is active planning for new freeway routes in the future? OKC showed some of the highest growth in the state and yet there are zero plans for a new freeway facility.

The OTA will likely push the Kickapoo south to connect with I-35 but that will be buying up properties, lawsuits, curves to avoid certain properties, etc that could be mitigated with better planning a long time ago.

OKC is going to end up in a very shitty situation unless some serious planning begins this decades to preserve ROW for future high capacity transportation corridors.

[Bobby5280]

I like the way you keep dragging out the Kilpatrick SW extension as an example of poor planning.  The plans are irrelevant. Any road map of the 60's will show you what ODOT wanted to do. As always, there wasn't even enough money to 'reserve' RoW given the competing priorities.

I keep dragging out the Kilpatrick SW extension as an example of poor planning because it is. And I'm not buying the excuse there wasn't enough money to buy up ROW way back when they should have done so. They blew a bunch of money on a pair of new bridges over the Canadian River back when the H.E. Bailey extension was built. They could have gone with a single 2-lane bridge and use the savings to Super-2 the OK-4 route from I-44 up thru Bridge Creek and Mustang. They could have done that back in the 1970's-1980's time frame when the Kilpatrick plan was starting to gel.

The Oklahoma state government, and by extension ODOT & OTA, has a reputation for doing things barely good enough to get by. Some projects get started and left unfinished for years, decades or permanently. For instance, I don't have much faith OTA (or ODOT) will do anything to extend the Kickapoo Turnpike farther South or North. They can sign it as I-240 if they want. I'm still probably never going to use it.

[Plutonic Panda]

There's a good change we'll hear about a south extension soon. Unfortunately it seems it might only be extended to highway 9 which is completely useless if so but we'll see.

[Bobby5280]

For my own selfish purposes, if the Kickapoo Turnpike doesn't at bare minimum wrap down and across to I-35 I'll see zero value in using it for my road trips on I-44 beyond OKC, such as trips up to Tulsa and beyond. I'll just stay on I-44. And I'd probably still stay on I-44 anyway unless the Kickapoo Turnpike somehow joined to the H.E. Bailey Turnpike extension either directly or by the HEB getting properly extended to I-35.

For me to even mess with driving on the Kickapoo Turnpike at all it would have to net me some substantial time savings over staying on I-44 thru OKC. When I drive thru OKC I rarely do so during rush hour. So I avoid the jams that can happen on I-44 just North of the OKC Fairgrounds, by Penn Square Mall and near the I-35 junction. I would have to pay a premium in tolls to go around OKC. Paying that premium would be stupid if I was having to drive through 3 traffic signals by Riverwind Casino and 11 of them on OK-9 thru the South side of Norman.

[J N Winkler]

Just a gentle reminder:  discussion of turnpike extensions in Oklahoma belongs on the Central States board.

[Plutonic Panda]

Just a gentle reminder:  discussion of turnpike extensions in Oklahoma belongs on the Central States board.

Wow we did get off topic that's pretty funny. My ADHD is so bad I'll click on this topic expecting to read about an update regarding this project in Houston see the discussion about turnpike extensions in Oklahoma and immediately forget what the original topic is supposed to be about. My bad

[rte66man]

It's great how you say Mustang and Yukon are growing and the DOT didnt plan for it.

It doesn't take a genius to be able to forecast urban growth, the resulting traffic needs and make plans for it like planning where new highways might be needed in the future or existing roads expanded. Texas has usually been pretty good at that sort of thing. At least they were in the past.

In Wichita Falls what is currently Kell Freeway was just a surface street in the 1970's. They widened it to a divided street with a huge median and it stayed that way until the late 1980's when it was finally time to start building the freeway. They got the ROW secured many years earlier when it was easy and far less expensive to do so. Several super highway corridors in DFW were built-out in the same manner.

Various parties here in Oklahoma could have copied that approach, specifically in the case of Yukon and Mustang. They knew the growth was coming back in the 1990's when they could have started reserving room on S Sara Road. ODOT and OTA did a little bit of that on OK-4 just South of Bridge Creek going to the H.E. Bailey turnpike extension. They built a new pair of bridges over the Canadian River. But they didn't follow through on anything else. And even the OTA's spur going from I-44 to Norman stops miles short of I-35. It's all half-a$$ nonsense. BTW, I don't mean to make it sound like I'm letting the buck stop at them. The biggest jerks in the situation are the politicians giving ODOT, OTA or various city planners their marching orders, funding (or lack thereof).

I like the way you keep dragging out the Kilpatrick SW extension as an example of poor planning.  The plans are irrelevant. Any road map of the 60's will show you what ODOT wanted to do. As always, there wasn't even enough money to 'reserve' RoW given the competing priorities.  Unless ODOT was willing to step in and buy the land, they had no legal way to prevent the development. That ship has sailed. you should go ahead and bury that horse 6 feet under and leave him there.

You'd have a point if the type of bullshit that caused the road to be the way it is didn't still exist in Oklahoma. Can you name me a single initiative in the entire goddamn state where there is active planning for new freeway routes in the future? OKC showed some of the highest growth in the state and yet there are zero plans for a new freeway facility.

The OTA will likely push the Kickapoo south to connect with I-35 but that will be buying up properties, lawsuits, curves to avoid certain properties, etc that could be mitigated with better planning a long time ago.

OKC is going to end up in a very shitty situation unless some serious planning begins this decades to preserve ROW for future high capacity transportation corridors.

The US81 bypass of Chickasha comes immediately to mind. A 4 lane, fully limited access bypass along the west side.

The issue is MONEY.  I actually agree that RoW needs to be preserved. However, the funds allocated for roads is extremely inadequate to do that as well as keep up with existing improvements. Right or wrong, the general populace won't vote for increased taxes to pay for RoW preservation when their shitty 2-lane state highway needs shoulders and bridge replacements.

If we were to task ODOT/OTA with buying up RoW for a SE Norman bypass from wherever the Kickapoo extension connects over to OK9 by the casino, how much do you think that would cost today? Yes, it will cost more next year but that's not the point. The money just isn't there.

To follow the moderator's "gentle guidance" to get this back on topic, what chance is there for a change in the board makeup so the project could get off center and move forward?  Not as familiar with Houston politics as I used to be.

[Chris]

Where is all the congestion? 9 a.m. and only some local congestion around downtown. If you compare that with European cities, you'll see that almost the entire urban highway network will be jammed up at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning.

[Rothman]

Where is all the congestion? 9 a.m. and only some local congestion around downtown. If you compare that with European cities, you'll see that almost the entire urban highway network will be jammed up at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning.

Zoom in.  You're looking at it way zoomed out.

[hotdogPi]

Where is all the congestion? 9 a.m. and only some local congestion around downtown. If you compare that with European cities, you'll see that almost the entire urban highway network will be jammed up at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning.

Zoom in.  You're looking at it way zoomed out.

I-610 is much less congested than MA 128 normally is during rush hour.

[bwana39]

9:00 AM How is the traffic where you are at 10:00 AM?  Texas; being on central time shifts the day an hour earlier than on the east coast. That is the real point of comparison.
Most of Texas tends to work from seven AM or later to about 5:00PM. Most of the offices work 8-5 with an hour for lunch.  Bank lobbies tend to be 9-3 (or 9-4)

I agree that I-610  is not nearly as congested as even the closer in downtown loop or SHT (Beltway 8). It is however congested if you hit it at the wrong times.