Looking Down the Road

Background

Draw a north-south line from Mexico City to Chicago. Draw an east-west line from Los Angeles to Miami. The two lines intersect in Texas.

Texas has long been seen as the crossroads of North America, but this concept has never been more relevant as trade between North and South America continues to grow.

Most goods and commodities coming into the United States from Mexico and South America cross the Texas border and move north, sometimes all the way to Canada. The reverse is true for exports.  In fact, 79 percent of all U.S.-Mexico trade passes through Texas ports of entry. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement, this international traffic will only increase.

A large percentage of the nation’s cross-continent traffic also passes through Texas. And then there are the transportation needs of the 21 million people who already live here.

Texas’ population has increased a staggering 65 percent since 1988.  Growth is projected to continue at a rate of 30,000 new residents a month. The state’s existing road and bridge system will not be sufficient to accommodate the increased traffic this growth will bring.  Beyond that, much of Texas’ transportation infrastructure is nearing the end of its design life.

Texas is at a crossroads.

History

Transportation systems, driven by a simple need to move people and goods from Point A to Point B, are as old as civilization. Well-constructed roads and bridges held the Roman Empire together. The inability to expand and maintain that transportation system was one of the key factors that brought about the empire’s eventual collapse.

Native Americans operated Texas’ first transportation system.  Their paths followed well-worn animal trails leading to sources of water and food. Later, these first Texans developed a network of footpaths and eventually horse trails to connect with trading points and landmarks ranging from strategic to sacred.

After Spain claimed the Southwest, a trace known as the El Camino Real—the King’s Highway—cut across Texas from the Sabine River on the east to the Rio Grande on the southwest. For years, this roadway—actually a series of routes that amounted to Texas’ first transportation corridor—remained the gateway to Texas and Mexico.

Other routes developed to tie into this Spanish colonial road, a happenstance version of what engineers today call connectivity.

Connectivity still is an important concept.

A second significant transportation corridor to span Texas was the Butterfield Overland Mail Route. This 2,700-mile stagecoach road began in St. Louis, entered Texas across the Red River north of Dallas and moved through the state to El Paso for an eventual connection to San Diego. The Civil War cut short the route’s useful life, but it demonstrated the national importance of being able to move people and goods over long distances. The mail route also foreshadowed development of the nation’s first trans-continental railroad.

After the Civil War, the Chisholm Trail connected Texas to the railhead in Kansas. Texas cattlemen pushed 5 million head of Longhorn cattle "up the trail" to market, reinvigorating Texas’ shattered economy.

Soon railroads began building into and across Texas. With completion of the Texas and Pacific line in 1881, the state had its first high-speed transportation corridor. Of course, high speed is a relative term. Steam engines of the era running full throttle pulled cars about 40 miles per hour. Still, that was faster than anyone had ever been able to move across Texas and speeds soon increased with development of more powerful locomotives. The new rail system, as transportation always has done, extended settlement and created jobs. Abilene, Sweetwater, Colorado City, Big Spring, Midland and Odessa all trace their beginnings to this railroad line.

Rail remained the principal mode of long-distance travel in Texas until the development in the early 1900s of inexpensive and reliable motor vehicles. That brought about the need for paved roads.

The state got into the business of designing and building highways in 1917 with the creation of the Highway Department, now the Texas Department of Transportation. Within a year, Texas’ fledgling transportation agency had prepared a map of a proposed statewide highway system. Many of the state’s roadways followed or were close to the old trails used by Native Americans and the other cultures which followed them.

Now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, it’s time for Texas to look down the road. Texas proposes to build a new type of transportation system, a network of wide corridors designed to move people and goods faster and more safely than ever before. Beyond that, the corridor will feature a wide utility zone for the transmission of oil, natural gas, electricity, data and a substance critical to the future of the state—water.

World-class concept

The Trans Texas Corridor is the largest engineering project ever proposed for Texas, a world-class concept. The planning and work involved in the corridor will far exceed any public works project in the state’s history. The first cross-state railroad, the Galveston seawall, Texas’ present highway infrastructure, the Astrodome…nothing compares in scope to the corridor.

This is not the first time Texas has started with a vision and transformed it into a useful reality. Texas’ pink granite Capitol is a monument to state-of-the-art 19th Century engineering and innovative financing—the state traded 3 million acres of public land to pay for the building. But the best example is our Interstate highway system.

Planning for a "National System of Interstate Highways," first envisioned in 1939 and expedited during World War II because of its importance to national defense, began in 1944.Within three years, the routes had been selected. A Texan, the late Frank Turner, played a key role in the planning process. In fact, the 1929 Texas A&M graduate is considered the "father of the Interstate system."  Construction finally began in 1956 after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law a measure creating the National Highway Fund.

Within 14 years, the Interstate system in Texas was essentially complete. A 3,234-mile network of multi-lane highways engineered for speed and safety connected the state’s major cities.

But the similarity between Texas’ portion of the Interstate system and the Trans Texas Corridor ends there. The Interstate system was a nationwide effort, primarily funded with federal dollars.  Though other state transportation agencies also are looking to the future, no other state has proposed such an ambitious and visionary project as the corridor.

The concept is simple. Texas will be connected by a 4,000-mile network of corridors up to 1,200 feet wide with separate lanes for passenger vehicles (three in each direction) and trucks (two in each direction). The corridor also will include six rail lines (three in each direction): two tracks for high-speed passenger rail, two for commuter rail and two for freight. The third component of the corridor will be a 200-foot-wide dedicated utility zone.

The corridor paves the way—literally—to the future of Texas. The Trans Texas Corridor will allow for much faster and safer transportation of people and freight. It will relieve our congested roadways. It will keep hazardous materials out of populated areas. It will improve air quality by reducing emissions and provide a safer, more reliable utility transmission system. It will keep Texas’ economy vibrant by creating new markets and jobs. Finally, as the King’s Highway and the railroad did in previous centuries, the corridor will lead to the development of new cities while increasing the importance of existing cities.

Funding for the corridor will be as innovative as the corridor itself.  Texas voters provided the framework on November 6, 2001 when they approved Proposition 15. That constitutional amendment allows Texas more flexibility than it has ever had to pay for transportation projects through a variety of means. These include public-private partnerships called exclusive development agreements, and funding options like toll equity, the Texas Mobility Fund and regional mobility authorities. Beyond these mechanisms, this report outlines other possible sources for funding the corridor.

The Trans Texas Corridor plan sounds futuristic and it is. Nearly a half-century ago, the proposed Interstate highway system seemed as avant-garde. But this new vision is achievable.

Sam Houston, the first elected leader of the Republic of Texas, understood the importance of transportation. After Texas’ admission to the Union, the hero of San Jacinto went to Washington to serve the new state as one of its two senators.

In 1858, during debate on what route the nation’s first transcontinental railroad should take, the tall Texan rose in the upper house of Congress to put the issue into perspective.

Transportation, he said, "is…of vital importance, and we must all lay our hands to it as a great and mighty work of national interest and concernment, divested of everything sectional or local in its character. If its accomplishment is to be secured, it must be done with united hands and united hearts, with reference alone to the public good and its accomplishment on the most reasonable terms that the national resources will justify."

Houston’s words, spoken as an earlier generation looked down the road, are as appropriate today as they were then.