Legal Commentary

Vetting the Trans-Texas Corridor

By Tom Kirkendall

This Ralph Blumenthal/NY Times article does a good job of summarizing the massive scale that is the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor project:

. . . the Trans-Texas Corridor, a public-private partnership unrivaled in the state?s ? or probably any state?s ? history, that would stretch well into the century and, if completed in full, end up costing around $200 billion. [. . .]

The plan envisions a 4,000-mile network of new toll roads, with car and truck lanes, rail lines, and pipeline and utilities zones, to bypass congested cities and speed freight to and from Mexico. [. . .]

The corridor project grew out of the 2002 governor?s race when [Governor] Rick Perry, . . . surprised transportation experts by taking ideas they had discussed a decade earlier, to little interest, and ?supersizing them,? as one recalled.

The project grew to consist of four ?priority segments:? new multimodal toll roads up to 1,200 feet wide paralleling Interstates 35 and 37 from Denison in North Texas to the Rio Grande Valley; a proposed I-69 from Texarkana to Houston and Laredo; I-45 from Dallas-Fort Worth to Houston; and I-10 from El Paso to Orange on the Louisiana border. But the exact routes are years away from being designated.

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on February 11, 2008 (boomark / email).