Trans-Texas Corridor Killed

I'm thrilled to hear that as of today, the unnecessary, $200 billion dollar, private, foreign controlled, tolled, countryside eating, 50 year construction project that is the Trans-Texas Corridor has been killed. I wrote previously about this project a couple years ago (link here). The universally maligned boondoggle was a centerpiece of the universally maligned Governor Rick Perry. He must be smarting today that his own transportation department unilaterally killed the project.

The project would have spewed 4,000 miles of concrete onto the beautiful Texas countryside (ie, not widening the existing freeways, but building new ones in the countryside). It would have measured up to 4 football fields of concrete in width (visualize that). It would have been funded by tolling - ostensibly in perpetuity - with proceeds sent oversees to Cintra, a Spanish engineering firm.

If this sounds bad to you, you can see why no one wanted it built in the first place. Yes, expand roads. Yes, infrustructure improvement is needed. But not a new freeway system that rivals that of Brazil's, on top of the huge whopper of a freeway system Texas already has.

Political side note: In 2006, Rick Perry won a plurality of votes, not a majority. Texans from Brownsville to Amarillo had 4 viable candidates to chose from, not the typical 2. Kinky Friedman, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, some Democrat guy, and Rick Perry. All of the other 3 candidates ran as anti TTC and anti-Rick Perry. But in the end they beat up on each other and Rick Perry grinned his way back to the governor's mansion. For anyone who cares, I'm endorsing Kay Bailey Hutchison for governor in 2010.