Highway

Remembering political trailblazer Eddie Bernice Johnson

The death of a giant in Texas politics: reaction to the passing of longtime political trailblazer Eddie Bernice Johnson.

A new year brings a new mayor in Houston. What John Whitmire plans to do to address the most pressing issues facing the city.

What 2024 heralds for one of the busiest thruways in Texas: the north-south corridor of Interstate 35.

An economist with the Dallas Fed shares red flags for Texas employment.

The San Antonio-Havana connection: A new cross-cultural art exchange between the two cities.

Also: Longhorn Nation recovers from a semifinal loss to Washington in the College Football Playoff.

TxDOT wants to bury a highway. The Dallas City Council wants to get rid of it.

Tenure is on the agenda in the Texas Senate this week, as lawmakers weigh a bill that would end the practice for the new faculty at public colleges and universities.

The Texas Department of Transportation wants to bury Interstate 345, a 1.4-mile stretch of highway that connects Dallas to its Deep Ellum neighborhood. But the Dallas City Council wants to get rid of it.

A Hill Country destination looks beyond tourism: The city of Kerrville gets busy on a plan to attract industry.

Pro sports teams shunned gambling on games, but now, Texas’ 11 top franchises are teaming up to legalize sports betting in the Lone Star State.

What this cold snap means for Texans experiencing homelessness

A last minute scramble to keep the Government funded as Texans clamber in advance of dangerously cold weather. We’ll have more on efforts to piece together a 1.7 trillion dollar spending bill; much debate centering on what’s happening at the border. Also as Texans prepare for a blast of Arctic air, we’ll speak with an official in Irving who’s been mobilizing efforts to help folks in the metroplex experiencing homelessness, who are especially vulnerable. Also a crisis among caregivers assisting Texans with disabilities. These stories and much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: September 2, 2022

A vote about a change to the social studies curriculum in Texas public schools. Only it’s not the sort of vote some advocates wanted. Proposals to add teaching about Junetheenth, the murder of George Floyd and LGBTQ rights are on long term pause. We’ll hear the backstory. Also how what’s happening in San Antonio could give larger clues about how climate change is affecting Texas. And a perfect storm for animal shelters as more pets are abandoned, costs rising with inflation, and a shortage of vets and staffers have shelters scrambling. Plus the end of the bitcoin mining gold rush in Texas? The week in politics with the Texas tribune and more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: July 28, 2022

18 billion in pandemic aid for Texas schools, a huge amount of money. So why has less than a third been spent? We’ll explore. Also with back to school just around the corner, many districts struggling to find and retain teachers. Will promises of a four day workweek do the trick? We’ll hear what educators and parents make of that approach. And five years after Hurricane Harvey, what researchers are finding out about a less obvious impact: the exposure to chemicals. Plus thousands of miles of new roads in Texas displacing hundreds of homes and businesses, but repeated findings of no environmental impact. A red flag? Those stories and much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: May 4, 2022

On today’s show we’ll explain the trigger law that would mostly ban abortion in Texas if Roe v. wade is overturned. Plus, have Texans had enough of highways? Some transportation activists are taking it to the streets. And are you familiar with Toadsuck? Don’t be offended, it’s the name of a place. Commentator W.F. Strong will tell you all about it. And we’ve got back to school book bans in San Antonio and of course the latest news from across the Lone Star State today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: February 8, 2022

As primaries approach, an effort to unseat incumbent Texas democrats, led by democrats. Who’s in the political crosshairs and why? We’ll explore. Also, what happens to oil wells that are no longer productive? Concerns grow about the environmental impact of abandoned production sites, now millions coming to Texas for cleanup. And how cyberattacks on small Texas towns have rewritten the rules of engagement for Russian hackers. Plus fresh allegations that pro football intentionally sidelines Black coaches. Former NFL coach Daron Roberts of UT-Austin’s Center for Sports Leadership and Innovation with a close up. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: July 16, 2021

A plane trip back to Austin for Texas Democrats, courtesy of the House speaker. We’ll have the latest in a huge political stalemate still unfolding. With Texas Democratic House and Senate members in D.C. right now, a maneuver to deny a quorum and stop legislation to further restrict voting in Texas. The political theatre is getting more dramatic with very real political fallout. Also, with Texas growing exponentially the state transportation department wants to spend billions widening highways, but some are wondering if that mindset should be thrown into reverse. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:

Miles And Miles Of Texas

One way I know a book is special is if I keep thinking about it years after I first read it. Miles and Miles of Texas, 100 years of the Texas Highway Department, by Carol Dawson and Roger Allen Polson, is such a book. I first read it several years ago, and even recommended it on air back then, but ever so briefly. I was unable to do it justice in the ten seconds I had to devote to it that day. So, let me give it the time it deserves right now.

One reason I have a particular fondness for the book is because my father drove me and my brothers all over Texas when we were kids and bragged about our great road system. This book makes my father’s case, and also, quite honestly, lays out just how early Texas political corruption (can you say Ferguson?) raided the highway funds and delayed the quality work that eventually became routine, thanks to meticulously ethical overseers who finally took charge.

This book is about how the Texas highway system got built, the story of how the state, as the authors say, “got the farmer out of the mud.” Farm to Market roads and Ranch to Market roads, FM and RM, were pioneered in Texas. The wildflowers being seeded along the highways was started long before Lady Bird Johnson took on the promotion of the practice as her special project, and enhanced it. That story is here.

Miles and Miles of Texas points out that “throughout recorded history, roads have provided opportunities for criminals.” Bonnie and Clyde used the good roads for fast getaways. Serial killers stalked the interstates. Smugglers of all kinds took advantage of the anonymity offered by crowded, fast-moving expressway traffic.

Roads do not always mean universal progress. Roads connect, but they also divide and circumvent. They unite some and isolate others. Eminent domain is often invoked for the public good, but it’s generally the poor that pay the biggest price for the “public good.”

What I most love about the book is that it is overflowing with marvelous anecdotes that are sometimes shocking, sometimes inspiring and sometimes just hilarious. One I found particularly amusing was how inmates working road construction during WWII got tired of people doing drive-bys with their kids just to gawk at them in their prison stripes. The inmates would pick the scariest looking among them and chain him to a tree with a forty-foot chain. Then, when cars would come by, he’d run after them until the chain grew taught and then he’d strain at the end like a zombie. The car would speed off with the kids staring out the back window, wide-eyed in horror. I imagine those petrified kids kept their parents up late into the night. Some poetic justice in that perhaps.

Another aspect of the book that is noteworthy is the photographs. They were chosen in close cooperation with the Texas Highway Department, which has phenomenal archives. The book contains dozens of these rare photographs of Texas roads and bridges in all phases of construction. The photographs were often taken by engineers and others uniquely involved in the building of roads so you feel privileged to see perspectives few have seen. This is a book that truly animates history because of the unique relationships between the photos and those who took them. Impressive, intricate research went into compiling this book.

I enjoy it as an extraordinary read, cover to cover, and as a coffee-table book to be perused at leisure.

Compared to other states, we have some impressive achievements in our road system. We have, as mentioned, the pioneering of FM roads, the landscaping of the highways for beauty and safety, the invention of the Texas turnaround (where you don’t have to go through the light to reverse direction on a freeway), and truly exceptional, even beautiful, roadside rest areas.

Miles and Miles of Texas is an entertaining collection of Texana. It’s worth a look.

Jefferson Davis Highway: The Persistence Of A Confederate Memorial

By W.F. Strong

On July 29, 1925 — a full 60 years after the American Civil War — Miss Decca Lamar West of Waco, Texas, wrote a strongly worded letter to Chief Thomas H. MacDonald, the head of what was then the Federal Bureau of Public Roads. Miss West was an influential member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who was lobbying for a coast to coast highway to honor the Former President of the Confederate States. After all, President Abraham Lincoln had a highway already that stretched from New York City to San Francisco. She wrote:

The Jefferson Davis Highway directors are doing constructive work in every state, and patriotically the women of the United States feel that nothing could tend to the greater unity and understanding of the people than that two transcontinental highways should be named for the two great leaders of the critical period of American history.

The honorary highway of which she wrote was almost fully realized. Today, the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway still exists – but only in bits and pieces – from Virginia to California. You’ll find United Daughters of the Confederacy markers along highways in Georgia and Louisiana and Arizona. But New Mexico had them all removed from along I-10 two years ago. You can see the Texas markers along U.S. 90 and 290 and I-35 and along Highways 59 and 77 South toward the border. Others have been removed — including those in Elgin, San Antonio, and San Marcos.

Brownsville just removed its marker after a contentious debate. The marker, originally placed on Palm Boulevard by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1927, was later moved to a city park after the state passed on certifying that memorial route. It was a simple, large boulder with a plaque praising Jefferson Davis. Some wanted the boulder removed altogether because it honored Davis who was a traitor to the U.S. Others felt that removing it would be an attempt to erase history.

My contention is that the monument itself tried to erase history. It was one of at least 250 markers placed along U. S. roadways which tried to re-brand Jefferson Davis, to make the enslaver equal to the emancipator. The plaque on the boulder in Brownsville was stone cold propaganda.

The plaque identifies Davis as President of the C.S.A. The word “Confederacy” is not spelled out there. Were they hiding the word from Davis’s resume? He is lauded as a United States soldier and Senator. It says he resigned as Senator, but it omits the fact that he resigned to create a new country where slavery would be forever legal. Finally, he is declared a martyr, but a martyr for what? Hundreds of thousands died for his cause but he didn’t.

President Ulysses S. Grant believed the contentiousness that resulted from the Civil War would, in time, pass. In 1885, in his famous memoirs, he wrote: “As time passes, people, even of the South, will begin to wonder how it was possible that their ancestors ever fought for or justified institutions which acknowledged the right of property in man.” And yet these arguments over monuments persist.

Texas Standard: July 1, 2020

In what would normally be the height of the summer season for Corpus Christi, new restrictions go into effect. But do they go far enough? Our conversation with the mayor of Corpus Christi as regional ICU bed space reaches single digit levels, and also an update on the situation in Dallas. Plus a surprising backyard trend during the pandemic: and why it has some Texans crying fowl over the mesh of rules. And another profile in one of the key races during primary runoff season plus a whole lot more today on the Texas Standard:

Armadillo Poem

A Texas road trip often isn’t without at least one sighting of these mileposts of sorts. That was the inspiration for this Typewriter Rodeo poem.

Texas Standard: November 15, 2018

Troops at the border: a test of mettle for the Military? The defense chief in south Texas defends the use of soldiers at the U.S. Mexico line. Border security is part of national security says James Mattis at a forward operating base in south Texas. But what’s the long term goal for those 23 hundred troops at the Texas border with Mexico? We’ll take a look. And the state of kids in Texas, today we get new data. Also the President set to sign a bill with bipartisan congressional support. Come again? We’ll hear about the issue that’s brought Congress, the White House, Democrats and Republicans together. Those stories and so much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: August 30, 2018

The state department denying US passports to American citizens born near the border. The accusation: fraudulent birth certificates. We’ll talk to the Washington post reporter who found that the citizenship of hundreds, possibly thousands of hispanics with American birth certificates are being stripped of their passports, and their legal status in the US thrown into question. We’ll hear the how and why. Also, Harvey trapped hundreds of thousands of Texans when major freeways flooded across Houston. Now the effort to fix what’s causing clogged arteries during storms. And smart enough to set up a smart home? A new industry emerges to help. Those stories and more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: March 29, 2018

Shakeup at the V-A: Texas is home to the second largest population of veterans in the U.S. We’ll explore what changes at the top could mean. Also, some Texas city and county leaders want the option to change open meeting rules in an emergency. We’ll look at why they’re pointing to Harvey as evidence. And you’ve heard of Bitcoin, but do you understand how crypto-currency actually works? We’ll ask our tech expert about the basics and why some see it as a bubble waiting to bust. And the Mexican game that’s gaining new fans. A look at the history of Loteria. Those stories and so much more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: June 27, 2017

A White House warning on Syria raises hackles in Moscow and eyebrows around the world. What’s behind last night’s announcement? We’ll explore. Also, drowned out by some of the bigger stories from the supreme court this week, a decision not to decide a case involving a high profile shooting at the border. We’ll loop back for a closer look. And a new law in Texas establishes a ‘right to try’ controversial stem cell treatments, but some worry it could be a green light for modern day snake oil salesmen. Those stories and a whole lot more today on the Texas Standard:

Texas Standard: January 16, 2017

Does the voting rights act still protect minorities? A working-class Texas town could be at the heart of a new test for the landmark law, we’ll explore. Also for decades, Texas has permitted vaccination exemptions for reasons of conscience. We’ll hear about a plan to change that. And if they build it, will they come? Selling state planners on a “prairie to port superhighway” thru Texas. And cattle rustlers beware: the big money’s on a new outlaw …time to lock up your beehives? And in south Texas scores of pelicans falling from the sky directly onto traffic below…the mystery…and much more today on the Texas Standard:

I-35

Highways are supposed to let us get around local traffic, across town or to the next big city quickly. But anyone who has lived in Texas for more than a week knows that there’s one exception to the rule: Interstate 35. Locals who live along the highway itself avoid it on their daily commutes. Long-distance travelers will drive an extra two hours on backroads just to ensure they won’t have to use it. But sometimes you just have to, sometimes there’s no choice, sometimes you sigh and say, “Let’s try I-35.”

Tappin’ on the Brakes

What do Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio all have in common? Traffic. That inspired Typewriter Rodeo’s David Fruchter to write this week’s poem.

Texas Highways

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including our highways. Summer is on its way and that means planning a road trip across one of these concrete titans. That was the inspiration for Typewriter Rodeo’s David Fruchter as he wrote this week’s poem.