New laws – one from Texas – to regulate platforms like Facebook and TikTok are getting Supreme Court scrutiny today, with potentially profound implications.
Years of drought have devastated sugar growers in South Texas – so much so that the state’s only sugar mill is closing.
Austin’s I-35, the spine of the region’s roadway grid, is about to undergo the largest expansion since the highway opened in 1962. Nathan Bernier joins with a drill down into what it means.
And: We’ll learn about a device that can help blind and low-vision people experience the eclipse.
road
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.
Texas Roadkill
No matter how careful you are, it can be an inevitability on Texas roads. That was the inspiration for this Typewriter Rodeo poem.
What Was That Roadkill?
It was gone way before you got there, all that’s left are clues — and smells. That was the inspiration for this Typewriter Rodeo poem.
Texas Standard: May 2, 2017
A stabbing incident at the flagship campus of the university of Texas: and an unexpected source helping to break the news, we’ll have the backstory. Plus the eyes of Texas are upon Pasadena? Why a local election east of Houston may have implications across the lone star state. Also, if you’re a non citizen putting your life on the line in service to the US, the law puts you on a fast track to citizenship, but now there’s a roadblock. We’ll hear what’s happening and what isn’t. Also: he was a young man building a website in his Texas bedroom who became a billionaire and then one of the most wanted men in all of America. We’ll hear the story of the search for the Dread Pirate Roberts. All of that and so much more today on the Texas Standard:
Statewide Ban
The Texas legislature is considering a statewide ban on texting while driving. That was the inspiration for this week’s Typewriter Rodeo poem for the Texas Standard.
Texas Standard: January 6, 2017
The report cards are in —and what do they teach us about the state of Texas public schools? A collision course over the grading system. Also, water closets everywhere, but who gets to use which ones? Texas lawmakers move to regulate public bathrooms a la North Carolina, as business groups warn that the price could be billions of dollars lost. We’ll hear all about it. Plus Texas bankruptcies on the rise. An ominous sign, or a hint that the worst of the oil bust may be behind us? And some new potential challengers to Ted Cruz and the rest of the week in politics plus a whole lot more today on the Texas Standard:
Courtesy Bumps
Texans have an unspoken agreement when it comes to passing each other on the open road. That was the inspiration for Typewriter Rodeo’s Sean Petrie as he wrote this week’s poem.