Economic Recovery Act

I can get through this. I know I can.

Living east of Houston, where fewer people want to live, has been a blessing as far as commuting. I've been making this drive for 16 years now, and although I've had to endure some amount of construction over the years on I-10 East, it has been less than, say, the Southwest Freeway (U.S. 59), which has had some portion under construction continuously since the 80s. And I-10 East seems to be ahead of the game, where the number of lanes is always ahead of need. (Side note: This conflicts with the claim of anti-freeway people, who insist that wider freeways lead to larger suburbs. The fastest growing areas have had worse traffic for years, and the freeways have always been behind in those areas.)

The Bush/Obama Economic Recovery Act has pumped a lot of money into transportation, and in Texas it's being used for "shovel ready" projects. This means that maintenance and construction projects that were already approved, but waiting on funding, have been accelerated. Projects that were once to be done sequentially are now being done concurrently.

I have one main route that I take to work (I-10 for almost 30 miles), but if there's a traffic problem, I can divert to the I-610 North Loop. Because of construction on the poorly designed downtown section of I-10, I've been taking the 610 option, but this was actually under construction first. Last week's traffic switch on 610 makes taking that route home almost always the worst choice, but in the morning, it still works better some days. But it's never good, because there are no shoulders in many places, and bottlenecks due to construction.

What is typically an easy 45 minute commute lengthened to around an hour, and I don't know when it's going to get better. Do you suppose anyone considered the negative impact of doing these projects at the same time? If they considered it, well, they decided it didn't matter.

Anyway, it'll get better soon. I really don't want to complain about road construction, because without these continual improvements, the commute would become unbearable.

Just hurry it up, would you!