While on the subject of traffic/driving

[Boogahz]

Amaze your friends with Texas transportation trivia

Ben Wear - GETTING THERE

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday, February 28, 2005

For some reason, not everyone I meet finds transportation as fascinating as I do. So, in an attempt to double the average time of my party conversations (to about 30 seconds), what follows is some basic Texas transportation literacy.

Warning: It will take more than 30 seconds to read this, so you might want to take a swig of coffee or turn on some loud music.

To the moon, Dallas: Texas has 301,796 miles of highways, county roads and city streets. As a point of comparison, the average distance to the moon (its orbit is oblong) is 238,856 miles, equal to about 80 percent of our road network. This includes, by the way, 142 miles of toll roads, a figure that's about to take off like, eh, a rocket.

No wonder parking is hard to find: The state has 18.6 million registered vehicles but only 14.6 million licensed drivers. Which means there are at least 4 million cars and trucks sitting around at all times with no one to drive them, or there are a whole lot of 12-year-olds behind the wheel of pickups in West Texas.

Why we need air conditioning: Every day, Texans (or visitors) drive 591 million miles within our borders. That's three round trips to the sun. But only for cars with great gas mileage.

Do you feel lucky? Texas has 48,920 bridges. Of that, 2,416 are classified as "structurally deficient" and 7,696 as "functionally obsolete." Meaning about one out of every five fall into one of those categories. On the upside, the 76 percent deemed "sufficient" increased by 665 bridges last year.

Not-so-public transportation: The total miles put on Texas roads last year by public transportation vehicles was 222.8 million miles. Or about 38 percent of non-public transportation miles traveled — for one day. The total rides on public transportation for the year were 278 million. That means the average Texas man, woman and child took about a dozen one-way trips.

Paving Texas: The state road system has 1,719 square miles of right of way. That amounts to six-tenths of 1 percent of Texas.

Heads in the clouds: Texas has 49,000 pilots, with 300 airports to leave and land on.

TxDollars: The Texas Department of Transportation's budget this year is $5.3 billion, including about $2.7 billion to build new or expanded roads and $2.1 billion to maintain the ones we have.

That repair figure is almost exactly what the state's 20-cent-a-gallon motor-fuels tax brings in (after 25 percent goes to public education), meaning that federal dollars build almost all our new roads.

Long and short of it: The longest highway in the state is U.S. 83, which runs 899 miles from the top of the Panhandle to Brownsville. The shortest is Loop 168 in downtown Tenaha, in East Texas, logging in at 391 feet. No word on whether the state is eying Loop 168 for possible tolls.

Our first state highway: 20 miles from Falfurrias to Encino, along what is now U.S. 281. Construction started in 1918 (coinciding with the invention of orange cones) and ended in 1920. First known Texas driver complaint about construction delays: Jan. 4, 1918.

[Adex_Xeda]

Heh,

My work does most of the traffic research for the state of Texas.

With population growth exceeding our ablity to slap down pavement to keep up, there's a lot of research dollars spent on figuring out better ways to use the roads we already have.