LONDON: It’s known as Ports-to-Plains and it will provide a modern highway network that stretches from Texas’s border with Mexico all the way into the Canadian plains.
The project isn’t done yet, but according to Michael Reeves, president of the Ports-to-Plains Alliance, much of the highway improvements – in Texas, at least – has been completed.
Reeves, who lives in Lubbock, has led the alliance – which he said is a 501 c 6 non-profit organization – for about a dozen years. He’s a Lubbock native, a journalism graduate from Texas Tech University and he’s an energetic advocate for this massive highway project.
The alliance comprises local officials representing cities, counties and chambers of commerce in communities stretching all the way from Mazatlan, on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, to Alberta, Reeves said.
“One of our goals is to relieve some of the heavy truck traffic from Interstate 35,” Reeves said. Expanding and improving the highway through Texas and north into the rest of the Great Plains would divert traffic that’s now moving along I-35 that most officials believe is causing considerable congestion headaches, Reeves said.
One possible way to do that would be to extend Interstate 27, which currently serves as a highway spur between Amarillo and Lubbock, to points north and south well beyond both cities. The Texas Department of Transportation is “looking at expansion” of I-27, Reeves said, “but we’re still waiting for the (Texas Transportation) commission to authorize a full feasibility study.”
I-27 came to be in a 1968 congressional highway funding bill, Reeves said. He said construction began in 1975 and the interstate highway was completed in 1992, at a cost of $453 million. Reeves calls that a “bargain” in today’s dollars.
Reeves credited the late U.S. Rep. George Mahon, D-Lubbock, with moving the project forward. Mahon, he said, had grown “tired of Lubbock not having an interstate highway” and that the city was big enough to warrant one. It helped, as well, that Mahon was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, one of the most powerful congressional panels on Capitol Hill.
“We’re working to get a four-lane divided highway built all the way from the Mexican border to Denver,” Reeves said, noting that such highways generally are safer than narrower, undivided roadways. “Fifty percent of the upgrades in that area have been done,” Reeves said.
TxDOT has estimated that in Texas alone these highway projects will cost about $425 million. Funding, though, is an issue.
Shipping activity at Port Qasim on February 11
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