including a deep dive on the community\u2019s relationship with I-35<\/a>.<\/p>\nSloan says it\u2019s pretty tough to tell Waco or Baylor\u2019s stories without discussing the massive interstate right next to campus.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t ignore I-35,\u201d said Sloan. \u201cIt\u2019s so central to life here in Texas.\u201d<\/p>\n
Initial construction on the interstate began in the mid-1950s, after being authorized by the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, and that work fully hit Waco by the 1960s. Recordings in Sloan\u2019s archives from Waco residents show the concern at the time about the construction of the road was it going through long-established neighborhoods, cutting the community in half with traffic, and the cost of building an interstate to stretch from northern Minnesota to southern Texas.<\/p>\n
Topics which, as Sloan alluded to, don\u2019t sound all that different from the complaints many Texans bring up regarding I-35 today, especially with some of the large-scale projects currently going on along that road.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat challenge is real when you have the population growing by 1,500 people a day,\u201d said Brian Barth, deputy executive director for program delivery at the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT).<\/p>\n
Barth said that the boom in population has fueled a lot of the major projects on I-35 currently. It makes sense, as TxDOT reports that roughly 50% of the state\u2019s population lives in the I-35 corridor and about half of the state\u2019s freight travels along the road.<\/p>\n
Two of the larger projects are the Capitol Express project through Austin and the Northeast Expansion project in San Antonio. Barth says other major expansion work is going on in Waco, Dallas and near the Texas-Oklahoma border.<\/p>\n
The Capitol Express project illustrates a new wrinkle in I-35\u2019s story that Barth says they\u2019re seeing more with these expansion efforts: space. That project requires drilling to lower the expanded roadway downward, since there\u2019s simply no space to expand the road much further outward in the packed cityscape.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou just have nowhere else to go,\u201d said Barth, pointing out that is quickly becoming the case in a lot of the large city-centered sections of the road.<\/p>\n
Barth said that is something TxDOT and road crews are heavily considering as they plan for the next waves of construction and expansion work on I-35, as they continue to try to keep that road up with the growing state. He said they\u2019re also looking at how technology like autonomous vehicles will affect the road\u2019s layout in the future and are taking additional steps to handle the increased traffic, like working to make sure the state\u2019s entire 500-plus mile stretch of the road contains at least three lanes going each way\u2014which Barth says currently approximately 41% of it is less than that.<\/p>\n
But the bottom line is that just as construction and expansion has been the story of I-35 from day one, it looks like it will continue to be as the state and the road grow up together.<\/p>\n
\u201cHistory\u2019s not the story of the past; it\u2019s not even passed,\u201d said Sloan, as he expects more stories of growing pains on I-35 to enter his archives. \u201cIt is the spine of Texas, so there\u2019s really no other way around it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WACO, Texas \u2014 Travel through Texas\u2019s busiest communities along Interstate 35 likely will come with some back-ups and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[30626,30627,132,134,133,21403,1570,102,138,223,82,27,1569,272,29499,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-232198","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-app-traffic-transit","9":"tag-app-traffic-and-transit","10":"tag-austin","11":"tag-austin-headlines","12":"tag-austin-news","13":"tag-brian-scott","14":"tag-ctv","15":"tag-dallas","16":"tag-el-paso","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-san-antonio","19":"tag-texas","20":"tag-texas-what-you-need-to-know","21":"tag-traffic","22":"tag-traffic-and-transit","23":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}