History
The Texas State Highway System can trace its roots to the establishment of the Texas Highway Department on April 4, 1917. Administrative control of the department was given to a three-member commission appointed by the governor for two-year terms. On June 21, 1917, the commission conducted its first public hearing to solicit input on potential highway routes. The committee also divided the state up into six divisions to be headquartered in Amarillo, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Angelo, and San Antonio. Later that year, the commission designated 26 state highways covering 8,865 miles (14,267 km) which were to be readily accessible to 89 percent of the state's population.
In 1921, Congress amended the Federal Aid to Roads Act of 1916 to require the States to take control of road design, construction and maintenance of state highways by 1925. As a result, on January 1, 1924, the Texas Highway Department took full control of maintaining the state highways from the counties within which they resided. In 1925, the state legislature granted the highway department the responsibility of surveying, planning and building highways, and the authorization to acquire new highway rights-of-way by purchasing, or condemning through Eminent Domain, land required for highway construction.
By 1927, the highway system covered 17,960 miles (28,900 km), of which 96 miles (154 km) were concrete, 1,060 miles (1,710 km) were asphalt, 5,000 miles (8,000 km) were gravel, shell or stone, and 10,000 miles (20,000 km) were clay or dirt.
In 1951, a 50-mile (80 km) section of the Gulf Freeway (now Interstate 45) opened, becoming Texas' first urban freeway. In 1957, the state began receiving federal funding for the construction of the Interstate Highway System. The first section of Interstate Highway from county line to county line to open in the state was a 43-mile (69 km) section of I-35 in Bexar County. By 1967, the highway system controlled 66,000 miles (106,000 km) of highway.
In 1984, US 66 was replaced by I-40 and the US 66 designation was removed from the state highway system the following year. Today, a portion of the original Route 67 between Garland and Greenville is signed as TX-66.
In 1992, the 3,200 miles (5,100 km) of Interstate Highway System in Texas was completed with the opening of a 6-mile (9.7 km) section of I-27. In 1997, the Texas Turnpike Authority was merged with TxDOT and independently, the North Texas Turnpike Authority became responsible for toll projects in Collin, Dallas, Denton and Tarrant counties.
In March 2011, Texas ranked as a bottom-ten "Worst" state (tied with Montana and North Dakota) in the American State Litter Scorecard, presented at the American Society for Public Administration national conference. Highways across Texas suffer from an overall poor quality of public space cleanliness, attributed to ineffective roadside and adjacent property litter/debris abatement standards, politicized procedural efforts, and other public performance indicators.
Read more about this topic: Texas State Highways
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)