MoPac

Austin’s second least favorite highway is getting a Windows ME-equivalent upgrade. From the world worst newspaper…

MoPac would not be widened. Instead, in the tight section between RM 2222 and the lake — where the Union Pacific railroad sits in the median — officials envision that the managed(tolled) lanes would be squeezed in by narrowing lanes slightly in some spots and using most of the existing shoulders. The new lanes would be separated from the free lanes by a row of flexible pylons and have a handful of entrances and exits.

As Germ said re-striping the shoulder is like putting a Band-aid on a severed arm. But hey, at least all those tolls are going to pay for those sound barriers in Tarrytown…God forbid that the house you over-paid for that next to a highway, be you know, loud. I know that TxDOT is secretly (or maybe not so secretly) trying to destroy Austin through a mix of strangling us with unused tollways, while letting I-35 (you know, the last free road) rot out from underneath us, but this is just absurd.