I-35 surface got stripped between Jarrell and Georgetown today. There were at least a dozen blowouts on that section just from this morning. I don't know if they did it wrong, should have closed down lanes, or what, but I'm quite confident there will no accountability for leaving the highway in that state.
I drove thru there on Tuesday and there were a lot of loose rocks and such on the road getting thrown up at oncoming cars. My truck took a shot off the windshield.
I miss the barbecue, chicken fried steak, and the Mexican food from Austin. I don't miss the hideous traffic and road construction.
I've seen plenty of road construction issues, but never anything like this where a freeway was left with open lanes that were both extraordinarily rough and coated in loose rocks. A couple of posts from reddit on the subject:
But if we don't have a government who will build the roads? Sheesh, who can build the roads with the government involved?
To be honest, it's far from perfect here. The Autobahn is built for high-speed travel. That sounds cool, because for a few seconds at a time you can drive 110 mph or even 135 mph (my speed record), but speed limits come up as well as speed cameras. Having to slam your breaks to slow from 110 to 60 is not fun. Furthermore, keeping these roads safe for high speed driving requires a ton of maintenance (more than the Interstate), so they're under construction routinely. That means lane closures and traffic jams. The real advantage Germans have is that they don't have to get on the Autobahn if they don't want to, so they're less crowded. They have real public transportation. If you don't want to sit in traffic, you can get on a train. Austinites don't have that luxury. Unless you just happen to work near a Capital Metro rail station, you're pretty much stuck on the freeways and toll roads. That means extremely crowded freeways, massive traffic jams, etc.
