Random Update On Construction In North Texas -- January 23, 2019

Updates

Later, 10:18 a.m. Central Time:  See link at first comment below. The narrator at that video does a really, really good jub, but "we" don't think of these as "bad roads" but really, really "good ideas."  The feeder roads are awesome and a little sporty; not having fences is really, really cool and are really quite important (counterintuitive?). Beltways around the cities are very, very clever; I first saw them in San Antonio. Not exactly sure how beltways have made floods worse. Urbanization made floods worse, but it wasn't the beltways. Population growth was made possible by Texas' transportation system? Austin took just the opposite tack: did not expand its transportation system like the rest of Texas. The city continued to grow and now has one of the worse transportation problems. But the video is really, really good -- gives a great overview of Texas highways. Once you figure them out, they are clearly the best in the nation.

Original Post

I've talked often of all the construction going on north of DFW airport, between Grapevine, TX, and on up to Carrollton, Plano, Frisco, McKinney. All of a sudden I'm seeing a huge project being developed along Texas Highway 121 between Grapevine's historic downtown and the airport (DFW). I know we are getting a new water park but this looks like a much bigger project and it's not quite in the spot I expected. So I asked the old-timers I run into at Starbucks.

I've been told that Grapevine is going to get a 5-level interchange.

Wiki has a page devoted to "stack interchanges." In the local area, the most famous is the "High-Five" north of Dallas on Texas Highway 75. This was the first of "several proposed 5-level interchanges" for the DFW area. Another one is the "Mixmaster" north of downtown Ft Worth. I don't know what is meant by "several," but I assume about five to seven. I think there are currently either three or four 5-level interchanges currently completed in the Dallas-Ft Worth area.

What intrigues me is this: at the wiki page on "stack interchanges," there is a whole subsection on Texas stacked interchanges.

In the screenshot above, this existing 5-level stacked interchange north of downtown Dallas.

Here is an artist's rendering of the new 5-level stacked interchange proposed for Grapevine, TX, just a mile or so northeast of where I live. Note the wide, long canal: this will be the "Lazy River" inner tube ride for the new water park. The first phase will stretch from Houston to Grapevine (Dallas). The second phase will take the "Lazy River" all the way to Amarillo.