Here’s the latest roadmap of where the Grand Pkwy. currently exists (in green) and where it plans to go (yellow) as it assumes its full, 184-mile circumference. Construction on segments H and I-1 — which serve Liberty and Chambers counties — has been in progress since last year, although it wasn’t until last week that the federal government decided to chip in for it with a $605 million loan to the public nonprofit that’s behind the highway’s construction (a companion to the $840.6 million loan the feds arranged to fund the first 5 segments of the road). That’ll cover about a third of total $1.9 billion pricetag for the 2 northeastern segments, reports News 88.7’s Gail Delaughter. Construction on them is scheduled to wrap up in 2022.
Down south, work on segments C and B remains in the planning stage — and in the case of segment A, the indefinitely stalled stage. If TxDOT were to consider building that all-but-dead portion of the parkway between State Hwy. 146 to I-45 however, it could begin as far north as Kemah or as far south as Texas City.
- Houston’s Grand Parkway Receives $605 Million Federal Loan For Further Expansion [Houston Public Media]
Map: TxDOT
For all that suburbanites love to gripe about the light rail, the Grand Parkway is the real boondoggle. Complete waste of money plus incentivizes further destructive sprawl and flooding problems.
A few bulldozers or less developers could straighten that path out quite a bit and save billions in construction. Case in point is the strange case of Mayor Bob Lanier ….
Segments A, B and C would result in substantial development relatively close to Galveston Bay and the Gulf. Along with a host of other calamities. Climate change anybody?
They absolutely need to run a ferry across the bay to complete all 360 degrees and mollify my OCD.
Talk about a complete waste! That money would be better spent serving the millions of people inside the city rather than the moo cows outside it, literally in the middle of nowhere. The eastern portion of the Grand Parkway, regardless of what biased “experts†may claim, serves absolutely no purpose and that region does not have anywhere near the traffic or population amounts to justify the $2 billion price tag. It astounds me that so many locals here will ignorantly protest any form of public transportation at the drop of a dime but a two billion road to nowhere…you could hear a pin drop. Where are you anti-rail/“rails too costly†people on this two billion dollar boondoggle? We can’t hear you hypocrites.
The Grand Parkway has been a real economic engine for the entire Houston region. Inner loop haters need to get out more.