Dust off your favorite steering-wheel-gripping curse words, because the Texas Department of Transportation has announced that the South Loop 289 bridge over Slide Road has officially reached the end of its natural life. Just like that bag of spinach rotting in your crisper drawer, this structural masterpiece is expired, and TxDOT is inviting the public to a meeting on Thursday, June 18, to look at drawings of how they plan to tear it down and start over.
Now, if you’re a rational human being who has ever tried to navigate the retail hellscape that is Slide Road and the Loop at 5:15 p.m., you might think, “Oh, wow, maybe they’ll finally add some lanes or fix those atrocious exit ramps!” Bless your sweet, naive heart. TxDOT explicitly stated there are absolutely no plans to add travel lanes or relocate ramps. They are putting the new bridge structure back into the exact same footprint. That’s right, folks—we get to endure months, if not years, of orange-barrel-induced gridlock just to end up with the exact same bottleneck we started with. Truly, a masterclass in Hub City logic.
In a move of peak bureaucratic comedy, this open-house meeting regarding a major bridge on the southwest side of town is being held from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. all the way over at the TxDOT Training Center on Slaton Road. Because nothing screams “we want civic engagement” like asking citizens to fight cross-town rush hour traffic just to stare at poster boards in the “Mesquite Room.” If you can’t make the trek to the southeast side, you can view a pre-recorded video online and email your digital tears to TxDOT until July 13.
But hey, look on the bright side: at least when you’re trapped in a stationary line of SUVs on Slide Road next year, you can take comfort in knowing the concrete crumbling above you is brand new and exactly as inadequate as the old stuff.
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