The Department of Transportation

Rene is the best! Awesome place! If you need a day at the dpt come here. I had a morning visit and afternoon visit in the same day!

Incompetent, late, and erroneous TXTAG billings as money grabs; no customer service or contacts to resolve issues (web form is broken, TXTAG staff useless), no response as you try to resolve your issues and the fees mount, forcing you to pay things you don’t owe. They know what they are doing so they hide behind phones and emails that are never answered, web forms that don’t submit.
I and many friends have personal experiences with this, but
read this article and others about the issues to know our experience is real:
Our tax dollars and uncaring government bureaucracy at work once again…

I’d like to congratulate TxDOT for selecting contractors who shut down two lanes of IH-​35 at 9 PM for construction, then neglect to put up signs warning of the lane closures until you’re already in the backed up traffic. Way to go for the epic fail.
The only reason I didn’t give only one star is that I’m actually amazed that they didn’t schedule this work for either rush hour or the Texas-​OU weekend.

Dear TxDOT,
Houston needs a little TLC from you. Why are the residential roads in West U being torn up when other roads nearby (south of the medical center, for example) actually need a complete overhaul?
Hempstead Hwy has pot holes so deep and wide they could be considered sinkholes. Also, I’m not sure if you’re aware that 11^th street has been under construction for 6^th months… did you forget you tore the street up and forgot to put it back together? I’ve never seen anyone out there working (or out there at all).
Anyway, keep doing what you’re doing … but do it more frequently & maybe consider using better asphalt to fill holes.
Fondly,
Heidi

TX Dot is a bunch of bureaucratic retards (apologies to actual retards, you are much smarter than Rick Williams) who are working harder for the concrete industry, and road building bid predators (it’s lucrative biz in TX) than working on actually making our transport system better. a bunch of corrupt corporate turd-​kickers to apply the absolute worst policy measures in order to ensure inefficient road building using methods that have the most unfortunate environmental and aesthetically unpleasing impact on our way of getting from A to B.
How about saving some trees/​grass/​vegetation so you have to worry LESS about runoff impact in the long run? Can’t you make something aesthetically pleasing? ²⁹⁰⁄₇₁ parkway and save some businesses and neighborhoods? or do you just wanna pave the shit outta Austin so we’ll all move outta here in 10 years when it becomes Los Angeles?

AKA TxDOT
This review is intended as a multi-​chapter, on-​going project, which, as true to its subject matter, may last an indeterminate number of weeks or months until completion, if you ever really do know that it is completed. Be warned that the words herein will not mark the shortest distance between two points, nor will those words be clearly marked, nor will they necessarily make sense at any time.
Chapter 1. The Burmuda Triangle.
Everyone who has moved to Austin from somewhere else knows exactly where the Bermuda Triangle of traffic hell is located. It is in south Austin, roughly bounded by 290, Mopac, aka «Loop One» and 360. (We can talk about Loop one not looping at all, but that’s another chapter.) Your first year of living in Austin is marked by getting lost within this triangle several times and sent either northbound on 360 or Southwest Parkway when you really just wanted to go to BestBuy to buy a simple household appliance, or to any of those frickin stores there at the side of 290, that you can’t really get to from 290, if you happen to be coming from the west. But, oddly, even if you do a U-​turn, it doesn’t help. I don’t know how many frickin times I ended up going up 3 frickin 60, when I really just wanted to go west on 290. Why does 290 turn? Why? That’s just stupid. Who designed this? How many vodka gimlets does it take to design an Austin highway or an interchange? And if you try to use Mapquest, it just doesn’t work. Whoever programmed Mapquest in Austin clearly decided to take a giant hit of acid that week. Actually, these roads remind me of those funky spider webs they take pictures of when they give the spiders drugs. Hmmm, that makes sense. I think the triangle most resembles the mescaline web. Don’t you think?
I have a friend who got transferred to Austin about a year before I moved here. I spoke longingly to her about wanting to visit the Neiman Marcus outlet, but no matter how many times I tried, I just couldn’t get there. Mapquest didn’t get me there; maps made no sense; driving around just put me back on 360 going north, yet again. But my friend understood my pain. She took me there herself, explaining that it took her eight months to figure out how to get there. (She has a master’s degree in engineering.)
I think that one of the ways TexDot is trying to keep traffic down in Austin is that they figure that if they ensnare unwary drivers in this traffic enough times, they will give up and go back where they came from.
Chapter 2 — Time, Resources and Management
TxDot’s Best Management Practices:
1. Tearing up a major street involving two or more major intersections is best done by completely destroying the street, and then having 16 pieces of heavy equipment blocking most of the road and having at most two seemingly exhausted guys working from 8 – 6, blocking traffic most effectively during the rush hours for an indeterminate amount of months or years. See: Oltorf, 45^th, 290 W between Oak Hill and Dripping Springs, 290 near the airport, etc, etc. (not to mention the entire City of San Antonio.)
Note to TxDot: Just about anywhere else on the planet, major road construction is done by a large crew of working weekends and in the middle of the night in order to minimize traffic congestion on major roads and intersections. It involves paying some overtime… hey wait, Texas is a right to work state — TxDot doesn’t even pay overtime, I bet! They could just use a night shift. But, inexplicably, they seem to think that working a tiny crew from 9 – 5 is the best way to do their work. Doesn’t the City have any say whatsoever about this? Often, Cities help pay this overtime, so that their citizenry is not overly inconvenienced. Doh.
Chapter 3-​Traffic Signs that Make No Sense (Coming soon)
And more… watch this space!

Dear TxDot
Please find a way to make people move to the right rather than enforcing their own personal speed limit in the left lane.
I suggest putting Marky Mark on overpasses with a sniper rifle.
PS Turn 35’s upper deck into the new Walmart and give us a REAL interstate