In Texas, Toll Roads or Flood Preparedness?

The Grand Parkway, Houston’s third and outermost ring road, is looking at a record year. Three major segments of Texas state highway 99 opened for business in 2016—and business is good. Since tolling began on the most recently completed arc of Grand Parkway, a segment that threads the city’s northwest suburbs between U.S. 290 and I-45, toll transactions have more than doubled. Revenue has climbed from $2.7 million in January to $4.4 million in February, the month that tolls opened.

By its completion in 2023, the Grand Parkway will form a 180-mile-long ring encircling greater metro Houston. The highway is a wonder of the world, of a sorts: As the Houston Chronicle helpfully demarcates, the Grand Parkway is large enough to circumscribe all of greater London and Paris, the entire Baltimore-Washington, D.C., megalopolis region, and the whole damned state of Rhode Island. The Grand Parkway is filthily large, the apotheosis of sprawl.