In between showing off various multicolored interchange tangles, the new flyover preview video of the huge changes proposed for I-45 North and the downtown freeway circuit glides viewers by a handful of areas where freeways will dive underground — while splicing in some new renderings of the tops of those tunnels-to-be as they could look, if somebody wanted to pay up to turn them into a park. (The animation is careful to emphasize once again that said parks would have to be developed and funded by a source other than TxDOT — and so far, there are no signs that anyone has stepped up.) The rendering up top shows the would-be-parallel sections of 45, 59, and SH 288, running behind the convention district where 59 sits now — the whole bundle would be pulled down below flood grade and covered up, evidently with concrete if the park thing doesn’t work out. (A clip of just that section of the 10-minute animation is included above; a tiny rendered version of the Cheek Neal Coffee building can be spied along the edge of the freeway, though SEARCH Homeless Service’s new building one block north isn’t specifically drawn in next to it.) The video also gives the section of 59 from Main to San Jacinto streets the same burial and dressup treatment: And the section of I-45 from N. Main to just past Cottage St., alongside the Hollywood Cemetery, gets it too: The length of 59 between the splitoffs of 288 and 45 South doesn’t appear to get covered over in the same manner— it does, however, pick up some bridges that look a lot like double-wide versions of the curved ones that got re-lit for the Super Bowl this year: Previously on Swamplot: Latest Mindboggling TxDOT Video Shows Off Rainbow Tangles of Spaghetti-tastic Downtown Freeway Redo Plans in Simulated Drone View; Big I-45 Downtown Rerouting, Grand Parkway Expansion Get Go-Aheads; TxDOT To Pierce Elevated: Your Years Are Numbered, Probably; TxDOT’s Plans for Freeway Expansion Around and Below the Newly Protected Cheek-Neal Coffee Building; Wacky TxDOT I-45 Redo Renderings Now Available in Mind-Boggling Video Format; The 5 Wackiest Images from TxDOT’s Plans To Reroute I-45 and Abandon the Pierce Elevated Images: HNTB and TxDOT (stills and video); Benjamin Pawlik (existing bridges over 59) … Read More
