Leaders Can & Should Remedy Reroute Fiasco

Several months ago the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), in an effort to decrease accidents, floated a plan to reroute the twisty Highway 77 Bluff through one of three new routes – either on the east or west sides of La Grange. Over the past few weeks a growing chorus of folks have been showing up to city council and county commissioners court meetings to express their concern over the reroutes coming through their neighborhoods.

I don’t blame them one bit.

And our local leaders have the power to end this controversy quickly and easily.

Why they haven’t done so already is beyond me, but it’s high time both the City Council of La Grange and the Fayette County Commissioners Court both draft resolutions opposing any reroute.

TxDOT has already indicated that it won’t go ahead with any of the three proposals (which by the way will cost hundreds of millions of dollars) without the blessing of city and county governments.

The Bluff, in its current format, is a challenging road (it struck fear into my heart the first time I had to drive it as a student driver 30 years ago). It’s particularly tricky for 18 wheelers and other large vehicles, but the blessing of that route being so twisty is that when accidents do happen they are often at such slow speeds that they are not serious as far as injuries are concerned. And there’s already an alternate route for trucks on FM 609.

Instead of spending hundreds of millions on a new route that might drive people out of their family farms (and already has formed into a East Plan versus West Plan civil war of sorts), the city and county should urge TxDOT to spend just a small fraction of that amount on better signage, lighting and improving existing road safety features on both the Bluff and the existing alternate route.

Yes, accidents would continue on the bluff, but no stretch of road is immune to that – even a $300 million reroute.