A Brief History of Houston Freeways

A driver of sprawl

Houston Freeways by Erik Slotboom is the best resource on the history of the local “urban freeway” system. This is an incredible book, which Slotboom wrote while he was a student at Texas A&M. Slotboom published a digital version of the book, as well. However, this book casts the freeway as a hero in service of the progressive desire for automobility.

Downtown Houston c 1970, in the vicinity of the present George R Brown Convention Center.

The arc of the adoption of the automobile nationwide is implied by automobile registrations. From 1900 by decade, these numbers were 8k, 458k, 8.1m, 23m, 27.5m, and 40.3m in 1950. US population increased over the same time period: 76m, 92m, 106m, 123m, 132m, 132m, and 151m in 1950. This is a population growth rate of less than 20 percent, while car registrations grew exponentially through the decades ending in 1930.

According to one account, Houston had only one highway in 1950. I believe such a definition of a highway is ahistorical. I would say “Houston had only one post-modern highway in 1950.” Highways are ancient. My more inclusive definition of a highway is “a right-of-way calculated to serve vehicle traffic between settlements.” Another word for a post-modern highway is the familiar word “freeway,” which traffic engineers define as a “limited-access highway” or “controlled-access highway.” My own view, however, is that freeways do not belong in urban areas.

The first of these limited-access highways within Houston was the Gulf Freeway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 was the first legislation to initiate a comprehensive plan for a national highway network. Gulf Freeway was the first project under this new federal program. Gulf Freeway, then numbered as a part of US 75, started construction in 1947 and was completed in 1952.

In 1956, President Eisenhower and Congress passed an even more ambitious federal highway program. This federal program accelerated its urban freeway program in the 1960s. I think this is a primary factor in the loss of transit commute modal shares between 1960 and 1970. However, a thorough analysis should account for annexation.

My contrarian take: few cities in the US ever built great transit systems. The best legacy fixed-guideway system in the US is New York MTA; however, most of the lines acquired by MTA were built in the 20th century and New York dismantled its streetcar lines, too. Pining for the former streetcar lines is an intellectual dead end. I enjoyed riding the St Charles line in NOLA, and I hope to find an excuse to do it again. Neither is streetcar service a high standard.

Certainly the automobile was already the dominant transportation mode by 1960. Yet transit shares in 1960 were very respectable, and if these were the baseline for today, it would be much easier to work toward active transportation for a majority of trips. Texas cities lost a large share of transit riders between 1960 and 1970. This is when these cities expanded their “urban freeways.”

Gulf Freeway, the name of the segment of Interstate 45 between downtown Houston and Galveston, opened on 30 September 1948. It was the first new federal highway constructed after World War II, but followed much of the route of US Highway 75. By July 1951, the freeway started just outside of downtown and was completed to what would later be Gulfgate Mall, near the junction of the future Interstate 610. By the end of the 1950s, Gulf Freeway was complete as far south as the present-day site of Almeda Mall. Construction continued throughout the 1960s and 1970 to construct the segment beyond the Johnson Space Center.

The Southwest Freeway, built under the designation of US 59, ran west from downtown and its name referring the its sharp bend to the Southwest near present-day Sharpstown Mall. This is truly a 1960s-era freeway, constructed from downtown and beyond Sharpstown in the 1960s, and extended to Sugarland in Fort Bend County in the early 1970s.

The construction of the Katy Freeway had a different pattern of sequencing. The Katy Freeway is the name of the segment of Interstate 10 west of downtown Houston. This suggests that the Katy Freeway was initially conceived as part of a bypass route for through traffic than it was intended to convey commuters. Early sequencing of the Katy Freeway project coordinated with the construction of the west and north loops of Interstate 610 (hereafter, Loop 610), with the first segment completed west of the future Interstate 610 junction in 1956. Construction proceeded east toward the junction, and this segment was completed in 1961. The far west segments were built in the mid-1960s and completed in 1966 and 1967, respectively. The last segment completed was inside Loop 610 in 1968.

The North Freeway, like the Katy Freeway, lacked directional sequencing. Perhaps it was also calculated for routing traffic onto Loop 610. Two segments of North Freeway were completed in the 1950s. The first segment completed for North Freeway suggests a bypass concept since this was a short corridor just north of the planned Loop 610 junction. It was completed by the end of 1959. A very long segment in Montgomery County was constructed in the late 1950s and completed in 1960. The rest of the North Freeway was built in the early 1960s.

US 59 north of downtown is called the Eastex Freeway. The construction was directionally sequenced, inside out. All of the Eastex inside Loop 610 was built in the 1950s, and was completed more than halfway to present-day Beltway 8. The other half of the freeway progressed over the next two decades.

The East Freeway, the name for Interstate 10 east of downtown, similar to its westbound complement, was sequenced outside in. Most of the East Freeway was completed in the 1950s, and these segments started form the Ship Channel and ran west. Aside from a small segment constructed near the Loop 610 junction, the western segments of the East Freeway were all completed in the 1960s.

Loop 610 is mostly of 1960s vintage. Some of its construction began in the late 1950s, but most of the work was started and finished in the 1960s. About twenty percent of the freeway, all on the east and southeast side, were completed in the 1970s.

Three other “spokes” to the Houston freeway system were added much later. Yet another spoke was started in the 1960s and never completed. The La Porte Freeway, aka State Highway 225, had one completed segments just east of Loop 610 by the end of 1966; however, a planned extension of the right-of-way into downtown through Harrisburg and the East End was shelved in the face of effective opposition. With the “Harrisburg Freeway” segment killed, the La Porte Freeway terminated at Loop 610. The three other spokes were included in a second wave of freeway planning in Houston: Northwest Freeway, South Freeway, and the Crosby Freeway. Meanwhile, during this era, two new loops were added: Beltway 8 and the yet uncompleted Grand Parkway.

In conclusion, the initial freeways planned for the Houston area combined spokes to convey traffic directly toward downtown, while also conceived to encourage through traffic to access Loop 610 as a bypass of central Houston. Most new freeway segments were added to the urban core in the 1960s, though existing freeways corridors were extended, new spokes were added, and two new loop freeways were constructed in subsequent decades.

Bibliography

Tom Watson McKinney, “The Gulf Freeway: Van London’s Legacy,” Houston History Magazine 5, no. 2 (2008): 16-24.

Tom Watson McKinney, “Superhighway Deluxe: Houston’s Gulf Freeway. In Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast, Martin V. Melosi and Joseph A Pratt, eds. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 148-172.

Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

Kyle Shelton, Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).

Erik Slotboom, Houston Freeways (Cincinnati: Oscar F. “Erik” Slotboom, 2003).

Earl Swift, The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2011).