An actual post about Texarkana

Texarkana, my home town, is finally having some real physical change. A major overhaul to our frontage roads has been ongoing for the past year but it wasn't until last weekend that anything had been built that could actually be driven on.

Now the odd thing about Texarkana is most of our frontage roads are two way and have been since I-30 was built, but now they are one way. Tex-Dot has made our frontage roads one way and for the time being, one lane. To help the drivers of our town understand that we are now in a one way system the wrong way lanes have been filled with barrels. I believe the equation for the number of barrels was rather simple. The civil engineer looked up the population of Texarkana and ordered a barrel for every person.

Monday morning the paper read that there wasn't a single accident with the new traffic flow. I can testify that it wasn't do to a lack of effort on the part of the drivers. I saw quite a few people turning left where they shouldn't, barrels be damned. But fortunately nobody bumped anyone else.

A lot of citizens in Texarkana are very leary of change, so it should be entertaining to read the letters to the editor over the next few months. There have been some in the past that I still hold dear, like the man who hadn't driven over to the Texas side in a few years but found the trip to Home Depot to be so difficult traffic wise as to claim the route was anti-Arkansas.

Having lived in Houston for five years before returning to Texarkana, I find that the people who complain the most about our traffic are the ones who have seldom left the area. I can only hope that they can acclimate to the new and improved system and not come barreling down on me from the east in a west bound lane. I like my air bags where they are.