A place like that, connecting continental companies, cargo, and cattle, is going to bring people, and Katy grew as the pages of calendars fluttered away. The oil and natural gas helped, and there were crops, too—citrus and cotton and rice—but if you want to give someone a reason to pull up stakes and move to Nowhere, Texas, just plant a natural energy well on an open patch of ground and watch what happens. Workers drifted in first like bees to columbine and soon swarmed like hornets around a hive.
Katy wasn’t the only place with rising population figures. Houston to the east had more than doubled from 1920 to 1930, reaching two hundred ninety-two thousand, after nearly doubling in size the decade before and the decade before that.173 This growth didn’t stop at people, but also the things they carried, and the things that carried them, specifically: the automobile, now affordable to the masses and eventually to eclipse the passenger rail once vital to Katy’s success. Then came the traffic.
It didn’t affect Katy at first, though, as Houston sprawled ever outward. The city of Katy was a nice place to live, but Houston was a nice place to work—all the big companies were there, anyway—and getting from one to the other briskly became nothing short of a traffic tribulation. Highways helped in the 1940s, and the Interstate Highway System promised relief in the 1950s (when Houston doubled in size yet again). Little Katy got its own stretch of black in the 1960s, part of Interstate 10 but called, locally, the Energy Corridor or the Katy Freeway. But being Katy—I mean, it was nice and all but it was mostly cows and oil wells from there to west Houston—it garnered a mere six lanes of highway on the outset and two service roads.174 And yet Houston grew and Katy grew and traffic grew and gridlock grew—everything grew but freeway, which needed to grow most of all.
But that traffic. Something had to be done. The problem was this. You don’t just expand a highway, even one as highly congested and generally unpleasant as the Katy Freeway (which, by the 1970s, had become one of the worst in the United States, built to accommodate a maximum of one hundred twenty thousand cars, but carrying twice that).175, 176 When it comes to major roadway construction, repair, or renovation, the Texas Department of Transportation operates unapologetically on a pay-as-you-go principle: save up your money and develop a plan of attack.177 What do you need to do the project? How do you handle existing traffic? How do you connect myriad sections of highway and byway old and new, above and below? How do you establish quality assurance? How much is this really going to cost? Then you save up more money until you can afford to finish the design. Then you save up money to relocate water, gas, electrical, copper, and fiber-optic utilities along the “right of way”—that is, the vast stretches of land, houses, factories, used car lots, lodging, and local businesses that will have to be leveled to put in the new roadways.178 It’s never just a matter of moving a telephone pole a few feet over: every node of the grid is affected, making it akin to relocating a spiderweb one mooring thread at a time without disturbing the spider. Then you need more money to actually buy that right of way, and these being Texans, don’t think that’s not a negotiation. You get everyone on board—and there are a lot of everyones, from environmentalists to bus drivers—and only then can you get final approval from the federal government, assuming it approves, and you get started on construction.
But no matter how you approach the problem, the first step is to get the money, and in the case of the Katy Freeway expansion, there was none, and no avenue by which money might be attained. Real Texans don’t generally vote for tax increases, and certainly not the genuine articles of west Houston.
Years of John Culberson’s life had been lost on that horrible freeway. He was born and raised in West University Place on the western front of Houston (easterly of Katy), an idyllic American hometown of freshly mown lawns, the tsst-tsst-tsst-tsst of early-morning sprinklers, and neighbors you still felt comfortable asking for a cup of sugar. Like all suburbs, however, it was the place you left when you wanted to go somewhere, and where you returned after doing something. And in proper suburban fashion, it existed only because of the automobile.
Long before John saw himself as Congressman Culberson, he determined that if ever he were in a position to change anything in the Great State of Texas, his beloved state that you absolutely Do Not Mess With, where stars at night are big and bright, he would do whatever it took to open up that freeway and fix it. He made that youthful vow official when he committed his name to a ballot. Once elected to Congress in 2000, locked into the promise and still angry at years lost in Katy traffic, Culberson had no choice but to find a way to fix the problem, and in his first year, he did. It required what he called “creative financing,” and it was nothing if not that.179 First the funding. The only obvious way to pay for the thing without raising taxes would be with tollways, which federal law forbade on interstate highways. Except John found, in subsection b of section 1216 on page 105 of a practically forgotten federal law from 1998 called the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, an allowance for a pilot program in which three toll facilities total might be tested in places along the forty-seven thousand miles of Interstate Highway System in all the United States. The reason: “reconstructing and rehabilitating Interstate highway corridors that could not otherwise be adequately maintained or functionally improved without the collection of tolls.”180
Well, why not Katy? The law, as he read it, let local governments test taking tolls on special “managed lanes” in the middle of a highway. Such lanes, as opposed to the wild and wooly free-range species of unmanaged roadway, would be actively monitored and controlled in response to changing traffic conditions, e.g., the occasional opening of high-occupancy vehicle lanes for all traffic. Moreover, bumper-to-bumper traffic would make sparse lanes quite the commodity, and the toll could thus be higher. Conversely, open roads in every direction would make toll lanes pretty pointless, and by the same logic, free (or practically free) to enter and exit. As intended by law, such an arrangement could reimburse construction costs, roadway repairs, and renovations.
This had not been done before anywhere in the country.
Culberson sharpened his pencil and got to work. He liked the concept of an all-new toll-oriented Katy Freeway operating on free market principles. That, therefore, was definitely going to happen. No federal earmarks, no federal management—Thomas Jefferson would have loved it. The Harris County Toll Road Authority, in whose jurisdiction fell Katy, would run the lanes, and tolls would take care of it all. And those tolls—the congressman really rubbed his hands together at this—wouldn’t merely double the number of existing lanes, or even triple it. If his estimates were correct, they could raise enough to cover a freeway expansion from six lanes to—another first—twenty-six lanes, consisting of three managed lanes, four feeder lanes, and six main lanes in each direction. It would be the widest highway not only in the history of the United States, but in the history of the world! It would be a road to make even the ancient Romans envious.
Before anything could happen, though, he would have to get the county and state on board, and while it was, in John’s view, clearly in the best interest of both, they fought back, forcing him to bird-dog it. They disagreed on design. Some lamented the possibility of sprawl, and of air and noise pollution, and how it would harm Harris County businesses in the megahighway’s expansion path. The Harris County Toll Road Authority wasn’t even sure it wanted to run what would be the first interstate tollway in the country. The office built toll roads from the ground up and operated them, maintained revenues, and paid back bonds. It was tried and true. But these would be controlled-access toll lanes within an existing, non-tolled freeway. More worrisome yet, the roads would use all-electronic tolling, which didn’t exist in Harris County. Estimates or not, they didn’t know for sure how much revenue they might generate, and whether it would cover the cost of construction and allow the authority to pay back bonds. Could carpools go free, for example, and how would that affect income? What about busses? What if everyone carpoo
led and took busses? How could you even measure that?
John held public hearings along the corridor. Listened to environmental concerns, business concerns. He went back to everyone involved and negotiated. He cajoled. He took the Gila monster approach: he ran in heedlessly and bit hard, and getting smacked only made him bite harder. He fast-tracked every single avenue of the bureaucratic process. He pushed successfully to get design work done while simultaneously getting right of way clearance and drafting relocation plans for utilities. This concurrent activity, too, had never before been done. The cash promised by his toll plan was a battering ram like no other, and the Harris County Toll Road Authority agreed to bring two hundred fifty million to the table (appropriated previously for Katy maintenance) to get things rolling. Culberson next went to the officials at the Federal Highway Administration. No way, they said. The Katy project would set a bad precedent, they said. It had never been done, they said. It shouldn’t be attempted, they said.
John could not believe that people actually thought this way. The congressman called Mary Peters, the U.S. secretary of transportation. They went back and forth, and in 2003 she approved the permit. The Texas Department of Transportation, the Harris County Toll Road Authority, and the now forced-to-be-flexible Federal Highway Administration signed a tripartite agreement in March, and by June, Williams Brothers Construction, which won the contract, broke ground.
In preparation for the expansion, the Union Pacific had already pulled up its ancient railroad tracks along Old Katy Road. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, which wasn’t part of the agreement because it initially brought no money to the table, got free busses in the toll lane, and so it kicked in ten million to strengthen support structures for a future light-rail line, which it most certainly did not get.
So what by all assumptions would never happen became a project that should have taken a decade to complete. In the end, however, it took only five years, three months, thanks to John Culberson. And no matter if it was day, night, rain, or shine, if Congress was in recess and he was in town, construction workers in engineering trailers beneath freeway overpasses could count on a knock on the door without warning, and there Congressman Culberson would be, hard hat in hand or on head. Were you getting everything you needed? Yes, sir. On schedule? Nope, ahead of it. (Financial incentives built into the contract helped that part along.)
In truth, John just plain loved meeting the guys who made this stuff. He’d drive out west to the Beltway 8 overpass, where construction crews used cranes to carry these giant steel support structures—it was unreal, these things, enormous, the crossbeam skeletons of the overpass, each a single, prefabricated piece of metal (made in America!), with predrilled holes for bolts. And there was this one crane operator—the only guy at Williams Brothers Construction who could do it—who would hoist these gargantuan beams, carry them slowly to the support structures, and set them into place so that the bolts and the predrilled bolt holes lined up perfectly every time. John even brought along his brother to see this guy in action. It was fascinating, rousing. It was nothing less than the American republic as the founders intended it.
By the time the Katy expansion was completed in 2008, John Culberson had a new tool in his box now, shiny and blunt, forged in the fires of the legislative process.181 The one thing he knew for sure about the tool: it definitely worked. And if it worked once, maybe it could work again.
THE FIRST TIME John set foot on the grounds of Jet Propulsion Laboratory was January 25, 2004. The lab was like a cross between a sprawling college campus and a military fortress. Surrounded by, dotted on, and nestled among Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains, classrooms and cafeterias and conference rooms were stacked in buildings six stories high, and interspersed were courtyards and warehouses with clean rooms where spacecraft were designed and built and battle tested for the rigors of space exploration. The sheer futurism of the place—everything from its neomodernist architectural aesthetic to its resolutely optimistic staff—suggested an academic oasis bringing forth a world only promised in Golden Age science fiction. I mean, they built spaceships for a living.
He was there that day for the landing of the Opportunity rover on Mars. There was no such thing as a routine landing on planet four; historically, most Mars surface craft crashed or vanished, including the European Space Agency’s Beagle 2, which failed one month earlier. The signal travel time between Earth and Mars made the moment more harrowing yet; once landing operations commenced, seven minutes would pass before you received a successful spacecraft status signal. Engineers at the lab called this the “seven minutes of terror.”
The problem with landing on Mars was that it didn’t work like the old Looney Tunes animated shorts: a rocket ship slowing and landing upright, a little ramp extending, a little car rolling out. Opportunity would plow into the Martian atmosphere at high-hypersonic speeds, heat shield down, looking a lot like a flying saucer, the letters JPL emblazoned on one side in red. Once through the upper atmosphere but still high in the Martian skies, a parachute striped in white and orange would fire from the spacecraft’s top, slowing the saucer to speeds more manageable, but slightly. Once slower (though not slow), the heat shield—the bottom of the flying saucer—would pop off and drop away, and a padded pyramid within would fall, tethered to the speeding saucer. The whole contraption would still be coursing toward the Martian surface like an incoming missile, but then the trademark JPL So Crazy It Might Work: eight seconds before slamming into the ground, the pyramid, still dangling and whipping away, would explode outward like an enormous, lumpy bag of instantaneously popped popcorn. Massive airbags covering every angle of the pyramid would deploy and inflate in a split second, simultaneously, protecting the package inside. Two seconds later, the saucer above would fire these giant retro rockets, blasting like hell to help out the parachute, to slow things down, to stop the landing from becoming an auguring. And then the impossible: three seconds before impact, slow and low enough to prevent a human-made billion-dollar crater on an alien world, the speeding saucer would cut loose the giant bag of popcorn, and it (i.e., the bag of popcorn) would smack into Mars . . . and then bounce! Like a fifteen-foot basketball!182 Just collide with the planet and bounce fifty feet into the air, and then come back down, and bounce again, and again, and again, twenty-six times total, bounding along the Martian surface for entire football fields, a giant’s plaything on a desolate red world.183
Once exhausted of energy, the fight taken out of it, inertia would keep the airbag-enveloped apparatus rolling along, and rolling and rolling and rolling across Mars and down hills and slopes, over jagged rocks and wind-worn topography, this comical cluster of inflated Vectran gamboling along another seven hundred feet.184 And when the ball would tumble not one inch farther, momentum depleted, the whole thing would stop, take a brief breather, and deflate, just melt away right there in the sun, a tawny sky above and penny-pigmented soil below. Beneath the material of the deflated airbag: the outline of the pyramid, still safely intact, about the size of a riding lawn mower. It would open slowly, the three petals of the pyramid peeling outward, revealing, what? A robot from space. A car. A robot space car! It was ridiculous, the Looney Tunes landing eminently sane by comparison. And the robot space car would itself then open, servos unfolding it like a Transformer, origami in reverse, its solar panels spreading, presenting a glistening back of black glass to a generous sun god. This creature is born, hatched and clawed from a tessellated metallic egg, wings now spread one planet removed from where it was conceived.
Well, if you were a Martian and saw all of this, it would have scared the hazy daylights out of you. The robot space car’s neck rising—the thing had a head! A face, and four eyes like a spider, two big ones, two small ones. And if you were a representative from west Houston who had gone to watch this unfold with the four eyes of your own from Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s mission control, where telemetry lines on computer consoles explained to edgy engineers what was happening in zeroes a
nd ones, and cheers erupted—Opportunity had survived!—you were already a space enthusiast, but now born again, from that moment and evermore. You—one of only two members of Congress to even bother showing up for the event—had witnessed the impossible made manifest at the JPL Space Flight Operations Facility, in a room that engineers called not modestly (but not unearned) the Center of the Universe.185
Everyone wants to be an astronaut when he or she grows up, but John, he really wanted it. He knew vast swaths of that Kennedy speech from memory, the Rice moon speech, and long before he wore the pin of a congressman, he had the pluck of a star voyager. His parents fueled it. You want to make an astronaut of a young Texan, give him, on his twelfth birthday, a Celestron telescope powerful enough to see Jupiter’s moons—really see them, these tiny white dots, the actual moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, and Io. Let him swing the scope over and catch the craters and permanently shadowed regions of the moon. You want him to be an astronaut, take him to Cape Canaveral in Florida and claim the closest spot to the launches you can get without riding on the rocket itself. Watch Apollo 15 lift into space, screwed to the top of a Saturn V, all three hundred sixty-three feet of it, this gleaming white column, taller than the Statue of Liberty, pedestal and all. Experience the launch—it will give you no choice—you don’t watch, you experience—the seven and a half million pounds of force suddenly blasted into the ground below, and outward. Feel the Earth tremble beneath the might of this colossus, its force leaving spectators’ flesh flapping as though they’re all on the back of some great motorcycle. The pennies rattling in their pockets. Higher, higher, higher it rises—but slowly! No bottle rocket, this is more like an inverted volcano.
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