McKinney, TX
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| The Gray Man |
Air Conditioning and a Movie
Today we decided to go see another $6 movie at Moviehouse & Eatery by Cinépolis. We saw The Gray Man and it was good. 2 hours of action packed chase scenes, fights, and explosions featuring Ryan Gosling, Billy Bob Thornton, Ana de Armas, and Chris Evans in a greasy mustache playing a villain. It reminded me of a mix of Bourn Identity and John Wick. It was also nice that there was only 1 other person in the theater with us.
Texas Frontage Roads
On the way there I asked Google Maps to avoid toll roads. Some of the highways here in Texas are very different from what I am used to in CA and WA. It's not just the Texas U-Turns I talk about here. The Texas U-Turns are actually a result of highways being flanked by 2nd highways called frontage roads and this isn't the 2 lane frontage road you see along highways in CA, these are 2-3 lanes on each side of the highway going 45-60 MPH "frontage roads". When you combine the frontage roads with the actual 6 lane highway you get up to 12 lanes across and then when you add intersecting highways with flyovers you get what Donna calls, "a spaghetti of lanes". So the point of this story is that you can avoid tolls by just driving on the 45-60 MPH frontage roads which is weird to me but I will take it.
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| Spaghetti |
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| The actual highway near the movie theater. You can see the Texas U-Turn lanes as well as all of the other lanes. This is how you make highways when you don't care how much land you use to make them. |
If this highway madness is as interesting to you as it is to me you might like some of these YouTube videos I have put in a playlist here.
If you didn't read about our Texas BBQ experience yesterday you can check it out here.
Until your previous post about the Frontage roads, I thought that was a New Mexico thing. Really interesting way to construct freeways. I have a feeling that Mr. Money Mustache would have some strong opinions about them.
ReplyDeleteOnly tangentially related: Do you know of anywhere else that does the switch-direction-based-on-traffic express lanes like Seattle?
We saw some in Denver. Also The Golden Gate Bridge has a lane that switches back and forth. They use a "Zipper" car to move the little wall. We saw it in action when we were living there. https://youtu.be/Yov4tkMIWAg So yea reversible lanes are one form of "Managed Lanes" and they appear in various states.
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