Wow. What a state.
The New York Times has this article on a newly-opened 41-mile section of toll road between Austin and San with the highest speed limit in the United States. And lest you think 41 miles of tollway at 85-miles-per-hour a rather chintzy contribution to automotive freedom, there's 544 miles of freeway, Interstate 10, between El Paso and San Antonio, where the speed limit is eighty.
Finally, this anecdote about Texans driving fast from the end of the Times article is the kind of thing that makes me wish Texas would secede--and that if it did, I'd go with it:
J. Eric Taylor, 59, an I.T. project manager from California who lived in Texas years ago and still works in the state occasionally, remembers the day he was on a two-lane road and saw, in his rearview mirror, a young man in a pickup truck come up quickly behind him. “He was very eager to get past me,” he said. “But we came upon a funeral coming the other way. As we approach the funeral, everyone pulls over.”
Mr. Taylor parked behind the pickup on the side of the road and watched the young man remove his cowboy hat and hold it over his heart as the funeral procession drove past. “And then the moment they took off,” Mr. Taylor said, “he burned rubber, threw gravel, put his hat back on and took off like a bat out of hell.”
