Coming soon to your backyard!
This would be part of the ‘super-highway’ spanning the United States from the Mexican border at Laredo, making its way through Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma and connecting with the Canadian highway system north of Duluth, Minnesota.
Because it would provide a connection all the way between Canada and Mexico, the project is also described as the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) super highway.
The project as conceived by Cintra and its partners and endorsed by the Texas transport department is certainly ambitious. They have talked about developing a corridor providing two lanes for high speed trucks and three for passenger vehicles in each direction, plus high speed and freight railway lines, possibly also telecommunication cables and oil, gas and water pipelines in an adjacent utilities corridor.
But a corridor of this overall width – maybe as much as 360 m - has alarmed people who stand forced to surrender property in land and buildings to the project. This concern has been sharpened by the disclosure that, citing a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the developers intend to exercise the principle of ‘eminent domain’ in land acquisition proceedings on the grounds that they are acting as agents of a public authority.
The developers apparently believe that such rights, once established in Texas, could then be applied across the entire 6,500 km length of the NAFTA highway. Whether that proves to be so depends on the outcome of any challenge that might be launched against such a claim.