There are a lot of books on bridges, one or two on roadbuilders like Robert Moses, a couple on road agencies, and a few on the big long city-to-city roads. But it is inside cities where roadbulding is the most difficult, where it finds the greatest engineering, financial and political challenges. Until this book on Houston's roads there has been no serious study of the history and future of a major intra-urban highway system. Wait, there's David Brodsly's "LA Freeway" but it's an essay, a short history with some nice old maps, cartoons and photographs but weighed down by psycho-sociological claptrap - lots of earnest interpretations of the 'real meaning' of freeways, what they 'say' about our 'values', and the like. Pretentious fluff. A special kind of jargonish gobbledegook that gets people university jobs. Better than nothing, but not much.

In sharp contrast "Houston Freeways: a historical and visual journey" by Erik Slotboom is a serious and substantial work and a quantum advance in documenting and discussing the history of roadbuilding in a discrete metro area. It's a hefty tome: 404 pages of 8x11in (A4) and meaty. Photographs are gotten out of archives or they are originals taken for the book by Slotboom, and they excellent, and keyed with clever minimaps so you can see quickly where you are looking. The book is comprehensive, describing first the general history of the area and its roads, then in considerable detail describing the development of each of 16 major freeway facilities. Larger diagrammatic maps use different colored notation to show the stages of development. Tables summarize stuff. Slotboom seems to be a methodical researcher because he produces a thorough and detailed narrative of all the battles of each road and mentions the main actors.

Some of the stereotypes are confirmed. In Houston they think big. There are plenty of 10 freeways and expressways in America, and a few 12 and 14 laners. Most of them got to be that wide by a process of several widenings and rebuilds. Only one place, so far as I know, have they gone out and built a 10-lane freeway from scratch - Houston's Southwest Freeway (US-59) in Houston built inside the I-610 Loop back in 1957 with 2x5-lanes. Slotboom, the author, has clearly lived in Texas too long. He's doesn't think to mention that this build-big approach is unusual.

Same with interchanges. Houston has built them from the beginning almost entirely with direct connector ramps. Loops, or 'cloverleaves' as Slotboom mistakenly calls them, are almost unknown. (A cloverleaf is a full interchange with four loops, one for each left turn movement.) Loopless interchanges of course have to be high. Houston with nine radials and three ring motorways (including the downtown ring, the I-610 Loop and the Sam Houston Beltway-8 has 16 four and five level interchanges, great spreading arrangements of rising and curving and intertwining ramps. He doesn't even count the 3-levels. Slotboom dubs Houston "stack city."

And with a couple of exceptions the Houston freeways and the tollways too have frontage roads. Though pioneered on Long Island (on the Long Island Expressway and the Shore/Belt Parkway,) only Texas has made frontage roads a standard. Four-fifths of the Houston system has frontage roads or 'feeders' as they call them locally. Three lanes each direction they are very logical in some respects. They allow staging, the frontage roads acting as signalized arterials until the grade-separated inner lanes in what starts out as a 90m (300ft) wide grass median get built. The frontage roads go on catering to short trips, that would otherwise load up the freeway, so they increase its capacity for long trips. Finally frontage roads provide valuable substitute capacity when the mainlanes are out of service, whether from an accident or road works.

But all the multiple roadways make Houston's big roads real monsters. Their right of way starts at 90m (300ft) but 122m (400ft) is more common and some go to 137m (450ft).

With businesses fronting the frontage roads and vying for the attention of motorists with billboards and signs they become vast cluttered commercial corridors, a glitzy blur of brandnames and logos and business shapes. These are the antithesis of parkways - 'anti-parkways' Slotboom observes. In this regard Houston type freeways are a totally different driving experience from New York expressways and pretty different from Los Angeles or Phoenix freeways. The ugliest of the Houston interchanges are the earliest where they hoisted the mainlanes up to the top of the stack creating vast wide ungainly shadow-making slabs of roadways. By contrast the later ones have a certain gymnastic splendor with narrow curving ramp connectors soaring on high. The author observes that if you want pleasantly landscaped highways you'd better not come to Houston. It's lots of harsh, hard concrete and commercialism at its most commercial. Maybe it's hopeless to try and soften them.

Poor loadbearing soils and a high watertable require pavement consisting of structural concrete slab construction often 40cm (16") thick, no asphalt.

Depressing the freeways below ground level is especially troublesome in Houston. The area is flat and liable to torrential and sustained downpours of rain, so pumps cannot cope and the depressed segments of freeway becomes canals. The book has a bunch of marvelous photos of flooded freeways!

Another Houston stereotype is that there has been no serious opposition to building these big roads. Untrue. Many of them have been a prolonged struggle to build. Large swathes of houses have had to be acquired and cleared, and people's lives uprooted. They have fought, sometimes winning odd routing jogs or restrictions on width. A couple of planned freeways have been defeated. It remains true that Houston does have as extensive and complete a freeway network as any sizable metro area in America, probably in the world. In LA and Washington DC perhaps half the planned freeway system was defeated, in New York a third. In Houston the proportion might be 10 percent.

The chapters on the Hardy Toll Road and the Sam Houston Tollway give due credit to the great work of HCTRA's Wes Freise in developing the system, and the importance of support from the county's chief exec.

The book has deficiencies. It would be nice to have a few more tables - showing the mileage of different parts of the system, lane numbers, and traffic.

The discussion of freeways' impact on the shape of Houston is unsatisfactory. Slotboom writes that Houston's unusually vigorous and successful development of freeways shaped Houston's development. The freeways being such a comprehensive network certainly improved the quality of life of Houstonians, improved the efficiency of the metro area economy and the standard of living of its people, and saved many lives that otherwise would have been ended in wrecks at signalized intersections. But did they really change the shape of the city much? I'm not convinced. Boston, the Washington DC area, Phoenix AZ, Denver CO, Portland OR are cities of comparable size but with far less impressive freeway systems than Houston, but in the end they all turn out rather similar to Houston in form. Like Houston they all have decent-sized but far from dominant central business districts. They all have predominantly suburban development of single family houses, but considerable amounts of townhouses and apartments. They all have 'edge cities' like the Galleria. They all have various non-central concentrations of an industry like Houston's energy corridor. They all have mixes of development.

Just as transit enthusiasts exaggerate the impact of an expensive subway in shaping a city, so I think Slotboom, in his concluding commentary, exaggerates the role of its freeways. It is accomplishment enough, surely, that the freeways allow people get around their metro area in a quick, efficient, safe, and hassle-free fashion. That's more than can be said of other systems.

Disappointing too is the complete absense of any reporting of Houston's Quickride system under which tolls are levied in the peakhours on what would otherwise be underutilized HOV lanes. Houston has more miles of these HOT lanes than any other place in the world, but you wouldn't get that news from this book.

Slotboom writes that the future of Houston freeways may be in tollways - because the gas tax source is drying up. But he has almost nothing on electronic toll collection, nothing on HCTRA's pathbreaking efforts in opening up the middle of its toll plazas for full highway speed ETC. And nothing on the use of variable tolls to manage traffic. He just mentions the proposed "managed lane" components of several rebuild projects. But I suppose all this could add another 50 pages to an already large book.

Slotboom does have great pictures of the barrier separated HOT lanes and their great variety of special interchange ramps, not just the familiar T-ramps, but several Wishbones, and one called The Pretzel.

Our criticisms are quibbles. Overall this is a great book, and terrific value for $30. Buy it at www.houstonfreeways.com Slotboom's website. TRnews 2003-10-27