Ports-To-Plains may save rural Southwest

The Ports-to-Plains Trade Corridor is a planned, multi-modal transportation corridor including a multi-lane divided highway that will facilitate the efficient transportation of goods and services from Mexico, through West Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Oklahoma, and ultimately on into Canada and the Pacific Northwest. -- Ports To Plains Trade Corridor, “Mission Statement   Bill Sontag's Journey along the Ports-to-Plains starts in Laredo, Texas and goes north through Eagle Pass, Del Rio, Sonora, and San Angelo, where he stops for today. Subsequent dispatches will take him all the way to Denver, Colorado. (click image to enlarge) LIVE! feature writer Bill Sontag hits the road and explores the people and places along the proposed Ports-to-Plains trade corridor that, when finished, will provide a primary artery of commerce through Del Rio and the Southwest Texas region. Here, he poses by a sign describing his current tasking, mixed in with the dangerous surroundings of the public highway. The sign is near Sonora, Texas just off US Hwy 277. (click image to enlarge)       Tourists, travelers and other visitors to the United States leave Nuevo Laredo through these toll booths, while commercial haulers enter the United States through a massive facility on the World Trade Bridge. More than 1.4 million trucks entered the United States last year, and together with smaller vehicles, Laredo’s three bridges comprise one of the United States’ busiest ports of entry. (LIVE! photo by Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge) Trucks entering the United States from Mexico commonly deliver their trailers of goods to U.S. long-haulers met in Laredo. Those drivers then often visit the TxDOT Travelers Information Center north of the city to rest, gather information and prepare for their trip to inland destinations. From this convenient location, the drivers can easily access routes north along U.S. Interstate 35 or west along the Ports-To-Plains Corridor, U.S. Highway 83. (LIVE! photo by Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge) Even as highway construction dollars are shrinking at alarming rates, Texas Department of Transportation Travel Information Centers are becoming larger, fancier, and more capacious for truckers and the state’s millions of travelers. The Laredo center, sited at the intersection of Interstate 35 and U.S. Highway 83, about twenty miles north of the POE, features ample truck and small vehicle parking, a staffed information desk, clean, attractive restrooms, picnic areas, and walkways around ponds stocked with large, orange goldfish. The Mexican-style architecture of arches and domes is ornamented with extensive decorative tiling. (LIVE! photo by Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge) Roy De La Rosa, hauling a 66,000-pound road scraper for Mesa Equipment Co, Inc., uses only short segments of the Ports-To-Plains Corridor between construction jobs and his headquarters in San Antonio. At the Catarina One Stop, Catarina, Texas, De La Rosa pauses for fuel and a snack before heading east again, after the scraper completed work to improve a deer lease on a nearby large ranch. (LIVE! photo by Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge) "Cheita," a Belgian Malanois, sniffs around Isauro Mota’s livestock truck, momentarily distracted by the sharp odor of previous loads of sheep and goats. All traffic stops for examination by U.S. Border Patrol agents at the Del Rio Station checkpoint along U.S. Highway 277, north of Del Rio. Larger and better staffed stations are common along major traffic arteries, a condition that may be necessary when this stretch of the Ports-To-Plains Corridor is expanded to four-lane, divided highway. LIVE! photo by Bill Sontag (click image to enlarge) Heavy equipment hauling wide loads of even heavier equipment, bound for assembly locations at major construction sites, are commonly seen along U.S. Highway 277 North on the Ports-To-Plains highway. The notoriously narrow Buffalo Creek Bridge, about 50 miles north of Del Rio, is accessed by northbound traffic only after cresting a hillside, followed by a sharp turn on the down slope toward the bridge. Here the load’s width occupies both the north- and southbound lanes. As this hauler then traveled toward Sonora, southbound wide loads took to shoulders to yield to this cargo which was also forced onto the opposite shoulder. Planners believe such circumstances offer compelling support for a four-lane divided highway along the Ports-To-Plains Corridor. (LIVE! photo by Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge) A Pan American Express cargo hauler rumbles over U.S. Highway 83 road construction between Asherton and Carrizo Springs, Texas. Workers are re-surfacing this short segment of the Ports-To-Plains Highway, a small part of the route in need of work from Eagle Pass to Laredo. PANAMEX uses the route for trailer service, hauling goods from in-country Mexican points of origin, without transloading onto U.S. haulers, to all points in the NAFTA countries, including Quebec and Ontario, Canada. (LIVE! photo by Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)     The weekend parked fleet of Nabors Well Services, Ltd., Sonora, Texas, gives a glimpse of substantial regional activity in oil and gas exploration, drilling and extraction. During the week, convoys of trucks in this burgeoning industry thunder up and down U.S. Highway 277, increasing the wear-and-tear on these segments of the Ports-To-Plains Corridor proportional to increases in newly-found petroleum fields. (LIVE! photo by Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge) Riders Ky Hofacket, left, and Zach Herrin pause to refresh at the local Dairy Queen, between events at a nearby National High School Rodeo Association event in Sonora, Sept. 10. The popular eatery also serves motorized traffic from the adjacent Ports-To-Plains Corridor route of U.S. Highway 277. (LIVE! photo by Bill Sontag) (click image to enlarge)

The Ports-to-Plains Series

1. Laredo, Texas to San Angelo, Texas:
   Ports-To-Plains may save rural Southwest
2. San Angelo to Lubbock:
   Ports-To-Plains connects Mexican manufacturers, consumers with U.S. markets
3. On to Denver, Colorado:
   On the Ports-to-Plains, Truckers’ tradeoffs: Better roads, but higher fuel prices
4. The New Mexico to Texas Spur
   Ports to Plains connects Texas and New Mexico

It started in the 1950s. Following World War II, America was on the move again, and, this time, not to and from combat in Europe or the Pacific. Leisure time, a booming middle class, and “See the U.S.A, in your Chevrolet!”

Truck traffic began to challenge the supremacy of railroads, and turnpikes turned into streams of commerce. And, along the Atlantic Seaboard and in New England, the term was coined to define avoidance of tolls, and later, such congestion.

“Shunpiking.” Shunning the turnpikes to enjoy the waning, rural character of the nation is being re-defined by determined advocates of alternative corridors of commerce, tourism, and economic development. The arch-proponent speaking loudly on behalf of southwest Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Colorado is the Ports-To-Plains Coalition, headquartered in Lubbock.

For nearly a decade, aggressive planning and astute lobbying have caused the Coalition to gel into a formidable collaboration of towns, counties, states, business interests and chambers of commerce.

Enhancing international commerce – as the PTP Corridor surely will – has met strident opposition from the same forces that opposed NAFTA and relaxed import/export restrictions between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. And the impact of NAFTA, the focus of its opponents, and the efforts of the Ports-To-Plains Coalition may all be seen at the corridor’s southernmost entry point from Mexico – Laredo, Texas.

Ports-To-Plains Coalition Board Chairman Sid Cauthorn, also president and CEO of The Bank & Trust, Del Rio, believes Mexican authorities are supportive of the corridor, too, already mounting PTP logo signs along routes of travel to the U.S. At the Laredo Point of Entry last year, 1,409,834 trucks crossed into the United States from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Many drivers and their tractors went no further, serving only as drayage to be met by long-haul U.S. drivers, picking up the trailers with goods destined for U.S. manufacturers, inland. Charles Korby, driver for P.A.M. Transportation Services, Inc., headquartered in Tonitown, Ark., paused, Sept. 9, for a rest stop in Laredo’s Texas Travel Information Center.

“No, our company’s trucks never go into Mexico. We just meet the Mexican drivers, pick up their load and move it on to its destination,” Korby explained. He had possession of 43,000 pounds of wire, manufactured in Monterrey, Mexico, destined for CME Wire and Cable, Suwannee, Ga.

Korby was headed up the Interstate 35 corridor, rather than onto U.S. Highway 83, the onset of the U.S. leg of the Ports-To-Plains corridor. The two merged highways separate near the strategically sited Texas Travel Information Center. Korby headed north, and other trucks rolled west on 83 toward Eagle Pass and Del Rio.

Ofelia Noriega, certified professional travel counselor at the sprawling, swanky new center, is barely familiar with the Ports-To-Plains Corridor, answering many questions from truckers about to embark on it from her vantage at the intersection. “Yes, I’ve heard a little about it, but would like to learn a lot more so I could answer questions better,” Noriega said. The center provided services to more than 81,000 travelers in the first seven months of 2006.

Truckers and tourists motoring northwest on 83 may notice spotty maintenance on the two-lane, undivided highway, but will also see local efforts to patch, widen or re-surface the aging road. It is one of the targets of interest to Reeves and the PTP board of directors. Currently, widening and re-surfacing is underway between Carrizo Springs and Asherton, Texas.

Their goal is for the entire route to be four-lane, divided highway with through-truck-friendly “reliever routes” (or loops) around cities along the 1,300-mile route. Now, 755 miles are still in the two-lane category, slightly more than half of the corridor.

Motoring along U.S. Highway 83, travelers will also notice a mix of typical south Texas scrubby desert through which the route passes: Mesquite, palo verde and huisache trees, and Volkswagen-sized clusters of prickly pear cactus. Near Catarina, a 30-foot-high derelict derrick of a wooden windmill is now crowned with a tuft of prickly pear cacti, a sharp contrast to the forest of antennae, cell phone and microwave transmission towers on both sides of the road.

Ranch names along the way reflect the regional influence of culture, humor and aspirations to carve an agrarian living out of this rough country. Among them, “La Esperanza” (The Hope), “El Bosal” (horse bridle noseband), and “Rancho Mejor Que Nada” (the Better Than Nothing Ranch) all conjure images and questions, as do “Rockin L” and “Cactus Jack.”

Wildlife is abundant. Crested caracaras – more than a hawk, less than an eagle – soar and stoop on prey along the entire route to Del Rio, and at night, deer can be a danger to travelers.

Roy De La Rosa is less apprehensive about the deer than many who travel 83. He’s on the route often, trailering heavy equipment for Mesa Equipment Co, Inc., San Antonio, to a variety of construction sites. De La Rosa’s rig, Sept. 9, bore a 66,000-pound road scraper to an earth-moving job on a deer lease near Catarina, Texas. “No, I’m not worried about the animals much, but it would be nice if the road was a little wider,” De La Rosa chuckled.

The Catarina One Stop may be too obviously named. It purports to offer all the fuel, services, snacks and goods a traveler might need, but it is also the one and only such stop in the small town of Catarina. As with many businesses and communities, Catarina and its One Stop will surely benefit if traffic increases when this portion of the Ports-To-Plains Corridor is improved.

Ports-To-Plains, undistinguished by road markers or logos marking the route, wends along to and through Carrizo Springs, where it jogs away to U.S. Highway 277 North to Eagle Pass and into Del Rio. There, for as much time and distance as is required to negotiate through the city, the route follows U.S. Highway 90, and 277 breaks away again just north of Del Rio.

After crossing the Devils River arm of Lake Amistad, and after the store at Loma Alta, the road begins to twist and turn, matching the rolling ranchlands that are interrupted by bluffs and canyons, draws and mostly-dry creeks. U.S. Highway 277 North is a white knuckle road trip for the uninitiated, and its two, undivided lanes are only minimally improved by passing lanes. A real abundance of narrow bridges and nocturnally grazing deer escalate the need for traveler caution between Del Rio and Sonora.

This is a more direct route from Laredo to Sonora, but not perceived as safer by many drivers who opt for the Interstate 35 to San Antonio and Interstate 10 to Sonora. This leg of the Ports-To-Plains Corridor offers the greatest challenge to engineers and to transportation appropriations budgeters.

Still, its directness is appealing to shippers from maquila industry (“twin plant”) manufacturers in Ciudad Acuña, and wide loads of heavy equipment and machine parts often narrow this stretch of 277’s two lanes to two shoulders until the cargo passes, or is passed.

But everyone slows down – stops, in fact – for the Del Rio Station Border Patrol checkpoint near Loma Alta. Agents encourage “Cheita” (pronounced SHY-tah), a Belgian Malanois, to sniff out contraband from all cars passing on a Sunday afternoon (Sept. 10), while other agents examine papers, thump door panels, and peer into dark corners.

Truck traffic is light on the Christian Sabbath, but Isauro Mota, driving for his company, Mota Transports, is headed for San Angelo. Mota uses a short stretch of the PTP Corridor, hauling sheep and goats picked up in San Angelo, transporting them south to Del Rio markets. He makes the trip several times each week, so is very familiar with the 277 hills, twists and bridges. “But I would still like to see the road a little bit wider, at least,” said Mota.

The landscape smooths and the road seems to broaden on approach to Sonora. This is oil-and-gas country, experiencing a rebirth of drilling interest, evidenced by convoys of trucks laden with exploration, drilling and well maintenance equipment. Many of these operations are based in Sonora, and fan out in all directions each work day morning.

A safety sign greets all drivers departing from the fleet lot of an energy well service company on the outskirts of Sonora: “CAUTION You are entering the most dangerous part of your job … THE PUBLIC HIGHWAY.”

From Sonora, U.S. Highway 277 North is a fine road in overall good condition, passing through the communities of Eldorado and Christoval. Travelers glide into San Angelo, and equally well-maintained streets over the route through that city, and crossing the scenic Concho River past a thriving historic downtown district.

Ahead are Big Spring and Lubbock.

(To be continued, to Denver, Colorado.)