Perhaps you have heard it said that one should “go big or go home,” correct?

Well, gang, the Texas Department of Transportation has taken going big to a whole new level. It is pondering construction of a new interstate highway that would stretch — and get hold of yourself — from Amarillo to Port Arthur. All in the same state! That would be Texas.

The interstate would track the course already traveled by U.S.Highway 287.

I will stipulate that there is no way on this good Earth that I will live to see this project completed. I don’t know that TxDOT even has a strategic completion date in mind. I also must stipulate that I cannot quite wrap my arms around the scope of this project.

Expensive? Yeah … it is. TxDOT is projecting 670-mile-long project to cost something exceeding $24 billion. It would employ 40,000 people to work on it. I venture to suggest that a huge portion of the cost would be in the purhase of private land. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution stipulates that the government must provide “just compensation” to property owners who have to surrender their land to the government. Given that more than 90% of all land in Texas is under private ownership, TxDOT would have to fork over a ton of dough to complete that transition from private property to land converted for “public use.”

To be candid, this scope of this idea — and that’s all it is! — is too much for my feeble noggin to ponder. It took TxDOT, for example, more than two years to complete an Interstate 40 expansion just through Amarillo. U.S. 287 begins just east of the Panhandle city and courses through many cities and towns on its way south and east through the Metroplex and into Deep East Texas. The idea of expanding a four-lane highway into a limited-access freeway through towns such as Chillicothe, Vernon, Claude or Clarendon simply blows my mind. There are more developed communities, such as Decatur and Fort Worth that lie in the path of this enormous project. Then you find yourself in Beaumont, the Mid-County area of Jefferson County until you end up in Port Arthur.

It is way too early to pass any form judgment on this project. I am not even sure TxDOT will pursue it. The highway agency will have to determine if the expense and the enormous disruption will be worth the effort.

When will that occur and what in the world will Texas even look like when they take down the last construction cones?