Texas
A frontage road for Texas State Highway 183 (Airport Freeway) in Irving, Texas.Most Texas freeways have frontage roads on both sides. In urban and suburban areas, the traffic typically travels one-way only in the direction of the neighboring main lanes. Most other areas have two-way traffic, but as an area urbanizes the highway is often transformed for one-way traffic.
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Over 80% of Houston freeways have frontage roads[1], which locals typically call feeders.
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Many frontage roads in urban and suburban areas of Texas have the convenience of Texas U-turns, which allow drivers to avoid being stopped by traffic lights when making a U-turn.
The Stemmons Freeway in Dallas illustrates the practicability of the frontage road: the real estate developer John Stemmons offered free land to the Texas Highway commission in which to build a freeway (Interstate 35E) on the condition that the state build the freeway with frontage roads that would give access to undeveloped property until then of slight value that he owned along the freeway corridor. The state was able to reduce its costs (largely the cost of land acquisition) of building the freeway and did not need to acquire and demolish developed property; in return the developer profited handsomely from lucrative development along the freeway.
With the arguable exception of Missouri, Texas is the only state in the USA that widely constructs frontage/access roads along its highways state-wide, even in some rural areas. Outside of these two states, frontage roads are common in only Michigan, Mississippi, and Florida, and then only in urban or suburban areas.
Frontage roads are often built as part of a multi-phase plan to construct new limited access highways. Therefore, they initially serve as a highway with access to local business before the freeway is constructed several years later. Even after the completion of the new freeway, frontage roads serve as a major thoroughfare for local activity, such as with the Katy Freeway project in Greater Houston[2]. In several cases, a long range plan has called for a future freeway, but the design is either changed or the project cancelled before completion [3].
Entering and exiting from access roads can be very confusing to drivers unfamiliar with the system. Signaling is very important not just for the drivers behind one, but also for oncoming traffic in areas where the access road is two-way.
Nicknames for frontage roads vary within the state of Texas. In Houston and East Texas they're called feeders. Dallas and Fort Worth residents call their frontage roads service roads. In San Antonio, they're known as access roads. El Paso residents call their frontage roads gateways. In Austin, however, they use the state's official term of "frontage roads".
In 2002, the Texas Department of Transportation proposed to discontinue building frontage roads on new freeways, citing studies that suggest frontage roads increase congestion. However, this proposal was widely ridiculed and criticized and was dropped later the same year[4].
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