Give Texas bridges and highways a space heater!

 If you are not from Texas, you have probably enjoyed smirking at the Lone Star State and how it completely shuts down with actual winter weather. Here's the thing: our state is just not built for this. 

At all. Not the roads. Not the houses. Not the people who have spent at least five years here. Here, cold is maybe close to freezing in the wee hours of the night. Until the last few years, most people had seen snowfall that wasn't measurable. Now, we see ice and snow each season around January. *NOTE: I am not a meteorologist but I have stayed at Holiday Inn Express.

After yet ANOTHER few days of watching Old Man Winter squeeze Texas so hard that schools and businesses had to shut down, I did what most home-bound people were doing. I watched weather coverage from all over the state. 

The photo above is from this Dallas Morning News article about the Metroplex turned Tundra. Many cities faced this struggle. Bridges and overpasses were turned into slick parking lots, some with banged up vehicles needing to be towed. As one who found herself near the verge of a breakdown as a passenger in a car working to navigate back roads to get home since highways were iced over only to find that my route is littered with hills of various sizes, I know to not even think of leaving a surface street. That's not how everyone thinks around here.

Most people have heard that saying that things are "bigger and better in Texas." If you try to find the origins of that statement (and I have), it generally refers to the size of the state. Some have taken that further. I drive a midsize SUV. I just did not feel safe being in a car because the trucks were being lifted so high I was pretty sure I would not be seen by those drivers. I am secure enough in my physical size that I do not need to compensate by driving a monster truck requiring either a ladder or a running leap to get inside. I am not all Texans.

I watched video after video of vehicles of all sizes sliding on snow and ice slicked roadways. When I saw a bunch of Jeep drivers, I was one part impressed and another face palming thinking Jeep People did not need such a public win. You know Jeep People. Their rides are their personalities. It's usually what they lead with in an introduction. There's nothing wrong with that. They're fun! I just like a car with doors and roofs that don't come off. I have also discovered that I REALLY love heated and cooled seats and I don't think that's a Jeep thing.

All of this coverage made me wonder if people have heated driveways, why can't we have heated bridges? Thinking I was really on to something novel, I hit Google. Y'all, it's a thing! 

I found multiple studies of this happening everywhere INCLUDING TEXAS!!! Engineers have figured out how to do it. It's a matter of money and fine-tuning the process to get it onto existing bridges. Seems 1,000,000% worth it. In the amount of time and money the state spends sending de-icing trucks up and down bridges day and night and the risk to those workers, it seems like a no-brainer!

Even once those bridge warmers are in place, I'll still monitor the news and social media to see if people still want to treat them like a racetrack only to find the icy spot just out of reach and slide into a nice guardrail. Once I let those crash test dummies work out the kinks, I just may have the big truck or Jeep confidence to go places. Until then, I'll make sure I'm stocked up on things to do with or without power (because, Texas).