There was a time in Amarillo when getting from here to anywhere meant dealing with the US highway system, The mother road ran east west and got you to Oklahoma City or Albuquerque. US 87 Was the main route to Lubbock, San Antonio or if you were going the other way points north Like Pueblo, Colorado Springs and Denver. The interstate system came in and gave us wider faster roads in the 50's and 60's and one of them is about to get a major extension. I-27 is strange, it's one of a handful of interstates in Texas that does not really go Interstate and when it was originally created certain parts of it, (to this day) really aren't up to standard as they were just upgraded in place.

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Imagine this, getting on I-27 here in Amarillo and heading down to Lubbock, but instead of I-27 ending at Loop 289 it just kept on going. Thats the very reality that Governor Abbott signed the other day. The Interstate 27 Advisory Committee is looking on how exactly that will happen, what it will look like and where the highway will ultimately end up passing through as it makes its way south to Laredo to link up with I-35 and continue on as part of the Pan American Highway.

There's already a Corridor

Courtesy TXDOT/txdot.gov
Courtesy TXDOT/txdot.gov
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The current study includes US 87/287 and I already know the first question you're asking, how are they going to cut through downtown Amarillo? They aren't. It looks like according to TXDOT studies The current loop 335 project may have provisions in there to serve as a bypass connecting both sections of the upgraded I-27 route.

When?

Since they are now in the planning stages this wont likely be a road we can drive on for at least another decade unless you use the existing US and Texas routes already in place. But just imagine a faster way to get to the rest of Texas and for some cities on the route like San Angelo, which happens to be the largest city in the state without freeway access a much needed connection.

Check Out The Original Names For These Amarillo Streets

It's hard to imagine these well-known Amarillo streets as any other name. Try to imagine giving directions to someone while using their original names. Gets tricky, doesn't it?

The new names (that we currently know them by) came mostly from associates of Henry Luckett, who drew the first map of the area. When this took place exactly, records do not show, but the street name revamp is covered extensively in 'Old Town Amarillo' by Judge John Crudgington, published in the Plains Historical Review in 1957.

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

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