A long and newly opened stretch of the toll road known as Texas 130, my sources tell me, includes the fastest posted speed limits in the nation – 85 mph. As we drove from San Antonio to Dallas last week, I made sure to take full advantage of that maximum. It’s fun for a while, but then you get used to the speed, especially since there isn’t much other traffic. You glide right along, mile after mile.

I haven’t followed the development of Texas 130 in any detail, though I know a little about it – it’s a private toll road, or rather a PPP (public-private partnership), which is generally just a new twist on the patronage schemes traditionally associated with road building. That aside, the theory of Texas 130 is to reduce congestion on I-35 through Central Texas, particularly Austin, which is awful and probably an unintended consequence of NAFTA allowing a free flow of trucks up from Mexico, plus rapid population growth in Central Texas in recent decades.

We drove the entire length of the toll road to take advantage of its stated purpose for being: avoiding traffic on I-35. If you’re going from San Antonio to Dallas, as we were, it adds a few miles to the trip, but it does indeed bypass the worst of Austin traffic.

It didn’t look like a lot of other drivers were doing the same. It is a toll road, after all. There was some traffic on the northern sections of the road, close to Austin, but not much. And no one seemed to be driving on the southern section of the road, near where it connects with I-10 (the main road from San Antonio to Houston). At times I saw no one on the road with us, ahead or behind.

That makes for more relaxing driving, but not a particularly successful toll road. The Austin American-Statesman reported earlier this year that “Texas 130, in 2011 traffic counts, saw a high of 43,000 vehicles a day on it in Pflugerville, about a fifth of what I-35 sees in Central Austin. Traffic on Texas 130 steadily ebbed further south, to just 9,600 vehicles a day near Mustang Ridge. Officials haven’t released traffic counts for the privately operated section south of Mustang Ridge, which opened last fall.”

The land along the road is also almost empty, too. Even at the few exits, there’s little development yet. Most of the time the view is open, not quite rolling, not quite flat, not quite green, not quite brown.  Some trees, but not a lot. It’s remarkable how much unpopulated space there still is in Texas, considering that 26 million people live there, with a good many of them along the Dallas-Austin-San Antonio axis.

Turns out a fair number of wild pigs live in the countryside near the road. We were warned not to drive Texas 130 at night, lest we run down pigs on the road.