001. The $1.52 Billion Dollar Dick

It’s Father’s Day, 2023. My family and I pile into the car for a bit of an adventure: a non-stop, 2 hour, 39 minute drive covering 152 miles of good ol’ urban Texas highway around Dallas/Fort Worth.

I’m wearing my old Garmin that’s been a trusted companion for tracking runs and workouts for a number of years. Today is the first day it’s seen any real action since its last major task of tracking a hundred mile trail run in California 18 months ago.

I make a mental note that I really need to get back to running, a mantra I’ve been repeating without taking serious action since that last race. Too many other things to do, I tell myself. What a sorry excuse for not having fun.

The watch itself is in good working condition and will be crucial for recording the GPS data needed to create a representation of the $1.5 billion dollar dick of DFW.

I start the car. I start my watch. And, we drive, and we drive, and we drive some more along a far less exciting route than I anticipated.

The Route

We began on I-635 at Webb Chapel, traveling west on the underside of the testicles. I suppose it’s worth providing a frame of reference by mentioning that The Big D of DFW is upside down when looking at a map with north pointing up.

We then took the President George Bush Turnpike (even the former president made this dick happen!), otherwise known as SH 161, south to SH 183 headed west. This is where we experienced our one and only delay with an overturned semi-truck trailer, briefly routing us off the highway for a short stretch.

I was initially a little worried that the detour would negatively affect the drawing, but in hindsight it wouldn’t have mattered with such a large scale. After a good number of minutes of just sitting, we finally got moving again, continuing west on 183 to finish drawing the underside of the shaft.

I-820 marks the beginning of the head of the penis, and we continued driving around Fort Worth until I-30 in White Settlement, a somewhat appropriate name for the place where semen is pushed out of the body. We used I-30 to draw the urethra, driving in and back out to continue along 820 to finish the head around Fort Worth.

I-820 serves as an auxiliary route of I-20 and is a little weird because not only does it go east-west, but also north-south. It’s purpose for Fort Worth is similar to what I-635 does for Dallas. The important thing here is that it allows for distinguishing the head of the penis from the shaft. So we drove north to North Richland Hills and promptly turned around to drive south right back to Kennedale to complete the head of the penis.

From Kennedale, it’s a very simple drive along I-20 east, past the Trinity Forest, the most scenic section of the drive and the largest urban forest in the United States, and continuing to I-635, looping north around Dallas to finish drawing the testicles and arrive back at our starting point.

A World Record Dick Drawing

Two hours, thirty nine minutes, and almost one hundred fifty two miles to drive what has to be a record in both size and expense for a dick pic. If there were a World Record for the largest and most expensive dick drawing ever, it’s quite possible that the Dallas/Fort Worth area very well might hold it.

Back-of-napkin math:

(5,280 feet per mile) x (12 feet width per lane) x (152 miles) = 9,630,720 feet in area.

(9,630,720 feet) x (0.9167 11” concrete) = 8,828,481 cubic feet = 326,722 cubic yards of concrete.

And that’s just for the surface. This doesn’t include the very large amount of material that goes into building up the base of a road. Now multiply that number by eight for the average number of lanes to construct the highway (this is not counting shoulders, or service roads, or entries and exits) and we get 2,613,776 cubic yards of concrete to construct what is perhaps the largest dick in the world.

If the average cost of a cubic yard of concrete costs $125, that amounts to a material cost of $328,972,000. Remember, this is just for the surface material. Not the base. Not the labor. Not literally everything else.

The average cost to construct a lane mile in an urban area is reportedly around $10 million. If we are accounting for one lane, one measly one-way lane for our entire route around Dallas/Fort Worth, then I suppose we could say that this route constitutes a $1.52 billion dollar dick.

Closing Thoughts

Recently I asked my family what they thought of the drive. What did they see? Was there anything they particularly enjoyed?

The short answer was a simple “nothing, no.” The longer answer was, “not much and no, not really.” Expected.

I hope to one day live in a place where our daily trips and adventures are filled with beauty and some sort of connection with the natural world. I hope we can live in a place that is built for people, not solely automobiles with people inside them.

I actually love to drive. I love to take my car on drives across the country. And I absolutely love a bit of spirited driving when the opportunity presents itself. But daily driving out of necessity? Because our place is designed pretty much solely around the automobile? That, I don’t like. And it’s exactly in that area where I believe we can do a lot better.

Why are we always talking about more lanes? More concrete, more heat, more stormwater runoff, more noise, more expense to mitigate all of these things, both from a local government and individual level. I think we need to have more discussions around transit oriented development. Around places built for people walking on their own two feet.

NFTs

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