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TexasLand USA Theme Park vs. Rural Texas: A Fight for the Land We Call Home
Traffic Impact
A Lesson from the RenFest Traffic Mess
Every fall, the Texas Renaissance Festival draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to Todd Mission — and the traffic impacts spill far beyond Grimes County. It’s a beloved tradition, but also a powerful case study in what happens when tens of thousands of cars converge on narrow, rural roads across the region.
In 2017, Waller County officials issued “resident-only stickers” so locals could get through RenFest gridlock. That wasn’t a long-term solution - it was a sign of how overwhelmed the roads had become.
RenFest by the numbers:
- 500,000+ visitors attend each season, with peak years topping 650,000.
- Drivers report 2–3+ hour delays on peak weekends, sometimes 40 minutes just to park.
- Emergency vehicles and residents have all been stuck in the same standstill traffic.
- All this for a seasonal event with decades of planning, dedicated parking fields and shuttles — and now, a direct highway corridor to help manage traffic.
In recent years, festival organizers have encouraged drivers to use Highway 249 to approach the site via FM 1774, and they actively warn visitors not to follow app-suggested detours through residential roads. Even with this dedicated access route and extensive traffic management, severe backups remain common.
If a few weekends of festival crowds can paralyze regional traffic despite highway access, decades of planning, and dedicated infrastructure, what happens with a year-round theme park built on isolated farm roads with none of those advantages?
A theme park in a more isolated area would have zero tolerance for misrouting — because there’s simply nowhere else for the traffic to go.
Why TexasLand Would Be Worse.
If a seasonal festival with highway access and decades of planning can still paralyze traffic, a permanent theme park on rural farm roads would turn short-term gridlock into a constant reality. TexasLand USA has none of the advantages RenFest relies on — and would pile on new challenges our roads were never built to handle.
- No highway access – Unlike RenFest, which now directs visitors along Highway 249 to FM 1774, TexasLand would sit near the intersection of FM 1887 and FM 3346 — two narrow, shoulderless farm-to-market roads that already struggle with local traffic. The site has no major highway frontage, no direct freeway connection, and no clear route for visitors coming from Houston, Austin, or College Station.
- Year-round crowds – RenFest lasts roughly eight weekends per year. TexasLand’s projected attendance would mean traffic every weekend, every holiday, every summer break — and often on weekdays too. What Waller County experiences for a couple of months each fall could become the daily reality.
- No traffic or parking plan – RenFest has decades of trial-and-error behind its parking fields, shuttles, and traffic coordination. TexasLand, by contrast, has offered no publicly available plan detailing how vehicles would enter, exit, park, or circulate — despite developer claims of hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
- Permanent pressure on emergency response – Every minute matters when first responders are stuck in traffic. With no bypasses, frontage roads, or service routes, TexasLand’s location would increase emergency response times and complicate evacuations in ways that even RenFest’s traffic does not.
If “resident-only stickers” were once needed just to get people home during a seasonal event with highway access, imagine the daily reality of a full-time theme park on roads that offer no highway, no redundancy, and no margin for error.
How Many Visitors Are We Talking About?
Mid-sized theme parks across the country draw enormous crowds:
- Dollywood (Tennessee) – ~3 million visitors/year
- Six Flags Fiesta Texas (San Antonio) – ~2.1 million/year
- Hersheypark (Pennsylvania) – ~3.4 million/year
Even on the low end, developers typically aim for 1 million visitors per year - that’s:
- ~2,700 people per day on average
- 10,000–20,000 people per day on peak weekends
What Does That Mean for Traffic?
Most guests travel by car, with 4 people per vehicle. So:
- A peak day = 2,500+ vehicles entering and exiting the area
- That’s 5,000+ vehicle movements per day
Traffic will spike hardest between 9–11 AM (arrivals) and 4–7 PM (departures)
Why Waller County Roads Can’t Handle It
This isn’t just about how many cars show up—it’s about where they go and how they get there. The proposed site is surrounded by narrow, rural roads with tight turns, railroad crossings, and no shoulders—creating built-in bottlenecks long before a single ride opens.
Approach routes & constraints:
- From the North (Hempstead): Multiple bottlenecks, a railroad crossing and sharp turns through town
- From the Southwest (Bellville): Sharp turns + a railroad crossing
- From the South (via I-10, Brookshire & Pattison & Monaville): A string of five tight turns on country roads + a railroad crossing
- From the East (via US290): Bottlenecks at turns + a railroad crossing
These routes were never meant to handle:
- High traffic volumes
- Tour buses or RVs
- Emergency response with time-critical access
- Large-scale evacuation if needed
Real-World Examples Show What Happens
Texas Renaissance Festival – Right in Our Backyard
- Draws ~500,000 people over 2 months
- Still causes massive backups on weekends
- Locals plan their lives around traffic delays
- Emergency vehicles have been delayed
→ That’s a seasonal event. TexasLand USA would be year-round.
Legoland New York (2021)
- 2 million guests/year in rural Orange County, NY
- Opening week: gridlock for hours
- Locals overwhelmed; traffic signals had to be reinstalled, reroutes created, and law enforcement deployed → and that was after years of preparation.
Hersheypark (PA)
- Even with advanced highway access, local town faces regular congestion
- Entire traffic control systems built around park hours
→ And that’s with major transportation investment — which Waller County hasn’t seen.
The Bottom Line
TexasLand USA would funnel tens of thousands of vehicles into an area served only by narrow, two-lane farm-to-market roads with hard turns and railroad crossings. And unlike RenFest — which now benefits from a direct highway and still struggles — TexasLand would have no buffer, no bypass, and no Plan B.
It’s not sustainable - and it’s not safe