Texas State Highway Beltway 8
Texas State Highway Beltway 8 or BW8, also Sam Houston Parkway, is a Texas state highway within Harris County of the Houston area. The Sam Houston Tollway, which follows much of the same route, is run under the auspices of the Harris County Toll Road Authority and is not part of the state highway system.
Beltway 8—defined as an orbital motorway—is the second of three highway loops within the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown metropolitan area, with Interstate 610 being the inner loop and Texas State Highway 99 (Grand Parkway) being the outer loop. The Grand Parkway is still under construction. Beltway 8 and Sam Houston Parkway are the names given to the frontage roads and a small section of freeway in northern Houston between Interstate 45 and US 59, while the Sam Houston Tollway is the name for the tollway that is located in the highway's median. Access to the Sam Houston Tollway is provided via Beltway 8 by means of entrance and exit ramps. As of 2005, Beltway 8 is complete while the Sam Houston Tollway is about 85 percent complete. Portions of the West Belt, as sections of the Beltway are called by their compass names, are in various stages of expansion due to high traffic volumes. The remaining portion is a small section of tollway between US 90 and US 59 northeast of Houston, which should be completed between 2007 and 2009.
The tollway's construction was piecemealed from the opening of the West Belt in the mid-1970s to the completion of the South Belt in the mid-1990s. The Jesse Jones Memorial Toll Bridge, as the Beltway's crossing of the Houston Ship Channel was originally called, was constructed by the Texas Turnpike Authority (TTA) and was opened in the early-1980s
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