Bios
Brian Purcell, aka the Texas Highwayman, is San Antonio’s de facto expert on our local highways.
Just check out his exhaustive web site, TexasHighwayMan.com, to find answers to many of your questions about local highways. Even transportation planners refer to his site to find out what’s going on.
By day, Brian is a network manager for a local university. By night (and let’s face it, all the time, really), he’s a husband and father to a son born in 2008. Somewhere in the middle, he leverages his bachelor’s degree in urban and regional planning from Texas State University and plies an intense interest in transportation to stay on top of what’s in store for commuters.
You’ll see Brian quietly milling around at public meetings. Sometimes his lucid comments surface in noisy online exchanges where he often tries to rope in wayward rhetoric about, usually, toll roads. But always, he has the latest road and traffic information on his web site.
Born overseas, Brian has lived in Germany for three years as well as Maryland, Pennsylvania, Kansas and Texas’ four largest metros. He’s traveled extensively in the United States and Europe and studied European transportation systems. He’s called San Antonio home since the mid 1980s, and has closely followed transportation issues here ever since.
Hugh Hemphill (pronounced HEMP-HILL, not Hemfill) is San Antonio’s most noted historian on our region’s transportation.
As manager of the Texas Transportation Museum, a nonprofit created in 1964, Hugh has spent years scouring shadowy corners, listening to stories and flipping through dusty documents and photos to uncover a rich tapesty on how transportation evolved in South Texas.
He has preserved some of what he learned by writing “San Antonio on Wheels: The Alamo City Learns to Drive” and “The Railroads of San Antonio and South Central Texas,”books issued by Maverick Publishing.” A trove of other tidbits can be found at www.txtransportationmuseum.org.
Hugh regularly drives antique cars and has recently become a born-again cyclist. He moved to Texas from Scotland in 1991. He is married with one daughter.
Patrick Driscoll is an award-winning blogger, reporter and editor who recently covered transportation for the San Antonio Express News.
At the Express-News, he tracked the transportation funding crisis from Austin to Washington, twists and turns in toll road and privatization initiatives, controversies over light-rail costs and benefits, 911 impacts to aviation and a wide range of other policy and commuter concerns.
Stories included the revealing of a clause buried in a private toll-road contract that gives the state an incentive to lower speed limits on Interstate 35; an expose on how I-35 became the state’s worst highway and in turn spawned the contentious Trans Texas Corridor, and an investigation into how poor short and long-term planning likely led to unnecessary deaths in the Hurricane Rita evacuation.
He also managed an Express-News top-five blog called Move It!
An Army brat who landed in San Antonio, Patrick has moved and wandered back here several times. He has now called the Alamo City home for more than two decades.
Though adverse to getting behind the wheel of a car, he loves road trips, checking out courthouse squares and downtowns along the way and usually stopping at eateries that aren’t part of chains. Of course, most trips aren’t worthwile without family to travel with or visit — so thankfully, he’s married with three children. Very busy. Very fun.
Subscribe
