HEMPSTEAD -- The Trans Texas Corridor may be the most controversial highway ever built in Texas.

That is, if it ever gets built.

All month, there have been public hearings throughout the area where people have been showing up in droves to oppose it.

People don’t drive very fast on Odis Styers’ family ranch near Hempstead, but TxDOT wants that to change.

“It’s quiet, it’s peaceful,” Styers said. “It’s a shame a road is gonna mess it up.”

The road is the Trans Texas Corridor. The plans call for it to come through here, and with it: separate lanes for cars and trucks, speeds topping 70 mph, trains and tolls.

So far, you’ve only seen part of the story of where it came from and why so many Texans have come forward to oppose it. But you may not realize that what we know as the Trans Texas Corridor is actually two huge highways.

The first is Trans Texas 35, which parallels I-35, from Laredo to north of Dallas. That project is further along than Trans Texas 69, which would run from Laredo through counties west and north of Houston. Both would likely be toll roads developed by private companies — companies that brought lots of money to the table.

Back in 2004 a Spanish company, Cintra, offered to pay TxDOT a billion dollars to build the first leg of the Corridor.

In exchange, Cintra would set the tolls and collect them for half a century.

“It’s a lot of money,” TxDOT spokesman Ric Williamson said.

TxDOT took the offer, and the controversy began.

Videos lampooning Gov. Rick Perry cropped up on YouTube. One of the people behind it was Gov. Perry’s election-day challenger, Carole Strayhorn.

“They are literally cramming toll roads down Texans throats,” Strayhorn said.

Of course, the government buying land to put up a railroad or a highway is nothing new, bt the Trans Texas Corridor would be different. For one thing, it would be a lot wider: between a quarter mile and a half mile wide. It would also be a toll road, so there would be fewer ways on and off. And there would be no frontage road, so some communities are worried the economic development would pass them by.

TXDOT said toll roads are the best option, because the gas tax can’t even maintain highways we already have.

“You can see our current congestion will not take us to where we need to be in 20 years, in 40 years, so we know that our highways have got to grow our infrastructure has got to build,” TxDOT spokesman Norm Wigington said. “Who is going to pay for it?”

The corridors would be built so truck and train traffic could bypass major cities. But that’s brought opposition from another source; magazines like the “New American” call the Trans Texas Corridor the first link of a so-called “NAFTA superhighway.”

“We will actually eliminate the sovereignty of the United States of America,” said Border Watch founder Curtis Collier.

Collier has maps and argues that because the corridor could link with highways in Mexico, it’s really the beginning of a free-trade superhighway that runs all the way to Canada. The first phase of the border-erasing “North American Union.”

“This highway will only be a stimulus for what is going on in Latin America and Central America, and it would be the death of all the major American seaports in this country,” Collier said.

“I can’t imagine that that would be the case,” Wigington said.

TxDOT said there is no conspiracy here, just reality: Traffic is getting worse, money for free highways is getting tight, and undeveloped land is growing scarce.

“We could be standing in the middle of the Trans Texas Corridor,” Stylers said.

The big picture matters less when you’re the one in the corridor’s path.

“I hate to say it’s a snowball headed down hill that you can’t stop, but it kind of appears that way,” Styers said.

So the next time you see Styers’ ranch, you might be driving through it.