The car radio is playing something loud and twangy. It’s late summer, so bugs are peppering your windshield like dollops of rain as you speed comfortably in the wide, smooth lanes. And then you realize you just missed your dang exit.

Relax, partner—you’re in Texas. Just take the next one, and stay to the left as the off ramp descends towards the intersection. Follow the signage that leads you into the U-turn lane—a curving bypass that traces the underpass’ embankment. Without stoplights, cross traffic, or stress, you about-face to the other side of the highway and head back to where you’re going.

This sublime, forgiving bit of infrastructure is colloquially called a Texas Turnaround—officially, “Diamond Interchange U-Turns,” or some similar reconstruction. And while a protected lane just for whipping 180s might feel like utopic transportational indulgence, studies suggest they ease congestion, improve safety, and save drivers money on fuel.

Thanks to the Texas Turnaround, moving from one side of the highway to the other is a breeze. Texas Department of Transportation

Yet much like a good beef rib, it’s pretty hard find a Texas Turnaround outside the state. A dive into Texas history yields a half-answer at best. The longer explanation hinges on a cost benefit debate that even the Lone Star State has begun to question.

If there’s a heaven for drivers, Texans did the roadwork under the direction of infrastructure archangel Dewitt C. Greer. As head engineer of the the Texas Highway Department from 1940 until 1967, Greer paved tens of thousands of miles of highway throughout the state. One of his chief innovations was to flank every bit of it with frontage roads (what other places call service or access roads).

“These provided local access to property owners living along the interstates,” says Roger Allen Polson, co-author of Miles and Miles of Texas, which chronicles the state’s century of building roads. Polson says these frontage roads give Texas driving its characteristic wide-open feeling.

You can’t appreciate the impact of statewide frontages unless you grok how significantly America’s highways changed the act of driving. The key to efficiency for this massive system of roads was the lack of congestion-triggering cross traffic. Interstate highways applied the railroad philosophy of limited, logically-placed access-points to private car travel. It’s convenient for drivers, but a problem for the islands in the stream of traffic that lose out on all sorts of economic benefits. “If you have four miles between interchanges, you don’t provide access to that property in between,” says Polson.