Erik Slotboom was born and raised in Sharpstown, Houston's prototypical freeway suburbia of the 1950s and 1960s. As Houston's first large-scale instance of "freeway suburbia," the story of Sharpstown is one of the more interesting side-stories in Houston Freeways. In 1957, real estate developer Frank Sharp organized a large group of landowners who donated 10.5 miles (17 km) of freeway right-of-way to expedite freeway construction. Sharp needed the freeway to keep real estate development in Sharpstown humming, building a community touted in 1955 as a "new experiment in our way of life," since it was planned to include all amenities needed for a city. Sure enough, Erik was born at Sharpstown General Hospital on January 8, 1967, attended local schools, and graduated from Sharpstown High School in 1985. Erik went on to receive a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M and an M.S. in mechanical engineering from UT-Austin, and subsequently worked as a project engineer for Schlumberger in Sugar Land (just southwest of Houston) from 1991 to 1997. After being transferred to Austin in 1997, Erik joined the high tech boom and became a software developer, working for high-profile dot-com Netpliance (now Tipping Point Technologies) for nearly two years at the peak of the bubble. In 2000 Erik started the web site TexasFreeway.com, with photographs and information about Texas's freeways. The surprisingly high interest in TexasFreeway.com prompted Erik to consider writing a book about Houston's freeways, a subject which had fascinated him dating back to his childhood and the Southwest Freeway. When the dot-com bust hit in 2001, the time was right to write the book. Erik began full-time work on the book in January 2002 and continued full speed until August, when he went to back to work. The job fizzled in January, and he worked full-time to finish the book in July 2003. As a self-published book, the writing and production of Houston Freeways was almost entirely a one-man show. Being free of the constraints imposed by publishers, Erik was able to produce the ultimate freeway book about what is perhaps the world's ultimate freeway city: Houston.