After widening was completed in 2008, a portion of the highway west of Houston is now also believed to be the widest in the world, at 26 lanes when including feeders. - (Wikipedia)
WTF
Looks a bit jammed on the photo though. I’m sure one more lane will fix that. /s
Just. One. More. Lane. Brooooo
And despite the extra lanes, it’s still gridlocked. Maybe they need just one more lane…
“I SWEAR BRO JUST ONE MORE LANE, ONE MORE LANE WILL BE ENOUGH!!!”
one more
lanetrain railI e moved out of Houston but if i recall correctly they also removed the rail line that was adjacent to this highway for the expansion.
There was a killer hamburger place off like Gessner that i still miss.
An old railway running along the north side of the freeway was demolished in 2002 in preparation for construction which began in 2004.
Form the wiki article linked above
Is Houston aware that some cities pay hundreds of millions of dollars to install a rail line to address this exact problem?
That sounds like extremely bad planning. In essence they could have had several smaller highways that better suited the needs of the users without forcing them all onto this clusterfuck.
There’s already another highway 4 miles north and 4 miles south of it. There’s some 2-lane each way roads between, but anything bigger or more grade-separated would be further isolate communities, take away alternative transportation routes, and take away greenspace.
This will soon become top 100 most popular photos. Its synonymous with car dependency and post WWII American urban planning
Also, this one. Insane traffic in Los Angeles, 1993.
Future ppl are truly going to consider this time a dystopia.
Ah ha! I see the problem. It looks like more lanes may be needed.
How common/usable is subway in bigger cities? Here in Prague we have an amazing public transport, even with priority lanes for buses at some places and most importantly a pretty decent subway. I’ve never had an issue getting anywhere around the city in a short time (I can get anywhere in the city within 1.5 hour max (that is including suburbs around Prague), around 30 mins to places around the center), and the cost of an unlimited year-long ticket is just 150EUR.
Oil and automotive companies literally tore most of public transport out in US way back when.
They would invest into the local tram companies, buy them out, then close and tear out the lines.In the US, public transportation is pretty much unusable in bigger cities except for NYC.
America has this weird, masochistic relationship with cars that just gridlocks everyone. But “FreEdoM.”
One potential reason posited by The 1619 Project is due to white Americans moving out of metro areas after WW2 in order to “escape” black residents. Then, they restricted expansion of public transportation development to those areas because making them more accessible and usable would potentially result in a influx of poorer, black residents who can’t afford a car to commute to the suburbs.
The specific example they used is Atlanta, which has staunch racial lines, horrible public transport, and some of the worst traffic in America. They make a very compelling case.
Here is the relevant New York Times article about it and it’s Chapter 16 in the actual book
This must also happen in reverse. The hip expensive city center and the poorer suburbs?
I think definitely in downtown areas with a large night culture, but to a much lesser extent. The entire city center isn’t expensive, just the “hip” areas where the money is being spent. There are tons of poorer areas inside city limits that definitely have a lower cost of living compared to owning a house and a car
It’s insanely bad. Hell, Canada has shown that public transit is viable with the North American development model, but the US simply refuses to invest money into public works.
Vancouver SkyTrain and Montreal REM/Metro are both fast, highly efficient subway systems that are able to navigate single-family housing development. Why can’t the US?
Come to Toronto/The GTA, the lack of investment in public transit is on par with the rest of North America.
When I was in Toronto, the transit wasn’t great but it was at least better than Boston/Philadelphia…
unfortunately it is not the case for most of countries. For example, here, in Azerbaijan, rural public transport basically doesn’t exist, and in capital city - Baku - schedules, traffic, prices… They all suck. We only got underground metro, but as that is only sane transport, everyone uses it and on critic hours it also suck. Sadly.
Dont take it the wrong way but 1.5 hours doesn’t sound great for every day travel.
That’s to the opposite side of the city, I’m guessing every day travel would be somewhere around those 30 mins
That was an extreme, if I really need to get somwhere on the outskirts away from the subway. I don’t think I’ve ever had to travel for longer than 40 minutes in a long time, an average not counting work (which I have literally two tram stations near home) would be around 30 minutes. Definitely way faster than by a car.
That gave me a good chuckle.
It’s odd how we’ve commoditized such selfishly resource hungry transportation. I like walking to stuff as long as where I live is safe.
But you dont get it, managers need you at the office so they can feel important. You just need to lose 3 hours of your day, spend more money and pollute more, STOP BEING SELFISH!
Government offloaded transportation onto individuals and parking onto business, now everyone is worse off.
This is true. Commuting in an urban or suburban environment should be significantly easier than it currently is. Public infrastructure needs to improve and become less car-centric. That being said, if you live in a rural area or a small town where there is very little traffic, or if you need to pick up groceries for your family of 4+, cars are needed. People in anti-car communities do not like to hear this, but I do not think cars should be criticized for merely existing. Current infrastructure should be criticized for only considering them. I think that while holding on to the idea that car=bad is fun, it also sours people who genuinely rely on cars to the movement and limits what actual progress could be made by these communities to make walkable cities a reality. Thank you for listening to my ted talk.
It’s extremely hard to nuance any conversation on any forum when multiple people interact. People almost always assume you’re pro or anti something. It’s also easier mentally to reject what doesn’t match your views.
Debating on the internet is useless most times to convince the other party, but I’m sure some people reading it who haven’t made up their mind on the subject can appreciate a well put out idea and maybe consider it before making up their mind.
Changing to a different form of transportation, unless it involves teleportation, is just moving the problem somewhere else. It might be all electric, and it might get you there twice as fast, but you’re still just leveraging a tactic that moves the goalpost and delays the inevitable.
Ultimately, there is no right answer to this. The greater the population, the greater the problem. If everyone who could work remotely started doing so, and the rest were afforded decentralized centers for the onsite labor they must do, this would be a more manageable problem. But eventually, we’d be back where we started - it’d just be a higher concentration of onsite workers generating all the traffic, and they might have less distance to travel.
Coruscant’s traffic problems, or maybe 5th Element’s, are what we’re destined for.
Better solutions move the problem elsewhere? I’m moving the goalpost and delaying the inevitable? I have no idea what you are talking about.
The answer is because local governments prioritized cars over streetcars and public transportation:
The real problem was that once cars appeared on the road, they could drive on streetcar tracks — and the streetcars could no longer operate efficiently. “Once just 10 percent or so of people were driving, the tracks were so crowded that [the streetcars] weren’t making their schedules,” Norton says.
We used to have public street cars where I live that took people up and down the hill, but they sold out to a car company. I believe it lasted 2 years before the car company shut it down all together. Wild stuff!
4chan can be surprisingly perceptive sometimes.
This reminds me of Andre Gorz - the social ideology of the motor car . Essentially:
The invention of the personal automobile, and destruction of public transportation, was a triumph of capitalist drug-peddling; suddenly, all at once, everyone’s personal mobility became dependent on a single, new commodity, gasoline. Without it, we are unable to function, since urban sprawl and suburbanization now means we can’t even walk to work if we wanted to.
And going by time, by spreading everything out, it ended up taking the same amount of time to get to work, in 1900 as in 1980.
I just read it, what a good article. I’m not sure I see the vision at the end, but I totally agree with the way he describes every aspect of the problem.
Some of my favorite excerpts, in addition to the one you quoted:
“The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”
You’ll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them.
These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.
No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.
> Me playing Cities: Skylines
It’s actually quite wiggly
Ok I’m here! Where do I put the recliners and all that shit you asked for? Just leave it outside in the sun while I work? Then take it back home, leave it outside the house and do it all over again tomorrow?
Houstonian of 30+ years here.
Even with the insane number of lanes available, driving anywhere inside beltway 8 between like 12 pm and 8pm is hell on earth. And outside those hours, you’re playing chicken with drunk drivers.
Before I started working remote, I used to clock my average speed to and from work. Most of the time it was 15-20mph on a 65mph freeway. Literally bicycle speeds. Without cars or gridlocked traffic, I could have commuted faster on a bike.
More than one person dies in Houston traffic every day on average. This is probably the shittiest and most expensive form of mass transit mankind will ever build. At least I hope this is as bad as it ever gets, lol.
It’s absolutely insane how many people die every single day because we thought it was a good idea to let everyone operate multi-ton pieces of heavy machinery at hundreds of km per hour on the reg.
How the fuck is there more regular testing and training for people driving forklifts than Dodge Rams?
Simple, if you fuck up on a forklift you are damaging company property.
