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)
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.
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?
Last time I was in Houston I was driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic that was going 95 mph. I looked over to my right and saw a group of five cars pass me going at least 10 to 20 mph faster. This would not have been remarkable except that I was in the right lane and these cars were passing me on the shoulder.
This being Houston, though, that's still probably not remarkable.
Can confirm, this happens a lot too. That level of recklessness should be remarkable, but that's just how people roll around here. There's a special sort of Houston PTSD that comes from almost dying in a car on the way to work every single day.
Air quality (or rather the lack thereof) is a problem in parts of Houston. If you ever want to go down an internet rabbit hole, google the Houston cancer clusters. Or the Brio superfund (not superfun) site. I try not to think about it when I'm outside taking a walk 🫠
I live in a medium-sized city and I learned years ago that if you want to get anywhere on time, stay off the freeway. It's not nearly as wide, but it has on ramps at shit intervals and the on ramps mostly give you no room to accelerate to highway speeds, so it's always congested. I'm actually about to go a couple towns south as I write this and looking at GPS the freeway route which is the most direct will take 20 minutes longer than simply going through back country roads that add an addition 10 miles to the trip.
I spent a week in vacation down in Galveston. Being a Chicagoan, I would have said that Chicago traffic was worse before that week. But it's not. Houston traffic is constant and with worse drivers. Chicago drivers are just trying to get someplace, as quickly as possible.
I've visited a lot of cities around the US and can confirm this. Most other places I go, people drive fast and aggressive, but predictable. In Houston it's just all over the place. You'll see people doing 30 under in the passing lane, and people doing 90+ on the shoulder. You'll get passed on the left and right simultaneously even though you're going over the speed limit. And everything in between.
Going 20 mph for any distance on a bike includes and assumption of good health, includes carrying a change of clothes, and shower which most workplace don't offer.
This is true, particularly in the brutal heat this summer. My mind just turns to selfish solutions when I'm stuck in bumper to bumper traffic.
You would think that somewhere between the 10th and 26th lane of this urban hellscape, someone calling the shots would stop to ask "hey guys, y'all think maybe there's a better way to do this?" But since this is 'murca, that guy probably got fired and replaced by some ex-executive of a company best known for its crimes against nature.
The Federal Highway Administration has a multi-billion dollar budget, and doesn't include the multi-billion dollar budget each state allocates to their state highway departments, or the multi-million dollar budget most large cities allocate to their streets and highways departments, and many cities unconditionally grant valuable street real estate to individuals to park for free.
It's not an anarchocapitalist conspiracy, it's a massive subsidy for motor vehicle owners.
How common/usable is subway in bigger cities? Here in Prague we have an amazing public transport, with priority lanes from buses from time to time and most importantly a pretty decent subway. I've never had an issue getting anywhere around the city in a decent time, 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.
Public transportation in the US is at best, an afterthought. A lot of major cities have buses/trolleys but not many have trains/subways. Only the largest cities have a workable public trans system such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco.
And as someone who lives right outside SF, yes it's one of the best cities for public transit in the US, but it can still take 2 hours to go somewhere that would take 30mins in a car.
Not all the time - sometimes it's just as fast as a car, but often enough that it's a deterrent.
And mind you, I live literally across the street from a train stop, so public transit is way more convenient for me than for most in the area.
Portland is talking about eventually making its MAX Light Rail a cut-and-cover subway over the course of the next few decades. The system is suffering from the effects of decisions made in the 1970's when the system was being created. At that point, it was limited to a stretch from the suburb of Gresham to downtown. Since then, that line has been extended to go to a completely different set of suburbs. So where a train being slowed down by downtown traffic was acceptable when that was the terminus, now that is unacceptable because it will affect many more stops.
The light rail also has all four lines in the current system going over the Steel Bridge. In the event of the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, that aging bridge is predicted to crumble, crippling the system for years. It also acts as one of the chock points in the system. Currently that's not the biggest bottleneck - that's hiring drivers - but as system ridership recovers post-COVID it will become a problem for schedules again.
A few things need to happen before Portland's ready. First and foremost is simply having more people using the system. Right now the capital costs are prohibitive given the ridership. I think this will continue to improve over time. Portland has increasingly bad traffic and it's only getting worse. Transit is often faster than going by car, depending on the trip. The city hasn't had much stomach for expanding roads over the past few decades, so I think the main outlet will be transit.
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?
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.
Not many U.S. cities have a subway. I think the only substantial subway system is in NYC. The city I live in has a very short commuter rail line that doesn't go to/from anywhere people want to go. Buses are gridlocked in traffic like everyone else, and have to make frequent stops, so it can take something like 2 hours to travel 10 miles. The low-wage workers I know without vehicles just spend $40/day on Uber to commute to work and back (which is a significant percentage of their pay).
NYC is by far the best, but several other cities have fairly decent subways. Boston, DC, Chicago, and San Francisco have decent systems, although Chicago's is an elevated train and Boston's has had increasingly severe issues due to underfunding maintainence for decades.
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.
Building subterranean rail after the fact is just not feasible.
Japan probably has the best rail system with JR. To do that in the US, you would probably need to remove a lot of roads. I would welcome it, but I don't know how the public would feel about losing roads to trains.
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.
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!
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.
Key word is can be. If transportation planners are lazy enough to only build more lanes on the major highway, who's to say they can build an efficient rail system. The major issue is a misallocation and a general lack of funding for transportation projects.
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.
My truck is used for hauling junk, supplies, tools, moving appliances etc. My job doesn't work without a truck. Can't get abandoned furniture to the dump on a bus. It is what it is.
Staw-man involves making claims that something is ssying something it isn't. Many of the posts I have seen and comments I have read suggest that the mere existence of cars is a problem. This is what I have a problem with because some people in rural areas, for example, need cars. I am not claiming that anti-car communities attack people in rural areas, rather, it can seem that way for those people.
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.
I drove 550 miles to another state for work travel, bringing an entire car load of work related stuff too. Doing that on a bike would be pretty hard...
80% of the US lives in metropolitan and micropolitan areas. Most people work in the same metro or micropolitan area that they live in.
Biking will never work for every trip for everyone. Public transit will never work for every trip. But it's something that can work for many more trips, given better zoning & infrastructure. If you're in a town, city or suburb, you shouldn't need a car to buy milk or have a pint with friends.
Getting most people out of cars is good for everyone. Cars lanes have much, much lower throughput than bus lanes or bike lanes do. Think about how much nicer driving is if you're not stuck in traffic.
That is an oversimplification though. Good city planning needs good city planning. Also more people willing to not have a huge house with a large garden.
You'll get a decent amount of downvotes because we're still not sure if Aptera is a scam or not, but the design is where we should be going.
If we moved away from full-ton SUVs, and focused on small cars, we could add far more lanes and clear up traffic. Our roads aren't going to get any larger. There's no more room in cities. We need the government to incentivize small commuter cars that take less space and energy. 90% of people in those SUVs are driving solo and it makes no damn sense.
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?
When I first encountered the photo, I thought I was looking at the latest superhighway in China. Then I saw the signs in English at the bottom right. 😞
Not at all. The 401 at most has 14 lanes across and not the 26 in this photo (at least based on a comment). That being said, the toronto subway system would benefit from an overhaul instead of the proposed highway 413. Additionally, mandating a max price somehow on the 407 could help to significantly reduce traffic on other highways. As much as people like to complain about Toronto, I do find the bus system to be better than most.
You can have all the fun you want playing with your stick. The post is calling out a system that forces people to drive to get around and creates infrastructure like that shown in the image. Driving would be a lot nicer if the roads weren't full of people who would prefer to use other modes.
I love driving too, but fewer lanes with more transit/cycling infrastructure/stricter testing would let those of us who enjoy driving (and are safe doing so) to have a more open road