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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
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!!!"
Unironically a single bike lane off to the side might have eased up traffic.
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?
Disused rail lines are a RoW life raft for American cities. I cycle in a very hilly area and rail trails and trails along waterways have nicely mild grades compared to the rest of the state. Electric trams could easily co-exist with a cycle path next to them. I just hope we're smart enough to recognize these chunks of land as a gift from the past and not give them up or develop them inappropriately (aka freeway expansions)
Well that stretch of highway is called the “energy corridor” and all the big oil companies have their headquarters there… bp, chevron, conoco, etc.
So to answer your question: No. they seem unaware.
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.
Highway planners are constrained by the fact that these roads can only be run through poor and usually black neighborhoods.
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.
Includes the express lanes and the frontage roads. It really shouldn't, you aren't supposed to just drive the entire trip on the frontage roads.
Meaning it's even wider than 26 lanes because of the space between the feeder and the highway, the extra shoulders, and barriers to the express lanes.
But its Texas, we have space. Isn't the point that its too many lanes/cars, not the space?
Too much space taken up by non-places means more distance between places, increasing dependence on cars, requiring more lanes, which take up space.
Whats the alternative? Walking? Its 100+ degrees 3 months out of the year and humid as fuck.
The alternative was not to feed into propoganda and let the car industry convince us to only build car infrastructure. We're fucked now without major time and work. Trains, buses, and final mile helpers like bikes and walkways together would have moved our millions more efficiently. Now we get to sit in our gridlock, with people who believe the earth is flat operating another four ton beast three feet away from us. Happy travels.
Reduce 27 lanes to 4 lanes with bus priority lanes and put people on a bus. Thats 27 cars with 5 people in roughly 2 buses with ~50 people.
Then you'd be riding with the sort that have to ride the bus. I personaly like not being stabbed or pissed on.
The sort of people that ride the bus and train is most of the population in the EU and a lot of other countries.
Nice dogwhistle fuckface
If you do it right, you share the bus with the sort that takes the bus because it's more convenient than getting stuck in traffic and having to look for a parking spot
Biking, buses, trains, underground tunnels.
I sometimes have biked to work in the summer not far from where that picture was taken and I live like 15 miles away. Its even more comfortable if you use an ebike. Unfortunately, I get that's not an option for everyone (personally have been off the bike due to an injury this summer).
Not everyone is a masochist. A lot of people find Houston heat intolerable.
So lets cover it in only asphalt that absorbs that heat and continuously vomits it back up over the course of the entire night. All this shit is self defeating, and a major cause of the situation we find ourselves in. Car infrastructure also encourages longer distances between destinations. Roads eat up more space than alternatives, and cars themselves are large vehicles. This, along with the increasing speeds of cars encourages society to spread out. Without it our cities would be more human-centric.
I hate the heat too. I much prefer it under 60 to over 70. But when you're moving at a good pace and you don't have to travel 15 miles because of miles of space wasted by cars, its not bad. Also, buses/trains should have AC. If you have a well-designed bus system, you aren't waiting for buses much, if at all.
And few people rode them as cars became more popular
Car ownership was untenable for most people until the mid-1970s, and since then the government has been funding extreme pro-car ownership policies. Houstonians rode the bus.
Isn't the whole point of dense urban development so that you can avoid going outside for too long?
Even in the US, Las Vegas showed how to connect independent complexes together without forcing people to go outside.
You might like look into #WinterCities. The whole point is to get city dwellers to be #outside; in the winter.