TIL The Katy Freeway in Houston, TX was expanded in 2008 to 26 lanes (one of the widest in the world) and 5 years later had longer peak travel times than before the expansion

Just a little more trickle down bro, I promise once we privatize the next utility it will all work.

snorts asphalt

The intended purpose isn’t to fix traffic. It’s supposed to allow more volume of cars through per day. Entirely different things.

I’m not suggesting that’s a good thing.

Eventually there's gotta be diminishing returns too given that every lane makes it a little harder to drive on. Can't imagine the idiots swerving over 13 lanes of traffic because they didn't realize they had to get off until the last minute

T R A I N S

https://youtu.be/0dKrUE_O0VE

Can't let a bunch of train virgins take away my Ford F-750.

Those train nerds are super cool. James may talked to a couple of them that had memorized every station’s unique arrival jingle and message and the one guy could whistle them. They said they weren’t popular with the ladies but i don’t understand how with cool skills/knowledge like that

I’m all for trains and against cars, but is Japan really the best example? Don’t they have people stuffing passengers into cars with special passenger packing sticks?

And housing is still affordable because they control zoning at the federal level and build houses to meet demand.

to me it's like the military industrial complex - they don't care what evidence supports, they want their fucking money and they'll keep building roads until it's a giant parking lot from sea to fucking sea. we could have an ecosystem, but fuck you, because cars.

I already see the angry republicans on Fox news raging on how their precious tax dollars are being wasted just to benefit poor people

It also costs the taxpayer more because of maintenance

trains and busses that actually work and get people where they need to go with minimal hassle and a reasonable cost

Trains predate cars and busses have always been with us since the car. People have voted -- with their cars.

The Interstate Highway System started in the 1950s. Population has more than doubled since then. Of course, we have more traffic, we have more people!

If you also consider the weather and politics, I would still much rather live in Paris.

But what options do you have in Houston, compared to Paris?

You can’t just not widen roads but instead

— less sprawl - places to live closer to each other and to destinations

-- useful transit or short distance commute options

-- remove bottlenecks

These are a lot harder to do, and I don’t imagine Houston even considered it

I stayed in Paris for a few months once, never once used a car. Never once had a problem getting somewhere, either.

This makes sense. With the increased cost of city living, and an ever increasing population; doesnt this support the need for more lanes?

99% of urban planners stop just one lane short of permanently solving traffic for good.

Well the population decrease would certainly decrease traffic so I think you're on to something.

Sounds like Moscow

Otherwise called, the Mad Max method.

Yes. This is the basic driving style on the Katy. No rules, no lanes. Just wide open spaces, bumper to bumper at a minimum of 75 mph. On a good day.

After Hurricane Katrina I lived in Houston for about six months. I still have nightmares about your highways. I don’t know how y’all do it.

Lived out there for a few years and i can tell you no one is communicating through the lights on their cars.

Perhaps drivers who can't understand the "complexity" of highways shouldn't be on the road.

Where are the bridges? How do you walk from one side to the other?

Oh yeah, right, of course. But how do you even drive from one side to the other?

Hey this looks just like my failed Cities Skylines build!

27 is an odd number, do I assume the center lane switches direction for rush hour. That's sure to fix it.

Reducing traffic by raising prices is a pretty piss-poor way to do so if the only alternative is walking or decrepit bus lines. There need to be other measures taken.

The US is all about more lanes for cars and less public transportation. Congestion be damned. Because "SoCiaLiSm."

You can reduce traffic with more lanes, but not just willy nilly. They need to be carefully planned and managed while limiting lane changes.

But a lot of the time, they won't. The issue usually comes from people wanting to change lanes while others are merging on. In high traffic areas, lane changes will slow the traffic down while increasing the risk of an accident. Making alternatives such as different routes, other modes of transportation, or reducing the need for traveling usually work better in cities.

By that logic just make driving illegal, problem solved!

Something is left out of the equation because more lanes != more traffic, yet there is ALWAYS someone around saying otherwise. Go drive on the highways in Montana if you don't believe me.

Consider adding gift links to this community: https://sopuli.xyz/post/2743454

Especially since most exits have very easy U Turn options. Just get off at the next one and then turn around

Exactly this! It’s especially terrifying to drive here Friday and Saturday nights and during heavy rains. You’re also expected to go 15-20 over the speed limit and yeah, idiots will absolutely speed-cross from the furthest lane to their exit without giving a f*ck about anyone else.

This is more than likely the real reason more lanes doesnt help.

I say the words "shitty skylines" way too often driving around the real world. My city lives and dies on suicide lanes >_>

And to allow for more development to house those people etc.

In an "urban hell" kind of way.

Express lanes essentially reduce traffic for the wealthy and make it worse for the poor.

If you are 'pro car' then you should definitely be resistant to adding lanes (and pro using that money for transit alternatives).

Getting cars off the road is the only thing that's going to make driving less miserable in the kinds of places were adding lanes is suggested.

Can confirm. My area added a third lane to the highway over the last 10 years or so. So much better than before. One grandma can't bring the entire highway to a snails pace anymore.

As with many things there's not a clear cut answer. I think you could make a strong case for the Katy Freeway expansion being a failure where those resources would have been better spent on other forms of transportation. I'd agree that adding lanes is not always a bad idea, but blindly adding lanes like the US has done for decades has not been a good thing overall, imo. We're dependent on cars for everything, they're heating up the planet and they're a very inefficient solution to the ultimate problem of getting people from point A to B. I'm not so much anti-car as anti-inefficient travel that has saddled us with tons of negative aspects to city life.

Yes you can. Other cities have far higher densities and their public transit keeps people moving just fine.

I'm sorry you've been brainwashed in to thinking individual cars are the pinnacle of efficient transport...

Sure you can, you just have to make sure that the people have multiple forms of viable transport beyond getting in their cars. Trains, bike lanes and trails, walkability improvements, etc. Of course there’s an upper limit to density, but that density can be more thoughtfully designed and built. Mixed-use development is essential.

The solution is stop upping population density in population dense areas.

This is completely backwards. Increasing population density means people can afford to live closer to work & resources. Low density means they have to drive 50 miles a day to get anywhere, and thus need more lanes.

That's what makes sense intuitively, but adding lanes doesn't solve congestion. Investing in more mass transit and improving walkability through more thoughtful zoning would be a better place to start.

Driving is the most expensive and dangerous way to get around, ironically championed by the party of "fiscal responsibility".

Train tracks would have been cheaper to build (and maintain), take up far less space and be far better for the local economy. Hell, just investing the money on buses would have been far more efficient.

You’re wrong though.

This is an article also about Houston’s freeways and traffic; induced demand is the reason congestion is not lessened in these situations:

The infuriating bit is that the evidence is pretty clear: these are deeply misguided policies. While it seems intuitive that the solution to three lanes of gridlock is to spread the same number of cars over four lanes, it fails because of a phenomenon called induced demand.

Please stop adding more lanes to busy highways—it doesn’t help

This is explored extensively in the book ‘Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)’ by Tom Vanderbilt. I highly recommend it; it’s excellent and very informative about this widely misunderstood topic.

Getting more cars off the road using things like better public transportation is the answer here, something that is sadly lacking in Houston…yet they keep widening roads. It never helps, and it never will.

I think adding lanes helps up to a point but after that just creates more problems. Here are a couple problems with adding lanes:

1. It assumes that everyone drives efficiently. For example, that everyone knows exactly where they're going and if they're in the left lane to go fast that they start migrating over to the right lane well in advance of their exit. But this is not true and instead causes people to panic swerve across 10 lanes while slowing down in order to get to their exit. Anyone who has been driving for a few years has seen this happen. Multiply this problem by the number of idiots on the road, and again by the number of exits. And having more lanes makes this a bigger problem because it has a higher capacity for more of these idiots to exist, and more "obstacle" lanes between them and their goal (not to mention more victims in those right lanes).

2. If you don't expand the lanes across all the exits from this super highway, traffic will still back up because the traffic cannot smoothly flow out to the rest of the city where people are trying to go. This backs up traffic on the highway itself. It's like having a clogged artery. And expanding those roads is not always an option if it's already in a heavily developed part of a city. If there's no room due to buildings, you simply cannot add lanes.

In addition to the zoning and walkability suggestion someone else made, I would propose that more alternate routes (even if not as direct a route) can help offload traffic especially at peak times, and is a much more feasible solution in the short term for our country that is built around private vehicle transportation. This is also an effective solution if you add tolls to one of those routes and increase the speed limit. It has the side benefit of funding other city projects, and acts as a sort of tax for people who want to go fast. The lazy implementation of this that I've seen in some places (including in Texas) is to add toll express lanes on the same highway. I see this as mostly a money grab but does not help much, if at all, with congestion. It's more like a streaming service raising their subscription costs just because they can.