- cross-posted to:
- greentext@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- greentext@lemmy.ml
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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
Looks a bit jammed on the photo though. I’m sure one more lane will fix that. /s
Just. One. More. Lane. Brooooo
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.
And despite the extra lanes, it’s still gridlocked. Maybe they need just one more lane…
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?
This will soon become top 100 most popular photos. Its synonymous with car dependency and post WWII American urban planning
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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…
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.
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?
Government offloaded transportation onto individuals and parking onto business, now everyone is worse off.
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. 😞
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!
4chan can be surprisingly perceptive sometimes.
