First time I visited the US it was Houston, Texas. My host was perplexed because I laughed out loud while we were driving. Experiencing highways and those massive gas stations felt like someone had made a state that mocked America by taking prejudices we have about the American traffic and making them 200% larger in real life. My mind was blown.
Crucially, Texans are highly aware of "everything is bigger in Texas" trope and take pride in it. My favorite example is that everyone knows that Texas State Capitol is taller than United States Capitol (92.24m vs 88m)... But nobody will ever tell you that Texas State Capitol is only 6th tallest state capitol.
Buc-ee's is the Trader Joe's of Texas, find all kinds of weird things that are actually good, or at least novel. Also, cleanest public restrooms you'll probably ever experience. Decent breakfast tacos too
From european drivers perspective, what surprised me the most (aside from peculiar traffic rules - some actually good) was concrete highways instead of black asphalt. I was especially careful during rain, it "looked" slippery; Later I was told it does actually have some asphalt in it.
As someone who has lived pretty much all of my life in the desert I look with considerable caution towards high speed asphalt.
The road concrete is roughened, you have good traction even in less than ideal weather. And concrete lasts an awful lot longer under heavy traffic. Smooth concrete would be like you are worried about, but the high speed roads aren't smooth concrete.
Asphalt is a hydrocarbon product and can sweat. But worse is the oil from cars. Drip, drip, drip--since it's on a hydrocarbon base it loosely bonds with it and simply accumulates. When the rain does come along the roads will be very slippery until there has been enough rain and cars to wash them clean. Until then, hydroplane accidents galore. Be especially careful around gas stations.
6-year Texan who grew up in New England here. Yes, those roads do get more slippery than regular ones. Unfortunately, many Texans drive worse in light rain than most New Englanders drive in the snow... and don't even get me started on how Texans drive in the snow, lol.
It’s a shame this country is so obsessed with cars. There’s so much land yet we devote it to destroying lush ecosystems (that help reduce effects of Mother Nature) and replacing it with massive highway projects that end up costing everyone more in taxes/indefinite maintenance costs.
Then the effect is 10X’d when useless suburbs are built. More car dependence. More time spent on roads. Traffic slows to a halt as suburbs fill up. Geniuses at the state transportation department believe we should just widen the roads. But continue to ignore decades of “induced demand” evidence.
The US Highway building industry is in many ways a form of a state run social system. First of all the road construction and maintenance uses a huge amount of tax dollars and redistributes it to lower class construction site and road maintenance workers and some engineering bureaus. Secondly it gives everybody equal (highway) transportation access by continuously expanding capacity on existing roads and building new highways to growing towns on the countryside. Poorer people need to buy or rent housing far away on the countryside and highways therefore democratizes their access to the urban centers with lots of jobs.
In the specific case of Texas there's also a toll road system, however this only covers a fraction of the highways in the state and the tolls themselves don't account for all the incurred costs.
I'm not sure what you think the alternative is. The US is huge compared to any similarly developed country. Is the answer huge cities right next to thousands of square miles of untouched nature? That hasn't happened in any society on the planet.
It sounds like you just want everyone to live in a city and take public transit everywhere but cities are awful for your mental health[0] and most people in the US do not want to live in a major urban area. You can't have a huge geography and rural or suburban life without private vehicles.
If people want to live in rural areas, that's fine by me. They don't particularly contribute to the problems with car-centric infrastructure in the US. The main complaints are how most cities in the US are designed in ways that are hostile to anybody who doesn't have a car, such as:
- making it difficult to get around safely by bike
- zoning restrictions that force development to be clumped in certain areas
- underdeveloped public transport with infrequent stops and limited range
- parking space requirements that limit development
- food deserts where people have to drive long distances to get groceries
There are many places in the world that have solved these problems. I don't get why it's so inconceivable to solve them in the US.
Love how you cite a study performed in the _UK_ in _1994_ as irrefutable evidence that cities are "awful" for your mental health. Yet more recent studies in the US indicate exactly the opposite.
The US being huge has no bearing on the requirement that I have to own a car to get to work every day, or to go to the grocery store, or to take kids to school. I live in a more suburban area than I used to and having to pilot a huge deadly vehicle everywhere is vastly more stressful than just walking to handle my groceries.
Note that the study you link to there is from 1994 and only controlled for the following criteria: sex, age, social class, marital status, unemployment, chronic illness and region of residence. Those aren't the things that put folks on edge about cities in 1994 or in the preceding years. 30 years on from 1994 and now in a different world, many of us are wondering why we're locked out of some of the benefits of a bit more density.
No ones saying we abandon all beyond our city walls to nature, instead they'll be farmland or productive rural activities like we already use them for. But we don't need every city of 500k people to mean that there's a 15 mile radius circle of strip malls in every direction.
I love how you claim that there doesn’t exist, while at the same time mentioning a (very old) study that would imply an alternative exists so that such study can take place.
If you go to anywhere in Europe you will find plenty of places that prove the opposite.
We could start by making people who choose rural or suburban life pay the costs of such a life rather than foisting them on everyone else. Roads should either be toll roads or entirely paid for by gas taxes and vehicle registration costs. Gas taxes should have to include the cost of removing the pollutants from the environment.
Houston is currently planning its fifth loop. They already have four, and they need a fifth, which mean converting many more square miles of marshland into pavement. Meanwhile there are hundreds of square miles of abandoned real estate in the middle of the city. It's cheaper to just buy and build new than the tear down the old building first. And they can't figure out why each hurricane season is more destructive than the last .... huh. I grew up in Houston and I hated it. I refuse to even visit family there now.
Houston only has three loops: I-610 and Beltway 8, with State Highway 99 under construction. The latter 2 are both toll roads. (I guess the highways around downtown form a loop, but as a former resident of the city, I never heard anyone call that a loop - I-610 was always the inner loop.) If you’re going to shit on Houston, at least get the facts right.
Also, what’s wrong with beltways? The main flaw in the interstate highway system, from an urbanist perspective, has always been the highways cutting through the historic urban core, which tend to attract traffic just passing through. Houston has those too, but not really any worse than most American cities. Beltways are really great at diverting such traffic away from the urban core. Unfortunately, as cities expand, beltways tend to become part of the urban core, so farther out beltways need to be built to retain their advantages.
I recently moved near the 4th loop and - it’s hard for me to imagine anyone crying for the land beyond it. There’s just nothing there. It’s like playing SimCity on an infinite flat map. I’d much rather they put another 2-5 million people here over the next few decades than try to sprawl out from Seattle or Boston or some of the other places I’ve lived.
But I'll start with the simple version of the critique. Individual commuters make their decision about whether to make a trip based in part on the time that trip will take (a function of road congestion). Thus, adding road capacity will temporarily lower the cost of a trip, allowing more people to make it until congestion reaches the pre-expansion level. Housing does not have this problem because consumers make decisions about where to live much more infrequently.
As you can tell, "induced demand" is a bad if rather catchy name. To be fair to urban planners, the throughput of an expanded road does increase. However, the experience of using it stays the same or gets worse, and the cost (both $ and space) is disproportionate. Is the pro-transit argument, which I subscribe to.
Of course, the real world includes large real estate firms which are making frequent decisions on housing stock. So I agree that the build-more-housing-and-everything-will-improve crowd is wrong. But I don't think YIMBY/transit and anti-transit are the only choices. The former is a common archetype these days.
I think the US kind of gets a pass for that. You guys have so much land to cover. No one's going to be surprised that US including Alaska and Nevada and all those deserts is technically 600x more sparsely populated than Singapore or 17x more than Germany, but I bet many do if they learn it has 10x more land per population than UAE, 4.5x over Ukraine, 4x over global average, and so on.
US forces had hard time moving about in Iraq due to its lower land use and actual US is 7.7x sparse-er. There's no way American car culture could just stop being car dependent. Abundant fast cars is potentially the only way it can work.
There’s a critical mass of population density needed to support a vast diversity of specialty businesses. NYC, for example, has the second- or third-best examples of basically every country’s cuisine.
Robert Caro's book The Power Broker details how Robert Moses hacked govt post WWII, so that urban areas unwittingly financed sprawl. So much so that when NYC nearly went bankrupt, the victim was blamed.
So thoroughly was the con job that just now some groups have started to question it. Orgs like Sightline, Stronger Towns, micromobility, renewed interest in mass transit, and so forth.
> Q: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
>
> Frontage roads need grade separation, adding a layer.
> Texas has lots of frontage roads.
OK, I buy that Texas has more grade-separated interchanges on average... but I'm not seeing how that turns into "Texas has more higher interchanges" which is what it feels like that question is asking. Frontage roads don't generally exist where 3+ highways intersect, so that shouldn't be relevant for high ones, it just raises many 1-high to 2-high.
Or do they, in Texas? Or is it just that Texas has one famous one and people extrapolate that to mean the whole state is absolutely smothered in interchanges, until it looks like a scene from The Fifth Element?
From a quick skim of Wikipedia, it looks like the main benefit to the stack style over a conventional 2-level cloverleaf is capacity (the left-turn leaves are generally at most one lane) and speed (left turns are direct rather than 270deg, so you don't have to slow down as much when taking them).
Still, to this layman it seems like a colossal engineering cost to build all those bridges and ramps for relatively modest gain.
It's an interchange that's tucked into the normal street grid of Chicago, taking up about 4 city blocks total, and requiring just 3 levels of bridges to get all the traffic to their destinations. The trick is that it relies on a windmill interchange rather than a stack (so the left turns aren't crossing each other in the center), and the Congress Parkway-into-Eisenhower Expressway goes from elevated highway to sunken highway over the course of the interchange. There's even a subway line in the middle of the interchange!
I think the better explanation is that the size of highway interchanges in Texas aren't meaningfully constrained, so there's little pressure to find ways to squeeze in more compact interchanges. Furthermore, I think Texas is motivated to make its interchanges high-speed--the highways look designed for a 65/70 mph speed limit, even near the city core, whereas the Kennedy Expressway near the Circle interchange drops down to 45 mph partially to deal with the confusion of the road (there are exits 51B-J on I-90 in this stretch, yes, that many exits in a single mile of road).
The article kind of addresses this. Texas really does have more frontage roads than other US states. In the specific example cited in the article's headline photo, both the US 75 and I-635 have frontage roads that cross each other. They stay at ground level whereas the highways elevate. Part of the reason this specific interchange has so many levels, though, which is not addressed for some reason, is that both highways have high-occupancy express lanes that are separated from other traffic and have separate interchanges with the other highway as well as separate on-ramps and off-ramps to the frontage roads. This one is particularly bad because it's where the express lane for the US 75 starts and stops. Normally, the express lanes don't have their own dedicated exits and you have to first exit to the normal highway, but US 75 has an express lane north of I-635 but not south, so there are separate entrances and exits for it here.
Thankfully, I've worked from home for years now, but back in the day, this used to feature heavily in my daily commute. My wife and I worked at the same place, so typically used the US 75 express lane where it existed, and it was a bitch. To go south, you have to get off the highway onto the frontage road and then back onto the highway.
The 75 lane your talking about is actually an HOV lane, not an express one. And I appreciate that it exits off the highway for exactly one reason and it's that it makes it so incredibly easy for the cops to setup their checkpoints to catch single people using the HOV lane without screwing over the rest of the traffic on the highway. Love to see it.
My partner (who moved to Houston around middle school age) and her mom both call it the feeder, but I always assumed it was a midwest thing since mom's side of the family is all from Michigan.
Frontage roads don't generally exist where 3+ highways intersect… Or do they, in Texas?
I've lived in several states where frontage roads are common (under various names), and Texas was the place where they were most plentiful.
Older interchanges tended to run the frontage roads below grade to make them cheaper. But more recent ones tend to keep everything above grade due to flooding.
Or is it just that Texas has one famous one and people extrapolate that to mean the whole state is absolutely smothered in interchanges
Texas has a crazy number of highway interchanges. This is a partial selection of highway interchanges with frontage roads just in Houston. There are probably a hundred more across the state:
Maybe it's just me but I expected these links to open in the recently established apple maps web page. However, on an Android phone, Google Maps opens.
The video shows multiple 5-level interchanges in Texas where two highways intersect along with their frontage roads, turning what would otherwise be a 4-stack into a 5-stack or 6-stack interchange.
I don't think there are many 3+ highway interchanges. These interchanges are designed to go in places where highways intersect. And you wouldn't design highways so that more than 2 highways intersect in a single point. If you need to connect 3 highways in a certain location, you can just pull back one of the connections and make 2 separate interchanges instead of one massive one.
Apparently no other country makes local stores directly accessible from the highway so 5 layer interchanges just don't exist anywhere else. This is why Texas interchanges are the highest, because they're the only interchanges in the world with 5 layers.
I heard somewhere that the reason is to provide trucks the ability to shed speed to make these sharp turns, and then give them back their speed when coming back down so they don’t have to brake hard or spend a lot of gas to do it.
Basically lets trucks use gravity to store their energy when making sharp turns and then get it back for nearly free.
My main complaint is that the people who like suburban density went ahead and made zoning codes to basically prevent building anything but sprawl, so now the few remaining places that don't require a car are rare and super expensive.
I'm even a car guy—I own a stick shift BMW—I just don't have much interest in getting into it to do literally any activity or errand other than walking around the neighborhood.
"The people who like suburban density went ahead and made zoning codes to basically prevent building anything but sprawl"
What, exactly, qualifies as "sprawl" to you? Houses with yards? How do you propose we build those to make them "non-sprawly?" Most of your statement is true, though: "People who like suburban density went ahead and made zoning codes to basically prevent building anything but" that density. So?
Those codes exist in SOME areas. They give people a choice of what kind of area they live in. Yes, yes, they were all racist and evil back in the day. Today they serve a valid and non-nefarious purpose: giving people a choice.
"the few remaining places that don't require a car are rare and super expensive." Do you have specifics on that? Are you saying there are no small towns to live in? That condos and apartments in the downtowns and city centers and town centers and boroughs of United States cities are more expensive than houses?
Take L.A. for instance. It has become very popular to piss and moan about "single-family homes" and to pass craven developer handouts in the guise of sham "housing reform." Meanwhile, dead or dying malls sit with boarded-up anchor tenants (there's an abandoned Macy's a few miles from me) and vast empty parking lots growing weeds.
Also, downtown L.A. is not "full." Nor are other high-density areas across the county, if you look at vacancy numbers. And then there are the tracts of disused, formerly commercial or light-industrial parcels all over the city and county. And yet already-residential areas are targeted for destruction.
And I do mean destruction. In a drought- and heat-plagued area, there is no excuse to promote the wipeout of every last tree and the paving-over of every last yard for the construction of 10 units where a single house stood. Yes, recent state legislation allowed just that, WITH NO REVIEW REQUIRED OR POSSIBLE. A developer's dream.
Meanwhile, vast tracts that have already suffered these effects of "density," the aforementioned malls and parkingn lots, sit empty.
And on top of all this, nothing is being done about the corporate buy-ups of entire neighborhoods. This is even worse than the "shortage" itself, because it takes what housing does exist off the market PERMANENTLY. Corporations don't typically die and leave their homes to their kids. But people do, and corporations are scooping up those houses as fast as they can, exacerbating a home-ownership crisis that deprives Americans of their best way to build wealth.
You might be tired of it, but it doesn't come from a place of 'wanting to bash car culture' but rather from a pragmatic look at the real outcomes from the current US transportation philosophy.
I don't know if you've noticed but there are some actual real problems that the US is running into.
Building stuff is cheap relative to having to maintain it over its lifetime and then eventually replacing it. The more you build the more it costs to maintain it all.
That means that from purely an economical perspective there is an optimum where you provide the most transportation for the least amount of money. The US method of building more and more is slowly driving up the cost side of the equation and delivering less and less benefits. That's not hippy-liberal bullshit, but that is just a fact.
Just imagine that instead of adding extra lanes, they would build a good train connection between your cities. You could still drive as much as you want but there would be a lot less people on the road.
I'd just love some zoning changes that would allow light commercial in the middle of some neighborhoods so I don't have to drive miles to get a cup of coffee. Could be as simple as adding more pathways between neighborhoods so I don't have to ride my bike on a busy street and almost get hit by someone on their phone.
Its not that we're obsessed with cars, its that cars are the only option for reasonable, safe transportation right now.
The problem is the planning is the same everywhere. People who like walkable cities don't have a choice but to buy a car. It would be nice to have some areas where residential and non-industrial businesses are more mixed to lessen the amount of driving.
There is also a subset of people who will go out of their way to dunk on Texas. I'm not Texan myself and feel the place has its pluses and its minuses (some of them huge ones on both sides of the ledger). But sometimes I'm like "come on, really, that's a cheap shot."
> We have a big-ass country. We like to move about it. Many of us don't want or need to live on top of each other. That is all.
Japan is about the size of the entire Eastern Seaboard. Japan has safe, fast, comfortable and competitively-priced high-speed rail through highly mountainous, earthquake-prone terrain.
What's the USA's excuse? No one is asking for a 4500 km-long railway from Los Angeles to New York. But a 1500 km-long one from Atlanta to Boston? Nope, can't do.
Forget that, not even a 700 km-long one between Washington DC, New York, and Boston (where many people arguably 'live on top of each other' already).
The US has no political will to up its public transport game, and your comment epitomises it.
Huh? You can take a train from New York to Washington. It’s not high speed rail but it’s not even a day trip. You could go there and back in one day and still get stuff done at the other end. It’d be a bit of a long day but nothing outrageous.
In fact, the Eastern seaboard is one of the few places in the US where rail travel is a valid option much of the time.
> Convenient trips from the Big Apple to the Big Easy. With service from New York City to New Orleans, the Crescent gives travelers a unique window to the beauty and heritage of the American South. You can tour Monticello or enjoy a wine tasting in the charming Virginia college town of Charlottesville. Or enjoy a stroll through the vibrant shopping and dining scene of Underground Atlanta. As you travel further south, you'll reach New Orleans, where you never run out of things to do. From jazz clubs to Cajun restaurants to Mississippi riverboat rides, the city was simply built to entertain.
So you'll have to change trains in NY to get to Boston, but one can definitely go from Atlanta to Boston by train.
In the end though, practically nobody would take a train from Atlanta to Boston. Even if you made it 200mph HSR, a direct flight would still be faster. And until both ends of that journey really make the city more walkable you're probably going to want to rent a car at your destination anyways so being at an airport at the edge of town versus the train station closer to downtown it doesn't make enough impact for most people.
Don't gete wrong I'm generally pro-train for good city pairs, but chances are I'd never take a train from say Dallas to Phoenix or Denver or Chicago. Flying will just practically always be faster. I'd take one to Houston or Austin or San Antonio though.
It’s not even that bad. If you go to Houston, there are plenty of parts which are so walking/transit focused you don’t need a car.
I’d argue the real reason people have cars is because if rent for a nice 1-bed only costs 700-1500 it doesn’t make sense to not also own a car. When people talk about a city that’s not “car-obsessed”, they’re usually referring to some place where even the wealthy can barely afford a car.
As somebody who lived in Dallas and drove on the high five with some frequency, I had actually a lot of questions about the design of it. If somebody who understands this could explain I’d be happy.
For one, a lot of the overpasses had two lanes. But then they merged down to one right before you got on the highway…
What’s the point in having two lanes on the overpass that merge just before you get onto the highway? There was always slow traffic because of this.
If it was me, I would always make it so that you lose equal number of lanes To the outgoing overpasses as you will get in incoming overpasses to prevent inefficient lane changes. So if you have six lanes, you get 4 branch off, 2 for each direction on the other highway and keep 2. Then you get the four back from the intersection. No lane change.
But the way they have it, there’s so much merging it , which is harder to drive, and I’m not sure it’s more efficient.
There's a cities skylines YouTuber who agrees with you. He calls it lane math. "2 come off, 2 go on,..." I'm sure there's some reason the engineers do it irl, but it is funny that going with your approach does fix things in game.
I have no answer, but this got me thinking: is the overpass's road a similar physical width as the highway?
I've been on some bridges that have two lanes with a very narrow shoulder that then then merge into a single lane (with wider shoulders) at the end of the bridge, with the asphalt width not changing too much. I've always assumed that was so traffic could continue flowing on the bridge should one lane become blocked for some reason. Off the bridge a car can pull off the road if there's a problem to let traffic continue passing. You can't really do that so much on a bridge.
But I'm not a traffic/road engineer so that's just speculation on my part.
My guess is the two lanes merging into one are only getting one lane. That is, only one lane is added after the merge, and both overpass lanes are merging into the one new lane.
But if there are indeed being two lanes added due to the merge, agree that doesn’t make much sense.
If the former, also agree that they should’ve added two lanes instead of one. But that decision could’ve come down to physical limitations, cost, or something else.
I completely agree. The ramp from 75 south to 635 west squeezed two lanes into one before it merged with 635, and it was always an enormous bottleneck when there was any traffic at all. But the last time I drove on that ramp was 5-6 years ago, maybe it's better now.
I don't have experience with Texas but there are plenty of interchanges as you describe in California. Sometimes you even see momentarily more lanes just before and after an at-grade intersection.
While more permanent lanes seems more desirable, for lack of space or money or whatever, this compromise at least increases the capacity of the ramp to absorb the queue before it starts to back up into through traffic.
Of course, in practice the capacity is often not enough.
Depends on setup, but if the alternative is to merge before splitting off, that can slow down the main highway. Get the two lanes separated first, then merge.
Around here, two lanes split, then they split into two north and two south, and then they merge again before rejoining the cross highway.
I haven't seen the road in question, but I wonder if it has to do with expected travel speed. Two lanes at low speed converting to one at higher speed. Of course following distance impacts this, but isn't actually 1:1 with speed
I always figured it was so that the bridge acts as a storage buffer for backed up traffic so you don't get the ramp to 635 eastbound so backed up that there is stopped traffic on 75 southbound.
I mean you still end up with that at rush hour but I think that's what they are trying to do. There is no number or lanes they could add that would prevent it from being a parking lot twice a day.
Frontage roads force a design decision. Texas likes to run the frontage roads through the interchange ramps. California generally displaces the freeway about 200m from major surface roads to avoid running the surface street through the ramps. CA-92 at US-101 does that.
When too many layers are needed, CALTRANS often goes for a tunnel underneath. See CA-92 at I-280, and SF's 19th Avenue at I-280.
At US-101 and I-280 in San Francisco, a frontage road does go through the ramps.
The interchange was spread out horizontally to avoid piling up all the levels.
I lived in Dallas for a couple years, and while driving the Hive Five interchange (mentioned in the article) always seemed a little crazy, what really blew my mind was that a specific interchange could warrant its own Wikipedia page. For some reason that more than anything else really underscored its scale.
Readit News
Everything's bigger in Texas, including egos.
Crucially, Texans are highly aware of "everything is bigger in Texas" trope and take pride in it. My favorite example is that everyone knows that Texas State Capitol is taller than United States Capitol (92.24m vs 88m)... But nobody will ever tell you that Texas State Capitol is only 6th tallest state capitol.
Source: lived in Austin for 2 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_State_Capitol#
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Buc-ee's is the Trader Joe's of Texas, find all kinds of weird things that are actually good, or at least novel. Also, cleanest public restrooms you'll probably ever experience. Decent breakfast tacos too
"I'm from Texas, what country are you from?"
The road concrete is roughened, you have good traction even in less than ideal weather. And concrete lasts an awful lot longer under heavy traffic. Smooth concrete would be like you are worried about, but the high speed roads aren't smooth concrete.
Asphalt is a hydrocarbon product and can sweat. But worse is the oil from cars. Drip, drip, drip--since it's on a hydrocarbon base it loosely bonds with it and simply accumulates. When the rain does come along the roads will be very slippery until there has been enough rain and cars to wash them clean. Until then, hydroplane accidents galore. Be especially careful around gas stations.
Also asphalt is more slippery than concrete. It will spill out oil.
Only poor cities will do asphalt, and they are in constant reconstruction.
I presume you are referring to [Buccee’s](https://buc-ees.com/about/world-record-holder/)
Dead Comment
Then the effect is 10X’d when useless suburbs are built. More car dependence. More time spent on roads. Traffic slows to a halt as suburbs fill up. Geniuses at the state transportation department believe we should just widen the roads. But continue to ignore decades of “induced demand” evidence.
In the specific case of Texas there's also a toll road system, however this only covers a fraction of the highways in the state and the tolls themselves don't account for all the incurred costs.
It sounds like you just want everyone to live in a city and take public transit everywhere but cities are awful for your mental health[0] and most people in the US do not want to live in a major urban area. You can't have a huge geography and rural or suburban life without private vehicles.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7892359/
- making it difficult to get around safely by bike
- zoning restrictions that force development to be clumped in certain areas
- underdeveloped public transport with infrequent stops and limited range
- parking space requirements that limit development
- food deserts where people have to drive long distances to get groceries
There are many places in the world that have solved these problems. I don't get why it's so inconceivable to solve them in the US.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34315817/ (2021)
Note that the study you link to there is from 1994 and only controlled for the following criteria: sex, age, social class, marital status, unemployment, chronic illness and region of residence. Those aren't the things that put folks on edge about cities in 1994 or in the preceding years. 30 years on from 1994 and now in a different world, many of us are wondering why we're locked out of some of the benefits of a bit more density.
No ones saying we abandon all beyond our city walls to nature, instead they'll be farmland or productive rural activities like we already use them for. But we don't need every city of 500k people to mean that there's a 15 mile radius circle of strip malls in every direction.
If you go to anywhere in Europe you will find plenty of places that prove the opposite.
Cities in the us are basically highway with warehouse around it.
It’s hard to navigate without a car, and public transportation are a afterthought.
We could start by making people who choose rural or suburban life pay the costs of such a life rather than foisting them on everyone else. Roads should either be toll roads or entirely paid for by gas taxes and vehicle registration costs. Gas taxes should have to include the cost of removing the pollutants from the environment.
Also, what’s wrong with beltways? The main flaw in the interstate highway system, from an urbanist perspective, has always been the highways cutting through the historic urban core, which tend to attract traffic just passing through. Houston has those too, but not really any worse than most American cities. Beltways are really great at diverting such traffic away from the urban core. Unfortunately, as cities expand, beltways tend to become part of the urban core, so farther out beltways need to be built to retain their advantages.
But I'll start with the simple version of the critique. Individual commuters make their decision about whether to make a trip based in part on the time that trip will take (a function of road congestion). Thus, adding road capacity will temporarily lower the cost of a trip, allowing more people to make it until congestion reaches the pre-expansion level. Housing does not have this problem because consumers make decisions about where to live much more infrequently.
As you can tell, "induced demand" is a bad if rather catchy name. To be fair to urban planners, the throughput of an expanded road does increase. However, the experience of using it stays the same or gets worse, and the cost (both $ and space) is disproportionate. Is the pro-transit argument, which I subscribe to.
Of course, the real world includes large real estate firms which are making frequent decisions on housing stock. So I agree that the build-more-housing-and-everything-will-improve crowd is wrong. But I don't think YIMBY/transit and anti-transit are the only choices. The former is a common archetype these days.
US forces had hard time moving about in Iraq due to its lower land use and actual US is 7.7x sparse-er. There's no way American car culture could just stop being car dependent. Abundant fast cars is potentially the only way it can work.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Whats the point of having all that room if you’re going to trap yourself in a small apartment tower?
So thoroughly was the con job that just now some groups have started to question it. Orgs like Sightline, Stronger Towns, micromobility, renewed interest in mass transit, and so forth.
Dead Comment
Or do they, in Texas? Or is it just that Texas has one famous one and people extrapolate that to mean the whole state is absolutely smothered in interchanges, until it looks like a scene from The Fifth Element?
Typical stack interchange elsewhere has 4 levels: freeway 1, freeway 2, freeway 1 left turns, freeway 2 left turns. Frontage roads add 5th and occasionally 6th levels.
The other thing not mentioned is the proliferation of separate express lanes, which often have dedicated flyover ramps as well.
Still, to this layman it seems like a colossal engineering cost to build all those bridges and ramps for relatively modest gain.
It's an interchange that's tucked into the normal street grid of Chicago, taking up about 4 city blocks total, and requiring just 3 levels of bridges to get all the traffic to their destinations. The trick is that it relies on a windmill interchange rather than a stack (so the left turns aren't crossing each other in the center), and the Congress Parkway-into-Eisenhower Expressway goes from elevated highway to sunken highway over the course of the interchange. There's even a subway line in the middle of the interchange!
I think the better explanation is that the size of highway interchanges in Texas aren't meaningfully constrained, so there's little pressure to find ways to squeeze in more compact interchanges. Furthermore, I think Texas is motivated to make its interchanges high-speed--the highways look designed for a 65/70 mph speed limit, even near the city core, whereas the Kennedy Expressway near the Circle interchange drops down to 45 mph partially to deal with the confusion of the road (there are exits 51B-J on I-90 in this stretch, yes, that many exits in a single mile of road).
Thankfully, I've worked from home for years now, but back in the day, this used to feature heavily in my daily commute. My wife and I worked at the same place, so typically used the US 75 express lane where it existed, and it was a bitch. To go south, you have to get off the highway onto the frontage road and then back onto the highway.
My partner (who moved to Houston around middle school age) and her mom both call it the feeder, but I always assumed it was a midwest thing since mom's side of the family is all from Michigan.
That said, the old Harvard Dialect survey does suggest this is fairly widespread (though definitely more common in the Houston area): http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q_99.html
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
I've lived in several states where frontage roads are common (under various names), and Texas was the place where they were most plentiful.
Older interchanges tended to run the frontage roads below grade to make them cheaper. But more recent ones tend to keep everything above grade due to flooding.
Or is it just that Texas has one famous one and people extrapolate that to mean the whole state is absolutely smothered in interchanges
Texas has a crazy number of highway interchanges. This is a partial selection of highway interchanges with frontage roads just in Houston. There are probably a hundred more across the state:
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.874104,-95.556634
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.726083,-95.459588
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.784165,-95.561947
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.785693,-95.777690
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.771646,-95.154931
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.940698,-95.293735
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=30.128100,-95.229756
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=30.050496,-95.614099
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.799694,-95.451234
Apparently no other country makes local stores directly accessible from the highway so 5 layer interchanges just don't exist anywhere else. This is why Texas interchanges are the highest, because they're the only interchanges in the world with 5 layers.
Basically lets trucks use gravity to store their energy when making sharp turns and then get it back for nearly free.
-it doesn't have any lane merges, you can change from one highway to another without merging, your bridge just becomes a new lane on the next road
-these bridges are very long leading up to the turn, so it displaces a lot of traffic and shifts a lot of the lane changing upstream.
It is Texas, so anything is possible.
Nothing against the article, which covers an interesting topic. But this refrain gets tiresome, the railing against our "car obsession."
We have a big-ass country. We like to move about it. Many of us don't want or need to live on top of each other. That is all.
I'm even a car guy—I own a stick shift BMW—I just don't have much interest in getting into it to do literally any activity or errand other than walking around the neighborhood.
What, exactly, qualifies as "sprawl" to you? Houses with yards? How do you propose we build those to make them "non-sprawly?" Most of your statement is true, though: "People who like suburban density went ahead and made zoning codes to basically prevent building anything but" that density. So?
Those codes exist in SOME areas. They give people a choice of what kind of area they live in. Yes, yes, they were all racist and evil back in the day. Today they serve a valid and non-nefarious purpose: giving people a choice.
"the few remaining places that don't require a car are rare and super expensive." Do you have specifics on that? Are you saying there are no small towns to live in? That condos and apartments in the downtowns and city centers and town centers and boroughs of United States cities are more expensive than houses?
Take L.A. for instance. It has become very popular to piss and moan about "single-family homes" and to pass craven developer handouts in the guise of sham "housing reform." Meanwhile, dead or dying malls sit with boarded-up anchor tenants (there's an abandoned Macy's a few miles from me) and vast empty parking lots growing weeds.
Also, downtown L.A. is not "full." Nor are other high-density areas across the county, if you look at vacancy numbers. And then there are the tracts of disused, formerly commercial or light-industrial parcels all over the city and county. And yet already-residential areas are targeted for destruction.
And I do mean destruction. In a drought- and heat-plagued area, there is no excuse to promote the wipeout of every last tree and the paving-over of every last yard for the construction of 10 units where a single house stood. Yes, recent state legislation allowed just that, WITH NO REVIEW REQUIRED OR POSSIBLE. A developer's dream.
Meanwhile, vast tracts that have already suffered these effects of "density," the aforementioned malls and parkingn lots, sit empty.
And on top of all this, nothing is being done about the corporate buy-ups of entire neighborhoods. This is even worse than the "shortage" itself, because it takes what housing does exist off the market PERMANENTLY. Corporations don't typically die and leave their homes to their kids. But people do, and corporations are scooping up those houses as fast as they can, exacerbating a home-ownership crisis that deprives Americans of their best way to build wealth.
I don't know if you've noticed but there are some actual real problems that the US is running into.
Building stuff is cheap relative to having to maintain it over its lifetime and then eventually replacing it. The more you build the more it costs to maintain it all.
That means that from purely an economical perspective there is an optimum where you provide the most transportation for the least amount of money. The US method of building more and more is slowly driving up the cost side of the equation and delivering less and less benefits. That's not hippy-liberal bullshit, but that is just a fact.
Just imagine that instead of adding extra lanes, they would build a good train connection between your cities. You could still drive as much as you want but there would be a lot less people on the road.
Its not that we're obsessed with cars, its that cars are the only option for reasonable, safe transportation right now.
This describes reality in Houston, and I do not get the impression that you’d like Houston at all.
Japan is about the size of the entire Eastern Seaboard. Japan has safe, fast, comfortable and competitively-priced high-speed rail through highly mountainous, earthquake-prone terrain.
What's the USA's excuse? No one is asking for a 4500 km-long railway from Los Angeles to New York. But a 1500 km-long one from Atlanta to Boston? Nope, can't do.
Forget that, not even a 700 km-long one between Washington DC, New York, and Boston (where many people arguably 'live on top of each other' already).
The US has no political will to up its public transport game, and your comment epitomises it.
In fact, the Eastern seaboard is one of the few places in the US where rail travel is a valid option much of the time.
> not even a 700 km-long one between Washington DC, New York, and Boston (where many people arguably 'live on top of each other' already).
https://www.amtrak.com/acela-train
> Acela offers downtown to downtown service between Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and other intermediate cities.
> But a 1500 km-long one from Atlanta to Boston? Nope, can't do.
https://www.amtrak.com/crescent-train
> Convenient trips from the Big Apple to the Big Easy. With service from New York City to New Orleans, the Crescent gives travelers a unique window to the beauty and heritage of the American South. You can tour Monticello or enjoy a wine tasting in the charming Virginia college town of Charlottesville. Or enjoy a stroll through the vibrant shopping and dining scene of Underground Atlanta. As you travel further south, you'll reach New Orleans, where you never run out of things to do. From jazz clubs to Cajun restaurants to Mississippi riverboat rides, the city was simply built to entertain.
So you'll have to change trains in NY to get to Boston, but one can definitely go from Atlanta to Boston by train.
In the end though, practically nobody would take a train from Atlanta to Boston. Even if you made it 200mph HSR, a direct flight would still be faster. And until both ends of that journey really make the city more walkable you're probably going to want to rent a car at your destination anyways so being at an airport at the edge of town versus the train station closer to downtown it doesn't make enough impact for most people.
Don't gete wrong I'm generally pro-train for good city pairs, but chances are I'd never take a train from say Dallas to Phoenix or Denver or Chicago. Flying will just practically always be faster. I'd take one to Houston or Austin or San Antonio though.
I’d argue the real reason people have cars is because if rent for a nice 1-bed only costs 700-1500 it doesn’t make sense to not also own a car. When people talk about a city that’s not “car-obsessed”, they’re usually referring to some place where even the wealthy can barely afford a car.
For one, a lot of the overpasses had two lanes. But then they merged down to one right before you got on the highway…
What’s the point in having two lanes on the overpass that merge just before you get onto the highway? There was always slow traffic because of this.
If it was me, I would always make it so that you lose equal number of lanes To the outgoing overpasses as you will get in incoming overpasses to prevent inefficient lane changes. So if you have six lanes, you get 4 branch off, 2 for each direction on the other highway and keep 2. Then you get the four back from the intersection. No lane change.
But the way they have it, there’s so much merging it , which is harder to drive, and I’m not sure it’s more efficient.
Any thoughts?
I've been on some bridges that have two lanes with a very narrow shoulder that then then merge into a single lane (with wider shoulders) at the end of the bridge, with the asphalt width not changing too much. I've always assumed that was so traffic could continue flowing on the bridge should one lane become blocked for some reason. Off the bridge a car can pull off the road if there's a problem to let traffic continue passing. You can't really do that so much on a bridge.
But I'm not a traffic/road engineer so that's just speculation on my part.
But if there are indeed being two lanes added due to the merge, agree that doesn’t make much sense.
If the former, also agree that they should’ve added two lanes instead of one. But that decision could’ve come down to physical limitations, cost, or something else.
While more permanent lanes seems more desirable, for lack of space or money or whatever, this compromise at least increases the capacity of the ramp to absorb the queue before it starts to back up into through traffic.
Of course, in practice the capacity is often not enough.
Around here, two lanes split, then they split into two north and two south, and then they merge again before rejoining the cross highway.
I mean you still end up with that at rush hour but I think that's what they are trying to do. There is no number or lanes they could add that would prevent it from being a parking lot twice a day.
When too many layers are needed, CALTRANS often goes for a tunnel underneath. See CA-92 at I-280, and SF's 19th Avenue at I-280.
At US-101 and I-280 in San Francisco, a frontage road does go through the ramps. The interchange was spread out horizontally to avoid piling up all the levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Five_Interchange
I think literally every interchange in Germany has got its own article: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Autobahnkreuz_in_D...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Interchange
2: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/38.791557/-77.175887