One more lane, bro
I swear bro, just one more, please
Worked every time so far, I swear!
Double it and pass the problem to the next generation
Everybody in this photo could fit in like 4 buses
For a small segment of the trip. The problem with public transportation is that all these people are going to different locations and a bus being more efficient for 50% of the travel doesn’t really help you for the other 50%
The problem is not with public transportation, the problem is that the area surrounding this highway was designed so that more cars and more lanes were the only possible solution.
Cars create problems that only cars can solve.
Edit: and to add more context: those 50 different locations are all separated by massive mandatory parking lots which make them miles apart from each other when they could likely all be contained in the same building in front of a single bus stop.
Oh sorry, 20 buses to cover all the sectors these people are going to then.
Unless there’s another bus for the other 50% of the travel. The point of a public transportation system is to be just that - a system. To get from anywhere to anywhere else.
Where I live this will cause what would be a 15 minute car ride into 1.5 hours of hopping on different busses and then walking 1/2 mile to your destination on either end. I don’t have a problem with effective public transportation but outside of major population centers like Manhattan, I haven’t seen one that really works all that well here in the US.
Well, that’s the thing you could have it if you invested all the money that currently goes into highways. The amount of money is always limited (everybody hates taxes for a reason), so building large quantities of both is impossible.
Roads are always going to cost more in the end, but they’re easier to build incrementally. Boiling the frog situation.
Even if policy of your local government changes (which is at least a little up to you) you will still have to suffer the current situation and keep driving for a while before a better system is built. But that’s no reason to throw good money after the bad.
So what?
Living in a city with actually good public transit, it is used to achieve exactly that. To get any one passenger from any one point within the metropolitan area, to any other. To work for everyone, even though every single person is starting from a different point, and going to a different destination.
It doesn’t matter where you’re going or from where. There is a public transit stop nearby at both ends.
The fuck do you mean “a small segment of the trip”? I share this city with a stupid number of other humans, only a small number of which I go to work with every day, yet a significant portion of of the entire city population travels to work, entertainment and shopping, using the exact same transit network.
Your trip may overlap with a varying number of entirely different individuals along each segment of the route, and at each end it might just be you walking a few dozen meters… But come on! The fact that it adds up is beyond obvious!
Your argument is only valid for mass transit, that isn’t actually mass transit.
And as density goes up (read less roads and carparks), the overlaps INCREASE and the whole thing gets more efficient.
There is a train station in Tokyo, that serves the same number of people every day, as there are citizens in my entire country.
Can you even imagine what a highway interchange that could serve 5 million people within 24 hours would look like? No, because it’s a physical impossibility.
The only reason the number can get so high, is because transit systems consolidate travellers even when they aren’t going to the same places.
That’s why frequency is one of the most important factors for public transportation.
THAT’S MY AMERICA 🇺🇸 🦅🔥🔥🔥 ONE MORE LANE DOESN’T FIX IT MY A$$ LOOK AT THIS AND TELL ME IT ISN’T WORKING 🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🔥🔥🔥🦅🦅
Counting the service road is kind of cheating. In built up areas in Texas they’re de facto city streets that happen to exactly mirror the freeway. They have intersections, lights, businesses, etc.
Yep. Texas does that because of a state law that says any landowner with property adjacent to a highway has a right to access that highway.
If I count the roads off the sides, on ramps and off ramps, etc, the highest I can get is 18 lanes. Is this the photo of where it’s 26 wide? I can’t seem to find it.
I can get to 22 in the foreground of the pic with some lanes underneath others with the flyover ramps.
Lol, the title even says only 20 with 12 main and 8 feeder lanes.
And traffic STILL sucks in Houston
This is why traffic sucks. Super highways don’t reduce traffic, they create it.
I’m not disagreeing necessarily (I know nothing about city planning), but wouldn’t a smaller highway just force people onto the side streets and city roads? How does a superhighway make traffic worse?
Most people will think traffic behave like water that you need to send through a network of pipes. It is not, traffic is made of humans and humans reactions will make traffic behave wildly differently than waters in pipes.
- Some people and businesses will move next to the new highway for its supposed ease of access, creating traffic
- some people might change their habits and go shopping to this place instead of that place, or getting a job far away from their home (or a home far away from home)
The exact reasons for the increase in traffic is complex and my example could be totally off. But we don’t need to know the exact reason for the increase in traffic, we know it happens because it has been observed on every road enlargement projects in the last decades.
There are some good videos by notjustbikes on this topic, iirc the main problem is that big streets make people want to drive more which makes everything more crowded
Ah, bikes. Driving is a necessity. I’m not going to commute 30 miles to work on a bike, and I’m not going to haul a pallet of drywall on a bicycle.
Off-road bikes are great, and they’re good machines for exercise. Bicycles should not be allowed on public roads. They’re a hazard.
The bicycles aren’t the hazard, the cars are.
In europe a few countries have city centers where you aren’t allowed to drive your car and some countries have seperate paths where bikes can ride.
Bikes are way better for the environment and trips around 5-15 km can easily be done with a bike without having to pay for gas or insurance etc.
Bikes also help you do excercise without having to waste time because you are doing the excercise while travelling somewhere.
Bikes and public transport are so much more efficient than cars
Tbf there’s assholes who behave recklessly in traffic on every mode of transportation. I’ve been run into by a bike twice in the past few years. But guess what, if we built proper infrastructure for them, they wouldn’t choose the sidewalk in order to protect themselves from cars. Also, the choice between whether you’d rather a bike or a car runs into you is pretty obvious.
the choice between whether you’d rather a bike or a car runs into you is pretty obvious.
No doubt. I pick car every time. Listening to the douchebag cyclist whining after the accident would be too much for me to bear.
If you had access to good public transport you could take a train for those 30 miles and relax, work or read instead of wasting time being focused on traffic. But if there’s too much supply of roads built for the purpose of everyone driving their car everywhere, there won’t be much demand to build something like that.
Biking and walking can then be for mid and short distances, respectively. But both will be dangerous unless there’s proper infrastructure for that. And again, not happening until they stop the over supply of roads.
And for hauling the dry wall, yes, use a car. Imagine how much nicer traffic and parking will be if most commuters who aren’t transporting big loads aren’t in private vehicles.
The problem is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist, and introducing it is cost-prohibitive for large parts of the US. I would love to be able to take a train from my small town to the nearest metro area 30 miles away and then take a tube to a block away from my destination–but that’s just not going to happen in my lifetime, because the city can’t afford to install a subway, and the auto lobby won the war against commuter rail before I was born.
Could it be better? Sure. Might it become better? Maybe, but probably not in my lifetime.
In the meantime, people are de facto dependent on cars. Destroying infrastructure necessary to support the reality of how people must, through no fault of their own, travel punishes the traveling public without addressing the actual problem.
If we’re going to transition to better transit infrastructure, we first have to build the better infrastructure–and pay for it by
eliminatingunseating political opposition. Only then can we dismantle these kinds of monstrosities without disenfranchising the people who depend on them.Yes absolutely! It’s a systemic issue and there’s no reason to blame the individuals who take cars because they’re literally not provided an alternative. It’s so fucked that you literally can’t do anything in much of the US if you can’t afford a car.
And of course it’s absolutely critical to start providing an alternative before dismantling existing infrastructure, fucking people over even further. It doesn’t have to start with a big rail line, even local buses and bike lanes and safe side walks within the small town will help a lot in reducing short car trips, such as to the shops or to school.
But for anything at all to happen, there will have to be enough problem in favour of traffic reform, and they’ll have to be loud. The car lobby is a huge opponent. But in local politics, like on a town level, they don’t have as much of a say. Maybe, just maybe, small change is possible
I know none of this will happen over night, but fingers crossed you’ll get to experience a better future in your lifetime.
It’s more the political opposition than the cost, rail used to be the de-facto long distance transport and it worked very well.
Rail still hauls a lot of freight, but in many areas people no longer enjoy the benefit of rail transport.
Your particular commute might not be feasible without a car, but many are. Adding bike infrastructures allows those who can commute by bike to do so, while freeing space on the road for those who can’t…
Let’s flip the equation here.
If driving wasn’t an option, you wouldn’t live 30 miles away from your job. Driving was an option, so you did and so did your neighbors. More neighbors move in, more cars, more traffic, more lanes, more neighbors, more cars, etc.
Alternatively, you move closer to work in a town with half decent sidewalks and walk or bike in. Bikes and people take up much less space which allows things to be closer together.
And yes, cars are necessary for hauling large objects over long distances, but how many vehicles in this photo do you think are carrying more than just people?
Building larger highways always encourages more traffic. For a better explanation, check out this video by Adam Something. His youtube channel has a lot of interesting videos about transportation infrastructure.
If it helps you can imagine the side streets and city roads as unused additional lanes.
You can turn the entire freeway system into a grid and it will still suck - Los Angeles
Los Angeles also has a higher population than 50% of the countries on the planet.
An anecdote fully lacking in relevance on account of there being larger cities than Los Angeles which do not at all have the same problems efficiently moving their populations where they need to go.
It’s all about the transportation infrastructure.
I just came back from tokyo after doing the JR pass travel to view the entire country. I fucking HATE CAR TRAVEL. taking the Narita express to the airport was so painless. Got back to IAH bush Int’ctl and it was a complete clusterfuck trying to get an Uber. Not to mention it was quite literally twice the price the express line train was. And that was one of the more expensive limited expresses too.
We getting out of the traffic jam with this one 🇺🇸🦅🔥🇺🇸
All of that, for a traffic jam. Imagine turning 4 lanes in a train track carrying 500 person every 5 min in both directions and one lane in a bike lane. It’s still 20 lanes for car, but you suddenly have decent public transport which would be safer and faster than that gigantic traffic jam
Fwiw, feeder lanes probably shouldn’t be counted in Texas because they’re basically glorified city streets. Businesses can have entrances and exits on frontage roads, so there’s not really anything special about them except that they have a slightly higher speed limit (50~60mph vs 40~45mph) and they have immediate access to the highway.
The feeder there is also almost certainly 45. So not really any faster than normal stroads.
I was going to ask if they count the frontage roads as part of the highway in TX. Because that’s not right.
I mean no shade, but I was honestly expecting as I scrolled down that this would be posted in c/ABoringDystopia
Try crossing that road froggy.
Extraterrestrial observer: And, do they know each of those vehicles are directly killing all life as they know it?
‘Murican: (Proudly) Yes!
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