One more lane, bro
I swear bro, just one more, please
Worked every time so far, I swear!
WE’RE GONNA FIX TRAFFIC, FOR REAL THIS TIME
Just one more and it’ll all be fixed, trust me bro
There are 2-4 HOV/toll lanes in the middle depending on where you are in the city. I only see 2 in this photo, and they aren’t called out in OP’s title.
Everybody in this photo could fit in like 4 buses
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
Or just a decent bus system. You could replace 50 cars on that highway with a single bus.
It’s always first and last leg in Texas that kills this stuff.
The only affordable housing is far enough outside the city that you basically have to own a car because there’s not enough density to have bus stops.
And going to a park park and ride following by waiting on the bus adds another 30-40 minutes to the commute and gets your car broken into 3 times a year, so nobody uses them.
The real solution is to mandate allowing remote work for positions where it is a viable option.
I commute 4 hours a day for a job where I log into a computer and do all my work online. If people like me were allowed to work remote we’d have more time with our families, traffic would be reduced, and housing closer the city would get cheaper for those who DO need to work in-person.
One train! A single train track solves all of this. No need for two. Just one. In the picture you don’t see more than 500 or so people and that fits in no more than 5 modern train cars, with toilets, refreshments and other amenities. And it moves faster.
Anything but a fucking train…
Coincidentally they form train-like structure, without all the benefits.
And quintuple the emissions
Yup. Trains are stupidly efficient.
Soooo like for profit health insurance? Murica
I hate cars and highways so much.
I wish we had good mass transit like Europe.
China’s mass transit is better. Probably we should just hire the Chinese to construct a national bullet train network in ten years like they did in China. But wait, we can’t do that because that threatens the profits of the bourgeoisie, who are the true rulers of amerikkka. Oh well, enjoy your eight hour commute to make your bosses richer!
Japan pretty much has it figured out. Bunch of trains, slow or fast, fancy or frugal. Whatever fits you there’s an option. You can get a Pikachu train with a shop and children’s playground if you want to.
Tofu dregs. You should look that up.
Which corporate CIA source should I use to excuse the nazis who run the USA?
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?
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.
You can turn the entire freeway system into a grid and it will still suck - Los Angeles
Hear me out: stack it vertically. It’ll be great, I promise
Yeah, we attempted a surprise vertical stacking on the highway one time. 0/10 would not try again
Got to practice my first aid skills, though, and I even picked up a few stories for my first aid classes.
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.
Just be aware that the JR pass is meant to be a form of soft power expression, with the goal being to make it easy for tourists to get places to spend money and then make them want to share stories about how great the rail system is in Japan when they leave.
They don’t allow such good deals for their own residents, only tourists, since JR pass requires you to be a non-resident. For everyone else, it is far more expensive to travel moderate distances by rail than it even is to fly in most circumstances in Japan.
And was we can all observe, it has solved traffic for Houston due to accommodating all the cars possible by upgrading with enough lanes perpetually.
It is expected to be complete once the lanes exceed N+1 or the population drops below N.
shit could have been 1 long passenger and 1/10th of a freight train
Am I the only one not seeing 26 landed here?
I think this is a picture before the most recent expansion. (They saw this picture and said “hmm not wide enough, too congested.”)
In the normal parts:
- 2 express/toll/HOV/carpool lanes
- 5 regular highway lanes
- 3 feeder lanes (in Texas, the highways tend to have “feeders” or “service roads” or “frontage roads” that run parallel to highways so that people can exit and enter, turn onto intersecting roads, and access local businesses, and Houston calls them “feeders”).
That’s 10 in each direction. But at any given time there might be merge lanes between the express and the regular lanes, between the highway and the feeder, or between the feeder and a turn lane. So at the widest point, around the major freeway intersection with another huge toll highway, they bump it up to one more of each type of lane, for 13 lanes in each direction.
There’s also a fair debate about whether the feeder lanes should count. After all, they have traffic lights and intersections to deal with. But on the other hand, driving on them is necessary to get on and off the highway lanes, so in a sense it’s part of the same highway.
Yeah that’s a better description.
Also of note this is part of the evacuation system for hurricanes. All lanes are outbown in an evacuation.
But it also kinda hides some of the crappyness. it was supposed to be on top of a giant underground flood diversion system which is a huge problem for Houston as you may have heard. Also the center was supposed to be for a commuter rail but we couldn’t get the bond passed so that might happen someday…
Unless they count the shoulders as their own lanes, I don’t see 26 either.
From the picture, I count 16 lanes. Is the pic accurate?
Texas highways are fucking terrible.
And I’m gonna have to deal with them in a couple weeks.
