Fuck cars
See if we had Elons tunnels you could get rid of the roads and combine the parking lots and even make them proprietary based on the vehicle you own!
Americans gutted their cities during white flight and had walkable cities replaced by parking for commuters and strip malls in the suburbs
Houston was built during and after white flight. It was never walkable.
This is especially dumb cause i know you can put a parking lot on top of a building or even UNDER it, and if Houston cant support construction like that then just dont even build shit there.
Believe it or not this is a vast improvement over this which is what Houston used to look like
Listen, at least there are multilevel parking garages now! That’s increased density right?….. right?????????
Or don't start over, tear it down and let nature reclaim it :anprim-pat:
There are three above grade rail lines for the entire metro area, which is a little over 7 million people. Busses are regularly up to 2 hours late. There are over 200 accidents in the city per day. Everything is pointlessly far apart and connected with crisscrossing highways which are always under construction. There's highway going from south Houston to League City that's just a spahetthi jumble of overlapping concrete and steel I'm surprised more cars just don't fall off during rain or ice.
Also, you know the worst part about this place? It is so difficult finding anyone who cares about changing it. Car culture is so endemic to Houston that all the transportation problems are placed on other drivers and/or poor people. Every time I bring up how shit the busses and rails are, the inevitable response is they're only used by poor people, homeless people live in them, they smell bad, they're slow, etc.
All the roadway problems are entirely blamed on all other people being shitty drivers except the person in question. Every time I bring up that the city could be organized better or less focus could be put on cars, I'm looked at like I'm an alien.
It's also really bad if you live in the surrounding cities and commute to Houston for work. There are literally no public transportation options in Pearland except for the school busses. The options in Baytown, Webster, Spring, etc are so threadbare they mighr as well not exist and probably only exist due to federal or state mandates.
I'm losing my mind.
Its still somewhat possible to get around with walking, but good luck. I've been hit as a pedestrian twice, plus you might have to illegally cross a highway or walk through someone's front yard to get where you're going.
People give Los Angeles and Las Vegas a lot of shit for being uninhabitable wastelands, but Houston is 1000x worse. The entire city is built on a paved over swamp that tries to reassert itself everytime there's a heavy rain (i.e. multiple times a year). Too little water is a much easier technical challenge to solve than too much water. Not to mention that the sprawl makes LA look like Tokyo.
Also, you know the worst part about this place? It is so difficult finding anyone who cares about changing it.
We exist, but there is damned near zero community solidarity. Everyone is atomized and impotently fuming.
Can’t get houstonians to care about shit. Same thing with the flooding. Every time someone proposes doing anything about it it dies out
. There’s a Japanese city that floods really bad and they built this awesome drainage system that Houston talked about learning from and that was like half a decade ago now probably?
This city is just gonna go under water at some point with all the problems we’ve had the last 20 years and more still perfectly In tact lol
The Houston mentality is that if things are bad you suffer though it. And if they're really bad, you buy something to fix it. And if they're really, really bad you move.
No community in this town. Everyone's just passing through.
This is what I hit into head first every time I've tried unionizing or organizing in this place. There's no solidarity at all. If you hate your job, get a new one. Hate that one? Get another. Everyone I know changes jobs once a year and if they still can't figure it out they move.
Something I discovered entirely too late in life was to change jobs every three years rather than ask for a raise.
Nobody knows what anything is actually worth and they'll pay a contractor $300/hr to do a job staff was doing for $50, because that gets the staffer off their books.
That’s Texas in general for the most part. Just hunker down and get through it, and definitely don’t go to an organization bigger than you and your immediate neighbors/family to deal with it
Americans straight cannot even fathom the idea of anything being better. You don't like all this car stuff? Guess the problem must be you 🤷♂️ 🤷♂️ 🤷♂️
When I was in my early 20s I loved downtown. I still like some parts but going there is such a hassle and paying 12-20 dollars for parking depending on what’s going on in the city that day is a night mare.
I used to work right off bagby by the aquarium and that was dope bc we’d walk over to frank’s and stuff, but fighting traffic all the time got old incredibly quickly
Like if you plan your trip well, downtown is actually ok. You can park in one of the cheaper lots and just take the rail to and from places. It's nice they have basically made almost all of main storefront and restaurants. But between main and discovery green it's all gray and boring and 3 or 4-lane streets. Like you gotta hurry before someone tries to run the light.
Now be an urban planner and constantly hear "there's no parking downtown!!!" :agony-immense:
Houston is actually more walkable than you'd think. Because of the lack of zoning most neighborhoods have at least a gas station within walking distance
What else could you need? Cars love gas so I assume people like it as well.
Are you one of those people who's gonna walk into a Houston gas station and be like "holy shit they put a bodega in the gas station"
It's a convenience store, they have Doritos.
it's definitely more walkable than most houstonians are willing to admit, but depending on where you are walkable might mean knee-deep grass and no sidewalk
oh yeah, bicycling through nicer areas it's always just cars and the occasional perfunctory dog walker, meanwhile in lower income areas where people actually walk the sidewalk coverage is spotty at best
The lack of sidewalks in some inner cities in the US is fucking wild to me
Houstonian. Can confirm. Traffic here sucks and we need more trains.
No no. Trains don't work because reasons. Also poor people use them. The solution to traffic is to build more roads so there will be room for all the cars. This time it will work.
Both 610 west by the galleria and i10 west by spring branch to Katy have both been the number one congested roads In the us at various times in the last 10 years or more. Shining examples of the build more roads idea lol
Wojackhorseman2’s Fool proof Plan to train-ize Houston:
Put swangaz on the trains
Give the driver a wood grain wheel (will attract drivers to the job)
Purple train?
???
Train time
With all those roads and all that parking I imagine there isn't any traffic to mention and that driving there is a great experience.
Yes, and as a predictable result, other drivers are very pleasant and polite!
You never see people swing across 5 lanes on i10 less than 100 feet from their exit!
Holy shit, imagine having to walk through half a dozen of contiguous blocks of pure parking lots.
There are tunnels if you’re in the middle part and a lot of the bigger commercial buildings have their own parking garages, there’s also the green link bus that you can take for free that circles a few city blocks but yeah for the most part it’s horrendous
I have a useless BS in IT garbage
Is it possible to get into urban planning at thia point in my life
as long as you sound confident probably
oh and don't forget you've gotta have a big bullshit 'solution' like a tunnel or something
