This is the widest freeway in the world in Houston. After the freeway was widened, traffic got even worse

https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/katy/news/article/Bragging-rights-or-embarrassment-Katy-Freeway-at-6261429.php

  • Multihedra [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Reposting a post from a while ago:

    The Social Ideology of the Motocar | André Gorz

    http://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/

    It’s good, folks. A taste:

    No matter how wide and fast a superhighway is, the speed at which vehicles can come off it to enter the city cannot be greater than the average speed on the city streets. As long as the average speed in Paris is 10 to 20 kmh, depending on the time of day, no one will be able to get off the beltways and autoroutes around and into the capital at more than 10 to 20 kmh.

    The same is true for all cities. It is impossible to drive at more than an average of 20 kmh in the tangled network of streets, avenues, and boulevards that characterise the traditional cities. The introduction of faster vehicles inevitably disrupts city traffic, causing bottlenecks-and finally complete paralysis.

    If the car is to prevail, there’s still one solution: get rid of the cities. That is, string them out for hundreds of miles along enormous roads, making them into highway suburbs. That’s what’s been done in the United States.

    • tomullus [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Thank you, thoroughly enjoyed that.

      Love the ending and description of the alienation in how our lives are structured: "Meanwhile, what is to be done to get there? Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life. One place for work, another for “living,” a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community."

      • Multihedra [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        It’s like if you’re standing in line at a checkout. It doesn’t matter how much area is reserved for people standing in line: if the store can’t support more than, say, 1 person checking out per minute, then when enough people want to buy something, you’re going to stand in line for a while; you’re limited by the slowest part of the process.

        Driving in a city is the checkout part; it’s inherently slower than driving on a highway. So you can add as much of a buffer as you want (in the driving example, that’s what the extra lanes do; in the checkout example, it would be adding more space to stand in line), but it can’t possibly address the actual choke point