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
Just keep adding lanes until you've turned the entire city into a highway--can't have traffic if there's nothing to commute to. It's simple dialectics really--expand the highway until it negates itself.
oh I definitely trust OP knows what they're talking about. I just wanted to make a highway accelerationism joke.
Kudos on your username, too, btw! It's clever and you should feel good.
nah there's not many left hand exits in houston in general, which is a good job cuz there'd be even more wrecks than the 300 a day they have already.
🎶Them boys in Houston, Texas, build their highways right
They're not too skinny, but maybe too long🎶
i used to work a shitty job at a dive bar every saturday several years ago and they played that song. every. fucking. week. Took me ages before I didn't want to jab pencils in my ears when it came on. lol
in practice its more like... dont even imagine, just remember earlier today when someone in the far left lane decided to fly across 7 lanes of traffic 3/4 of a mile from their exit.
Can't remember the episode but Well There's Your Problem did a great breakdown on how endlessly widening freeways and bridges just delays a real solution because as capacity increases traffic fills in the gaps like instantly
EDIT: It's the fifth episode
Yeah, we've known this since the 1920's when New York kept adding new bridges into the city. But somehow no one on a city council in the entire country knows this One Cool Fact from 100 years ago when it's time to decide on an infrastructure plan.
Induced demand go brrr.
Also it doesn't help how wide you make the roads if the choke points are intersections and on/off ramps. Traffic will just pile up anyway until those can handle a larger volume, and there is no way to make an intersection handle 26 fucking lanes of traffic or eliminate every possible choke point on a road system. In short, car bad train good
Exactly. Everyone should spend the time to really understand induced demand.
Not only does it apply to roads and traffic, there are other implications too. This goes into theory territory, but for every technocratic solution to climate change there is, like electric cars, there is induced demand to use them more. There was a study on mice once that put a few breeding pairs in a massive enclosure with abundant food and they observed the population. It maxed out at about 1000. At that point, it was crowded and a lot of the mice stopped reproducing. Could it be the same thing with technology that makes our lives easier? Or technology that reduces carbon emissions? People and companies will just do more until the emissions (the stresses on our society) are the same again.
It's not really induced demand, it's pent up demand, the problem is that only trains are physically compact enough to alleviate the pent up demand. Each passenger takes up, what, 1000-2000 square feet? The wider road helped more people get places, but it's clearly run up against the upper limits of a highway.
More people need to play Road Building Simulator (Cities Skylines)
Induced demand isn't real. That's like saying we shouldn't expand an emergency room that is consistently full because it would just still be busy after the expansion. If your goal is to get people where they want to go, it makes sense to expand transportation infrastructure.
There are a lot of good arguments against car-centric infrastructure, but the induced demand one never made any sense.
your analogy to expanding an emergency room is terrible, for reasons that should be obvious
hope the mods are happy for making me insult you
No, it is perfectly analogous. The question is if your objective is to get people where they are going (that is, treat more people) or to reduce traffic times (that is, reduce wait times in the er). You could demolish every freeway and it would solve the traffic problem in the same way that putting a strict quota on admittance to the ER would.
So obvious that you can't even mention them? The question is if your objective is to get people where they are going (that is, treat more people) or to reduce traffic times (that is, reduce wait times in the er). You could demolish every freeway and it would solve the traffic problem in the same way that putting a strict quota on admittance to the ER would.
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.
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."
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
houston drivers are probably the worst drivers in the entire world so I'm sure that doesn't help
that would because the root cause isn't the freeway, it's all the traffic design off the freeway that backs up onto it.
but good luck getting a city planner or public transit authority to acknowledge that
rip up the HOV lane and turn it into a rail for a train already you cowards :angery:
They did the opposite of that to build the HOV lane lol. They also did it to create the Westpark Tollway too.
woof.
I just remember seeing some trains in the middle of roads in la and thinking that's probably the best we could get.
either way it's gonna take them 100 bajillion years to extend the light rail outside the loop.
I just want a good train system, visiting germany broke me. 😭
