For those wondering it’s like 3 feeder lanes, 6 regular freeway lanes, and 1 hov/toll lane on each side. When it was completed back in (est 2005) it was already outdated and fully congested duri my rush hour.
Outdated makes it sound like it was a good idea at any point during its inception.
Highways were outdated the moment they were invented. We already had better options. Cars were a mistake.
And don't forget the 3 lanes of frontage road in each direction which are common on most highways in Texas! They also get contested during rush hour of course, but have traffic signals between the entrances/exits so aren't part of the actual highway even though they run parallel to it.
16 lanes of freedom! Yeehaw! 'Murica!
Adding roads to the list of things that texas makes way bigger than they ought to be
Wtf Texas? Even the busiest highways I’ve driven on are 3 or 4 lanes each way, near and around London.
What sorts of urban/commuter populations are we dealing with here?
Induced demand. Apparently Texas hasn't heard of that yet, but that's the reason 3 or even fewer lanes work fine everywhere else where there's also good alternative transportation.
Keep adding lanes, traffic quietens down, people see the roads are quiet and decide to drive, road gets busy, rinse and repeat.
Also just poor zoning with people needing to commute for miles to get to anything.
Yes.
Highways are a ridiculously terrible way to move lots of people.
A single 12-car Thameslink train can transport about as many people as a fully saturated highway lane can in 1 hour.
If a set of tracks has only 3 trains go down it each way per hour, it has the equivalent capacity of a three lane highway. If a pair of tracks in downtown London has a train going over it every 5 minutes, that single pair of tracks can transport as many people as a 24 lane highway.
Edit: every 5 minutes each way. Every 5 min is 12 trains/hour, every 5 minutes in both directions is 24 trains/hour.
That’s quite an epiphany. This is chiefly how millions of people go to and from Central London every day.
Nicely put. There’s many trains going in and out of London every hour. Just from our town, in rush hour there’s a train into London every 10-15 mins or so.
Just fucking urban hell. People don't realize they don't have to live that way.
Well, I say don't have to only in that there are different ways to design transportation and this is the worst way, but they don't know it because this hell is all they've known.
They most certainly have to live that way because their transportation and city planners are idiots.
When they were first putting the first part of 161 / gwb tollway in north dallas (well, las colinas) I was one of the first people to drive on it the day it opened. Thought to myself "jfc that's a lot of lanes". That was half the lanes they ended up putting in, and, it's damn near capacity daily already lol.
So glad I moved away from Texas, it's like road construction is the dominant species there and humans just happen to live nearby.
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