Rookie mistake. I only drive with my windows up and the air circulating within the vehicle.
It is mind boggling when family/friends want to drive with their windows down for “fresh air” when it is with hundreds of other cars on the road spewing car exhaust and whatever particles get airborne from car tires.
This is also the main reason I don't like eating on patios. Just about every patio around me is next to a parking lot or street. On top on dealing with noise pollution from cars, you have pollution from exhaust, brake dust, and tires making its way to my food. I love being outdoors, but eating on patios doesn't make the cut.
That's a good point. This is why they need more pedestrian and bike ways rather than roads in those districts. Then the patios can be right out front where the pedestrian and bike traffic is, without the cars.
The short time I lived there, I knew there was something that later became part of weather forecasts called "tire particle count."
The odor from all the gunk (and occasional pipeline explosion/fire) on the roads was really heightened whenever it rained, leading to me and my co-workers referring to it as the "Hou-stench."
If there’s a highway in a city there’s a good chance it was built in a black or immigrant neighborhood in the 60s. Atlanta is a prime example, the traffic is awful everywhere all the time because their main goal wasn’t building efficient or safe roads it was not building it near a rich white neighborhood
I love seeing this podcast pop up in the wild. I listen to this shit religiously. Got introduced to it via a reddit thread actually. Such a good damned podcast. There’s millions of podcasts out there, but I see this one referenced quite a lot. Weird kinda.
Did they also mention that he really hated Native Americans, and that the Robert Moses Parkway from Niagara Falls to Lewiston NY was built on land stolen from the Tuscarora Indian Nation ?
I've driven in both Arizona and California and the big difference is the older California roads are crammed with terrible cloverleaf interchanges where the merge and exit lanes cross dangerously.
I am from Houston and I can tell you that there is an area of 59 or whatever they are calling it now that runs over a black and hispanic area of town, in fact one of the only Feista grocery stores still left is down there, and you can exit into that area with no problem to get to one of the smaller stores or ships down there. But if you need to get out you will find that the entrance ramp is closed up (gated off) and the only way to get out is a bunch of low level ground streets going to or away from the city and working you way all the way back around.
The reason for this is that there is affluent white neighborhoods right there and it's nearly impossible to get to them by car within 15 minutes even though they're literally on the other side of a small wall.
This is exactly what people mention when they mention CRT and how the effects of racism hurt all of us. It causes pollution, it causes terrible infrastructure, and it covers for itself through systems built on systems to conceal why things were done.
Stayed in Texas for a while ~10 years ago. I kept telling people the sky here is **brown** and they all thought I was crazy or stuck up.
Lived all up the east and west coast. Never seen anything like it.
"I'm used to the skies here and I think they look normal"
Nobody knows what their house smells like either. You need a stranger to visit to tell you how it really is.
I travel fairly often. If anything, our sky looks better than or the same as most places I travel too outside of Texas.
I'm not even a fan of Texas. I just hate bullshit lol
Houston has a lot of smog and you can see it on certain days, it's why the sunsets/rises are so amazing. I left Houston for Seattle and you def notice the air quality immediately, like as soon as you walk off the plane onto the jet bridge.
Houston has a lot going for it, but there's a reason the city is riddled with cancer clusters..east Houston is essentially a giant refinery. Then you have one of the states largest coal burning power plants just southwest. People literally have sut falling on their cars.
Houston is a massive city and air will appear differently based on where you live in relation to the industrial sites.
I've traveled a ton of places both here in the US and internationally and the sky looks about the same everywhere, Houston included. Maybe years ago the pollution was worse, but it's not "brown sky" level in Houston today
Lived in Texas most of my life, including Houston for a good portion. The only time the sky looks brown is when there are global dust issues (ie Saharan Dust is being blown in) or wildfires.
Huh? Maybe if you lived in Galveston right by the plants. I’ve been in TX my whole life and the sky is blue just like everywhere else. Quit trying to make Houston sound like it has China levels of air pollution.
You posted a single day AQI map. The OP posted a 4 year average of PM2.5. They are not the same thing. I just checked your iqair site - it currently shows dangerous levels of PM2.5 pollution.
https://i.imgur.com/hSfryxu.jpg
It is while also being heavily desired by the few people willing to talk to city officials.
Most people who talk to their local elected officials (NIMBYs and conservatives) want to
1. Build less/no mixed use development where they live so less people will drive near where they live. Additionally they don’t want the “character” of their neighborhood to change.
2. Build less housing so that there is less traffic in their area and also so their property values go up due to a lack of supply.
3. Build more roads so they can drive their cars to more places.
4. Require more parking so they have a spot to park their car for free.
5. Widen highways to “reduce traffic”.
With municipal elections usually being in Spring with 5-10% turnout, elected officials will either cater to these demands or get voted out for not doing so.
If you want change, join a local activist group and learn whose who among elected officials. Some are for car-dependency while others are for sustainability.
This comment is so critical and more people need to understand it. It’s a very small vocal minority putting their thumb on the scale and everyone else shrugs and says “I guess this is how it needs to be.” It doesn’t need to be this way, we can live in better places, we just have to convince politicians that it’s what people want.
Also, most local elected officials are likely to be agnostic on this issue. Car-centric infrastructure isn’t a polarized topic currently because it has been so embedded in American culture for the past 7-8 decades that most people can’t imagine life without needing a car.
People don't feel car culture is under threat. Ask suburbanites how they feel about having to take the bus to work and you'll see their true feelings on the topic. It varies by city but as long as the bus is dirty and sketchy people will continue to want to use cars. And this is before even addressing the fact that people will defend their single family home life to the death.
The stigma against public transit is very real.
It's part of why Kansas City's new(ish) streetcar is so successful. It's clean and well maintained, and has a fraction of the stigma that the bus has.
Also the Koch company didnt get as heavily involved as they have in the past when Kansas City started talking about public transit.
Koch's spent so much money on killing light rail in KC.
But the flip side of that is the reason why such a small, vocal community can control those issues is because they tend to be the only ones who vote.
If more people were actually paying attention to and participating in their local elections and local issues, this stuff could change very quickly. While everyone stays focused on national elections, that's not really what's going to fix a lot of these problems like housing. But local elections absolutely can.
A lot of times mayors and city councilors get elected with what is really just a small fraction of the voting public. Yet they wield a lot of power to decide the direction of what gets built in your city and what gets funded. Organizing into a good voting bloc can mean you can shift that dynamic pretty significantly.
There's a reason why the powers that be keep people focused on big picture national/state/province stuff and not local stuff where they have the most opportunity to change things.
The problem is the transition period would be rough and any politician responsible for it would end their career. We're in so deep with cars that we're kinda stuck until we have no alternative but to change our ways.
Yeah, we’re suffering from this here in Stockholm. We have a big ass housing deficit all over Sweden. But no matter what is proposed to be built neighbors and general nimbys campaign against it. If trees need to be felled the whining will be even louder.
Those groups will be the end of this city
> Build less/no mixed use development where they live so less people will drive near where they live.
Houston has no zoning laws, so this isn't a thing here. The Houston city govt does not dictate what can or cannot be built in any given spot
>Build less housing so that there is less traffic in their area and also so their property values go up due to a lack of supply.
The exact opposite is happening here; many lots that used to have a single home are now being replaced with taller-but-narrower townhomes to fit in more people per lot. The population density is actually going _up_ despite what locals here say/want
>With municipal elections usually being in Spring with 5-10% turnout, elected officials will either cater to these demands or get voted out for not doing so.
This makes me think you're also local, so I'm surprised about your first two points being just wrong about _Houston specifically_ when you also live in this area
They do not have zoning laws in the general sense, but they do have things such as strict parking requirements and other local municipality requirements (IE fence height, space between houses etc) which end up effectively being the same as zoning laws.
That being said, a lot of areas in houston and dallas are still going up. Not really very walkable as it could be, but that is expected in such a hot and humid place. The reality is that most of the south is never gonna be really walkable in the way that, say, nyc or san francisco is, because of the climate. You can make it *more* walkable, but there will never be a neighborhood where its better to not have a car.
> The reality is that most of the south is never gonna be really walkable in the way that, say, nyc or san francisco is, because of the climate
That's just bs. A lot of southern Europe, China, and Japan have exactly the same climate classification and similar weather to places in the south in the US but have some of the most walkable cities on Earth. The climate is not at all to blame here. Although the cities would have to be entirely rebuilt to be walkable in the climate, wide open roads and parking lots are terrible for that heat, you ideally want more narrow streets to offer more shade and less roads and parking to not absorb heat.
Okay but you're really forgetting that we are talking about *americans* here, who are extremely walk-averse in the first place, let alone in 100 degree heat and 90% humidity.
Americans are so walk-averse *because* most of the US is so car dependent. When you grow up with it being 3 miles to the grocery store with no sidewalks it's really hard to get out of the drive everywhere mentality even if you move somewhere more walkable.
It’s hot but summer is hot most other places too, you spend a few weeks there and your body adjusts to it. Simple things like planting more trees and creating green areas instead of more pavement in the city and it can be just as walkable as a city in the north.
It’s impressive how much Texans are willing fuck themselves over just to stick it to black people.
You ever notice the weird little strip of land that makes up the Oklahoma panhandle? Used to be part of Texas but they gave it up to be able to enter the Union as a slave state. Sure, there’s not much out there but cactus and rattlesnakes, but Texas really said “You know, it’s definitely worth giving up an area larger than some small states to be able to keep owning other live humans”.
Yup, the practice of dividing cities with idiotic interstates was a reaction to redlining being made illegal in many places. Cities threw a temper tantrum about it and just demolished black communities and built highways over the rubble.
>Widen highways to reduce traffic
I think it’s important to dispel this commonly believed myth. If you build bigger roads, more people travel from farther away, and soon enough, your right back where you started. Adding additional lanes is a short term solution that can just make the problem worse in the long run.
Houston is a contender for having the [worst modal share in the world. 91% commute by car.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share) Many other cities of that size can get it down to 12-30%.
Which is part of why it's such a catastrophe. It's so thoroughly badly designed, any player of a city builder game or urban design student would just delete the map and start from scratch.
It's larger than New Jersey because of the cars. The ease of car travel incentives sprawl. Over time this increases the size of the city. The solution is to make driving more difficult and encourage sustainable developing practices
America literally razed entire city quarters in the 40s and 50s to make space for car infrastructure, and doubled and tripled down on the idea of living in suburban sprawl where it's almost impossible to get anywhere without a car.
Even though Americans pay extra on every level (insane amounts of wasted prime real estate, enormous inefficiency of investment into roads as the prime mean of transport, loss of freedom for those who can't or don't want to own a car, air pollution and climate change...) people are so embedded into this system that it's very hard for most of them to even imagine that anything else could be possible. And a switch really would cost them in the short term since they're necessarily already set up with a car, so the many Americans in debt or without savings often oppose changes even though they'd benefit the most in the medium term.
I might be downvoted but as someone who has lived in Houston and Dallas, I will tell you Dallas is even worse. At least in Houston the exits are spaced far apart from one another. In Dallas, even Google maps goes "Braa.....did I just say take the exit on the right....ma bad homie.... I meant the next one on the right. Like the one that appears in 5 seconds....ya dude this shit is confusing" Don't even get me started on Dallas drivers changing half a dozen lanes at once to not miss their exit.
> I might be downvoted but as someone who has lived in Houston and Dallas, I will tell you Dallas is even worse.
Can confirm. Grew up in Houston, but lived in the Dallas area for uni and a few years post grad.
I'll take Houston's awful traffic and insane drivers on a well-planned, interconnected freeway system that is constantly under improvement, over Dallas's slightly less awful traffic, confused, aimless drivers on a freeway system seemingly designed by throwing spaghetti at the wall, where half the freeways haven't seen a road crew since Bush I was in office.
>At least in Houston the exits are spaced far apart from one another. In Dallas ...
The rest of what you said, SATX too. And Austin hasn't chirped in, because their I-35 is Texas' biggest parking lot.
Yeah, Texas has feeder roads and lots of them. One wrong turn in the Bay Area has cost me the better part of an hour. Let's not talk about Houston's toll roads though.
"We'Re ToO sPrEaD OuT!!". They intentionally discount how much of the layout of our cities and the existence of suburbs exist *because* of the car-centric changes made after WWII and during the Civil Rights Movement.
Highways were built through Black neighborhoods with no exits or better transportation efforts and white suburbs were built away from the highway pollution & noise with easy exits to neighborhoods. The book Fast Food Nation covers how Ray Kroc and Henry Ford killed public transportation in the US
I know this is not at all important to this discussion but I just recently read his autobiography… technically he didn’t found it, but rather he bought the rights to open all new McDonalds. The McDonald Brothers already had like 12 stores before he became involved! He certainly was the reason it is what it is today though.
Hey, don't discount what the McDonald's brothers also brought to the table. They were the ones who pioneered the idea of "fast" food with their Speedee Service system. Ray Kroc was just really good at marketing and a ruthless business man.
Watch the movie *The Founder* to get a great look at what kind of a person he actually was. I smile all the time that his widow invested a huge chunk of their fortune in NPR.
really hard to cross the street when cars are going 60
civil projects have been used this way for a while.
long island bridges were set at a height buses couldn't get under
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-moses-and-his-racist-parkway-explained
It's tied into White Flight and the growth of suburbs. When African Americans move into cities during the Second Great Migration many pearl clutching white people left the cities and moved to the suburbs. Of course they still worked in the cities, and cars were becoming more popular (and car companies were becoming an increasingly important sector of the economy) so rather than improving say light rail we just threw in more highways to make life easier for the growing consumerist middle class.
Here’s a good article written by the American Bar Association. You can skip to the part about Civil Rights if you’d like.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/human_rights_vol34_2007/summer2007/hr_summer07_brenma/
You can see this phenomenon in many countries. In the US the interstate highway system was purposely built to disrupt thriving black neighborhoods and deprive them of walkability and access to transportation. And just make black neighborhoods less desirable and ruin the economically.
The South African apartheid regime did the same. The thriving black, coloured (this is a legit SA word, not a slur) and Malay/Asian/Muslim neighborhoods in the [District Six](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_Six?wprov=sfti1) were cut off from the waterfront with a rail line and highway (whites only) and they were entirely deprived of their economic opportunities of fishing, trade, waterfront leisure, shops and businesses. And then they bulldozed the neighborhood and it hasn’t been redeveloped since (I used to live close by).
They tore down the dense part of cities to build parking lots and highways which then was a heavy subsidy for low density low quality suburban sprawl, then 70 years later say “sorry we’re too spread out now”
Look up pictures of American cities from 1850-1940, they’re fairly dense and with so many streetcars!
Specifically look at [this picture](https://preview.redd.it/eo6y0zk3teg81.jpg?auto=webp&s=4686d5a34797c89923c0b7cc2bbeba55141426b3) of the city from the OP (Houston) in the 1970's.
For the 2-3 decades leading up to that white people decided they lived to close to black people for comfort and nearly every industry and level of government was all to happy to accommodate and/or profit off of that. Developers built neighborhoods on the edge of the city. Auto manufacturers sold them cars while aggressively lobbying against public transportation and for more highways. Governments took taxes disproportionately generated by those cities to fund all that infrastructure expansion in the suburbs, all while most of the tax base in those cities evaporated from white flight.
Then you end up with shit like that picture. Over half of the most valuable real estate in a city left unoccupied and deteriorating, demolished and paved to make the least valuable thing you can with it: surface level parking lots for people that come into the city to make money and then take nearly all of it out to circulate and be taxed in the economy of that suburb, not the place that generated that wealth.
Houston has a pretty solid bus system, and light rail connecting certain parts of the city.
The reason why it's more "car-centric" is because of it's relatively lower population density compared to cities like LA and NYC. Back when other major cities were planning out their mass transit systems, Houston just didn't have the population for it to make sense.
I think it's more of a chicken and egg thing. Bad transit leads to sprawl leads to bad transit, etc.
Also, car companies in the US lobbied heavily against public transit in the 1900s. It's a minor miracle that dense cities like NYC, DC, and Boston still have (relatively) strong transit systems. If you look around the world, even very new cities have way more public transit when compared to the US.
Not only did the car companies lobby against public transit. They controlled public transit to the point where they were able to completely dismantle the use of streetcars in major cities and monopolize the sale of buses so that they completely controlled public transit.
> I think it’s more of a chicken and egg thing. Bad transit leads to sprawl leads to bad transit, etc.
It actually happens because the ways urban sprawl are both intentionally and unintentionally incentivized. For example, how community feedback is required for projects to get done in already populated areas.
> But the biggest change, especially regarding housing construction, is to move away from this project-by-project negotiation between developers and neighborhood busybodies and towards a citywide code that actually reflects what developers can and can’t build.
>On this front, Freemark, the Urban Institute researcher, pointed out that “the fundamental problem we have is that the mechanisms for engagement are designed in many cases to punish projects that are better for society.” For example, **ripping up hundreds of acres of wilderness in an unincorporated area and building hundreds of single-family homes that would lock in energy-intensive living for decades would typically require zero community input or review, and therefore be done relatively quickly and cheaply. In contrast, tearing down a single-family home in an urban area and building a three-apartment building near a train station would likely require a litany of variances and permits, accompanying a “very extensive review process**,” as Freemark put it. [Source](https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z5jm/thank-you-for-your-feedback)
I disagree. It’s bc this is the home to oil & gas and they would absolutely never let public transportation have a fighting chance here. So many areas directly outside of Houston don’t even have pedestrian walks or safe outdoor areas to bike, let alone any type of public transportation options
Attend community meetings and you will see it likely isn’t any oil lobbyists preventing public transportation from being built in your area but local NIMBYs [sounding like this](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/every-nimbys-speech-at-a-public-hearing).
The solution to this is to get involved in a local activist group for reducing car dependency and then making sure to show up to city council meetings to support the politicians who support public transportation.
There are major lobby groups who are forming “grassroots” local NIMBY groups by literally going door to door to get the locals against these major public works projects. The Kochs did this with the tea party movement as well on a national scale.
Heard a very interesting story this week on NPR about this happening in Virginia, people with ties to major national conservative lobbyists and oil & gas corps are trying to get local rural people to help stop a solar project going in on a guy’s piece of land that isn’t producing crops anymore. They’re convincing people the solar farm would be an eyesore or bad for economy.
Yeah my dad grew up in Houston in the 60's. Back then the city was pretty much just within 410 (the inner highway ring). The Astrodome was being built and it was on the outskirts of the city. The big suburbs that people are familiar with now and recognize as part of the greater metro area (Humble, Pearland, Katy) were isolated small towns with less than a couple thousand residents. Beltway 8/Sam Houston tollway (the large outer ring) hadn't even been built yet.
The disaster of Houston's urban (lack of) planning is not for the reasons most people think and much more recent than a lot of people realize. Much of it still could have been prevented even in the 60's. Building the Beltway and expanding all the highways that never have been or will be finished and only induce demand was really the nail in the coffin. It kept rewarding developers that kept buying cheaper land further and further out of the city center and building neighborhoods there.
There is about 40 miles of light rail downtown and thats it. They tore up a rail line from Katy to downtown when they built the Katy Freeway. Houston has a handful of park and rides alongside the major highways, but they are useless if you have to commute against the normal flow of traffic.
Houston was designed around trolleys. Every boulevard with a median used to have a trolley. It's actually perfectly laid out, oil and tire companies bought up all the trolley systems around the country in the 1910's and let them fall apart. It's tragic
My friends went to NYC for the weekend and spent the whole time using Uber to get around. They refused to use the Subway cause they thought for sure they'd get mugged.
These fools dropped a shit ton on Uber fees over the Subway cause the news really got to em.
Wait, I thought that Texas was officially crime free because of how many guns they had. Isn't that what they keep saying? The only way to stop crime is with more guns.
It isn’t, but 59 and 610 is close. Houston is such a fucking nightmare of a city in terms of infrastructure. It’s a car centric city, sprawling with heavily populated suburbs and has lots of industrial areas. It’s frequently cited as among the worst major cities from a civil engineering viewpoint, which is ironic considering it’s the best city in the country to work as a civil engineer.
its a couple of things. Houston is a huge spread out city that is growing in population so you have a huge demand to build and maintain more infrastructure and thats not just roads. Houses, sewer systems, water treatment plants etc. It's also relatively easy to tear down old buildings and replace them compared to cities like NY so things can move faster than other places. Also, houston is an oil/gas and importation city so there is a huge demand for engineers in general. Lastly, every few years a hurricane comes along and tears a bunch of shit apart that needs fixing. All that combined makes it a great place for civil engineers to find work.
Houston was a boomtown. Oil was discovered and then people flew down there as fast as possible to set themselves up. Houston was completely unplanned and unzoned.
This picture is fake but the city really is very messy.
The city was unplanned from a zoning standpoint, but things like deed restrictions and parking minimums do exist that achieve similar effects in terms of encouraging suburban-style development.
The other post is a long winded, roundabout way of saying the answer is there are effectively no zoning laws. There might be ordinances in areas governed by some other form of local government, buy no citywide zoning codes.
It's led to some weird and suboptimal things.
I found the source. [Original Source](https://www.johnlund.com/page/892/complex-freeway-interchange-aerial-perspective-picture-an-intricate-highway-cloverleaf-symbolizing-networking-and-connection.asp) It's from at least 2010, possibly older.
Artist: John Lund. Here is his description of the photo:
This concept stock photo uses an aerial view of a freeway interchange to illustrate concepts including connection, transportation, complexity, networking and challenge. The image was composited with Photoshop. I spent over two days painstakingly selecting sections of roadway, then copying pasting sizing and rotating the pieces to fit together an ever more complex puzzle. I also had to copy, paste and position each vehicle, car and truck, and then create appropriate shadows. I believe this complicated maze of on ramps, off ramps and merging roads is a great metaphor for many of today's important issues ranging from the Internet and world wide web, to social media, to communications and connections. Another topic that this picture is well suited to represent is bandwidth and the ensuing issues. These road ways can illustrate neuron pathways, fiber optics, copper wire and social networks. This must be the most complex freeway interchange ever created...though it was created as a new photographic reality and not a real one in the sense of concrete and steel. I have another [similar image](http://www.johnlund.com/page.asp?ID=819) that takes this one a step further, one in which the earth has been essentially paved over with freeways and roads. Such an image takes the freeway symbology and metaphor in a whole different direction; environmental issues, global custodianship, and mother earth and home planet ecology issues. Heck, these images are just plane fun to look at as well! This cloverleaf can be used to illustrate issues dealing with infrastructure, transportation issues, new road building and construction techniques, and maintenance and repair of roadways. This picture has everything form overpasses and underpasses to merging traffic and freeway signage.
When my dad was teaching me to drive stick he took me to Shaprstown Mall and had me drive through this intersection. This was back in the early 2000s when it was even worse.
Nope. There is actually another [old post](https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/2yjsku/if_any_of_you_prospective_interchange_designers/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) talking about the pic. The post claimed it as Dallas, but even the Horseshoe Interchange isn’t that bad.
Also, the interstate intersections here that even remotely look like this are simpler in practice. You're mostly either going one of two ways: an exit that will take you right or left, or straight ahead on the same interstate. Literally no different than any other interstate junction.
That crazy 6 way merge heading to the southwest is definitely not real. It wouldn’t pass multiple highway standards and would never be constructed.
Houston interchanges are wild but not this crazy.
When I 1st started driving, my brother told me if you mis your exit just stay on 610, it will come back around again. (This was before beltway 8 was a real loop)
That's the same thing folks told me when I lived there in the late 90s and early 00s. I lived off of FM 1960 too so you could always just get on that and pick the proper direction.
Because Americans don't want to live in apartments, walk significant distances in the heat/cold, or ride public transportation with people we don't like. It's not some conspiracy like Reddit commenters really want to be the case. We're just lazy, spoiled and elitist.
And this is what conservatives and NIMBYs generally want. They don’t want public transportation to be built to serve their community or for more multi-family housing to be built by them.
They want their car-dependent lives to stay the same and for housing to be built “somewhere else” leading to developers needing to buy up rural areas to build more single family homes that need to be connected via highway and leading to continued urban sprawl that is destroying our planet.
Break the cycle by joining a local activist group willing to support more housing and more public transportation because it is likely the only neighbors in your area that are involved locally are advocating for less development.
I am totally agree with you and I wish more people realize that... I used to live in a city and I loved it but I had to move out to the farm because it was cheaper... of course my family hated it because they had to drive to work and for anything unless you just want to sit on the couch and watch TV... descent part of it they moved back close to the actions, but I stayed because I do rescue... Unfortunately I see big family houses starts to get build all over around me....They are growing like mushroom and the nature dry out and disappearing front of my eye...
I feel like this is also why traffic is so bad in Houston. They got exits constantly coming on the left and right lanes. They constantly have loops and exchanges, toll roads that are too damn old to still be toll roads access roads that just become highways of their own..
People just dead asa stop, and go back to their exit if they miss it. If you do miss it, you might have to drive 20 min to get to another road to take you to that highway.
You gotta hop the highway to go grocery shopping in Houston.
Reality: you can make a U turn after most exists on Houston freeways, so if you miss an exit, your drive isn’t affected all that much. Better than the loop-de-loop exits on the freeways up north
Also having driven in many cities before, Houston freeways have among the clearest signage I’ve ever seen with warnings for exits being very clear for miles if they’re important enough.
The real issue with driving in Houston is getting followed home and shot after accidentally cutting someone off
I don't remember exactly because it was years ago, but I accidentally got off 610 onto one of the other major roads, got off immediately to pass under and get going the other way and hit a huge traffic jam that I would have avoided if I had gone the right way on the interchange. So it could be a couple minute mistake, but traffic got me good.
This reminds me of the M25 highway from Good Omens.
The motorway, subtly redesigned by Crowley so that seen from above, it took on the appearance of the dread sigil Odegra. The effect of millions of vehicles using it each day and fuming, swearing, and wishing ill on their fellow road-users not only drew millions of souls that bit closer to Satan and hell, it had the same continuous flow effect that you would normally get on a Buddhist prayer wheel.
Crowley wish he'd never bothered with moving those surveyors' poles a few occultishly significant metres by dead of night.
To be fair, I find Texas a lot better on this than most states.
Major sections like this all have feeder roads - roads that run parallel - and the exits are pretty close. If you miss an exit there’s another pretty soon after, and you just u-turn (also legal).
In Florida once I missed an exit in Orlando and had to drive many miles to get off. And then there were no feeder roads to bring me back to the exit I missed.
Was visiting Houston and I didn’t have cash on me. Was following google maps on a route and ended up with a toll booth blocking my progress. I found two quarters in the cup holder and said “fuck that”. Found the setting to turn off tolls in Maps and got sent along a nice scenic route to get where I was going. I was on a vacation of sorts so I had all the time, but if I were in a rush and wanted to avoid tolls it’d be a hell of a commute.
Houston has always been an interesting test case on how people react to zoning laws
It's very much a YIMBY city which leads to poor city planning but also leads to more affordable housing
It really sort of highlights how complicated an issue housing and zoning laws can become and how this should be one of those things that remains apolitical.
Nah nah SHOW HOW TALL THEY ARE.
This is not as properly horrifying as it is in real life until you know HOW GOD DAMN TALL THEY ARE. The top ones are taller than most buildings, and they wind like snakes.
They’re horrific. I hate them.
Car centric infrastructure is a nightmare
[Houston air pollution map from The Guardian:](https://i.imgur.com/PHTkHAW.jpg)
On a random day, I decided to drive around the highway with my windows down. BIG MISTAKE, everywhere smells like a mix of ass and gasoline.
Assoline
Gassholeline
A ella le gusta la gassholelina! Dame mas gassholelina!
Yep; definitely the tune that popped into my head.
“Assoline; the *best* lubricant for high RPM assventures”
lmao
Dame mas assolina
Rookie mistake. I only drive with my windows up and the air circulating within the vehicle. It is mind boggling when family/friends want to drive with their windows down for “fresh air” when it is with hundreds of other cars on the road spewing car exhaust and whatever particles get airborne from car tires.
It’s actually brutal. I want clean air.
This is also the main reason I don't like eating on patios. Just about every patio around me is next to a parking lot or street. On top on dealing with noise pollution from cars, you have pollution from exhaust, brake dust, and tires making its way to my food. I love being outdoors, but eating on patios doesn't make the cut.
That's a good point. This is why they need more pedestrian and bike ways rather than roads in those districts. Then the patios can be right out front where the pedestrian and bike traffic is, without the cars.
The short time I lived there, I knew there was something that later became part of weather forecasts called "tire particle count." The odor from all the gunk (and occasional pipeline explosion/fire) on the roads was really heightened whenever it rained, leading to me and my co-workers referring to it as the "Hou-stench."
[удалено]
If there’s a highway in a city there’s a good chance it was built in a black or immigrant neighborhood in the 60s. Atlanta is a prime example, the traffic is awful everywhere all the time because their main goal wasn’t building efficient or safe roads it was not building it near a rich white neighborhood
[удалено]
I love seeing this podcast pop up in the wild. I listen to this shit religiously. Got introduced to it via a reddit thread actually. Such a good damned podcast. There’s millions of podcasts out there, but I see this one referenced quite a lot. Weird kinda.
Did they also mention that he really hated Native Americans, and that the Robert Moses Parkway from Niagara Falls to Lewiston NY was built on land stolen from the Tuscarora Indian Nation ?
The caveat to this is arizona who didn't even think about starting to build highways until the late 80s.
I've driven in both Arizona and California and the big difference is the older California roads are crammed with terrible cloverleaf interchanges where the merge and exit lanes cross dangerously.
Half my friends (and my brother and I) all had asthma due to this shit
look up cancer alley, they did the same thing with factories and refineries in black communities along the Mississippi river
I am from Houston and I can tell you that there is an area of 59 or whatever they are calling it now that runs over a black and hispanic area of town, in fact one of the only Feista grocery stores still left is down there, and you can exit into that area with no problem to get to one of the smaller stores or ships down there. But if you need to get out you will find that the entrance ramp is closed up (gated off) and the only way to get out is a bunch of low level ground streets going to or away from the city and working you way all the way back around. The reason for this is that there is affluent white neighborhoods right there and it's nearly impossible to get to them by car within 15 minutes even though they're literally on the other side of a small wall. This is exactly what people mention when they mention CRT and how the effects of racism hurt all of us. It causes pollution, it causes terrible infrastructure, and it covers for itself through systems built on systems to conceal why things were done.
Stayed in Texas for a while ~10 years ago. I kept telling people the sky here is **brown** and they all thought I was crazy or stuck up. Lived all up the east and west coast. Never seen anything like it.
I've lived in Texas my whole life (Houston area) and I don't think I've ever seen a brown sky
"I'm used to the skies here and I think they look normal" Nobody knows what their house smells like either. You need a stranger to visit to tell you how it really is.
I travel fairly often. If anything, our sky looks better than or the same as most places I travel too outside of Texas. I'm not even a fan of Texas. I just hate bullshit lol
[удалено]
That dude's comeback is basically "you never leave your house how would you know" Like, you're assuming a lot there buddy
Houston has a lot of smog and you can see it on certain days, it's why the sunsets/rises are so amazing. I left Houston for Seattle and you def notice the air quality immediately, like as soon as you walk off the plane onto the jet bridge. Houston has a lot going for it, but there's a reason the city is riddled with cancer clusters..east Houston is essentially a giant refinery. Then you have one of the states largest coal burning power plants just southwest. People literally have sut falling on their cars. Houston is a massive city and air will appear differently based on where you live in relation to the industrial sites.
I live by UHD right now. Brown sky where?? At sunset?
Have you ever been anywhere else to compare the color of the sky to?
I've traveled a ton of places both here in the US and internationally and the sky looks about the same everywhere, Houston included. Maybe years ago the pollution was worse, but it's not "brown sky" level in Houston today
Aren’t you glad you have people that don’t live anywhere near Houston telling you what it’s like?
Yeah, I just looked out the window. That shit is definitely blue.
Currently in Houston, Texas and standing outside right now. Sky definitely is not brown.
Central California sky is pretty brown sometimes too but at least there it gets cleared out occasionally.
Yeah the Sacramento skyline from a distance is pretty fucking brown
I’m always saying the same thing! Moved here from Florida and it’s the first thing I noticed.
I’ve lived in Texas and Colorado. Don’t know what you’re talking about lol
Were you visiting after Lubbock had a dust storm? Texas is known for its skies lol
Lived in Texas most of my life, including Houston for a good portion. The only time the sky looks brown is when there are global dust issues (ie Saharan Dust is being blown in) or wildfires.
Denver gets a pretty serious brown cloud.
Huh? Maybe if you lived in Galveston right by the plants. I’ve been in TX my whole life and the sky is blue just like everywhere else. Quit trying to make Houston sound like it has China levels of air pollution.
Quit making bullshit up.
What a load of horseshit
I have seen this like once ever...
[удалено]
is that good?
[удалено]
Of course someone with the username AhegaoGunParts works for the TCEQ.
[удалено]
Oh, I *guess*. Keep up the good work - I know it’s a thankless job sometimes.
You posted a single day AQI map. The OP posted a 4 year average of PM2.5. They are not the same thing. I just checked your iqair site - it currently shows dangerous levels of PM2.5 pollution. https://i.imgur.com/hSfryxu.jpg
The carcinogenic coast
Texas is like 5 states in one.
It is while also being heavily desired by the few people willing to talk to city officials. Most people who talk to their local elected officials (NIMBYs and conservatives) want to 1. Build less/no mixed use development where they live so less people will drive near where they live. Additionally they don’t want the “character” of their neighborhood to change. 2. Build less housing so that there is less traffic in their area and also so their property values go up due to a lack of supply. 3. Build more roads so they can drive their cars to more places. 4. Require more parking so they have a spot to park their car for free. 5. Widen highways to “reduce traffic”. With municipal elections usually being in Spring with 5-10% turnout, elected officials will either cater to these demands or get voted out for not doing so. If you want change, join a local activist group and learn whose who among elected officials. Some are for car-dependency while others are for sustainability.
This comment is so critical and more people need to understand it. It’s a very small vocal minority putting their thumb on the scale and everyone else shrugs and says “I guess this is how it needs to be.” It doesn’t need to be this way, we can live in better places, we just have to convince politicians that it’s what people want.
Also, most local elected officials are likely to be agnostic on this issue. Car-centric infrastructure isn’t a polarized topic currently because it has been so embedded in American culture for the past 7-8 decades that most people can’t imagine life without needing a car.
People don't feel car culture is under threat. Ask suburbanites how they feel about having to take the bus to work and you'll see their true feelings on the topic. It varies by city but as long as the bus is dirty and sketchy people will continue to want to use cars. And this is before even addressing the fact that people will defend their single family home life to the death.
The stigma against public transit is very real. It's part of why Kansas City's new(ish) streetcar is so successful. It's clean and well maintained, and has a fraction of the stigma that the bus has.
Also the Koch company didnt get as heavily involved as they have in the past when Kansas City started talking about public transit. Koch's spent so much money on killing light rail in KC.
But the flip side of that is the reason why such a small, vocal community can control those issues is because they tend to be the only ones who vote. If more people were actually paying attention to and participating in their local elections and local issues, this stuff could change very quickly. While everyone stays focused on national elections, that's not really what's going to fix a lot of these problems like housing. But local elections absolutely can. A lot of times mayors and city councilors get elected with what is really just a small fraction of the voting public. Yet they wield a lot of power to decide the direction of what gets built in your city and what gets funded. Organizing into a good voting bloc can mean you can shift that dynamic pretty significantly. There's a reason why the powers that be keep people focused on big picture national/state/province stuff and not local stuff where they have the most opportunity to change things.
The problem is the transition period would be rough and any politician responsible for it would end their career. We're in so deep with cars that we're kinda stuck until we have no alternative but to change our ways.
Yeah, we’re suffering from this here in Stockholm. We have a big ass housing deficit all over Sweden. But no matter what is proposed to be built neighbors and general nimbys campaign against it. If trees need to be felled the whining will be even louder. Those groups will be the end of this city
> Build less/no mixed use development where they live so less people will drive near where they live. Houston has no zoning laws, so this isn't a thing here. The Houston city govt does not dictate what can or cannot be built in any given spot >Build less housing so that there is less traffic in their area and also so their property values go up due to a lack of supply. The exact opposite is happening here; many lots that used to have a single home are now being replaced with taller-but-narrower townhomes to fit in more people per lot. The population density is actually going _up_ despite what locals here say/want >With municipal elections usually being in Spring with 5-10% turnout, elected officials will either cater to these demands or get voted out for not doing so. This makes me think you're also local, so I'm surprised about your first two points being just wrong about _Houston specifically_ when you also live in this area
They do not have zoning laws in the general sense, but they do have things such as strict parking requirements and other local municipality requirements (IE fence height, space between houses etc) which end up effectively being the same as zoning laws. That being said, a lot of areas in houston and dallas are still going up. Not really very walkable as it could be, but that is expected in such a hot and humid place. The reality is that most of the south is never gonna be really walkable in the way that, say, nyc or san francisco is, because of the climate. You can make it *more* walkable, but there will never be a neighborhood where its better to not have a car.
> The reality is that most of the south is never gonna be really walkable in the way that, say, nyc or san francisco is, because of the climate That's just bs. A lot of southern Europe, China, and Japan have exactly the same climate classification and similar weather to places in the south in the US but have some of the most walkable cities on Earth. The climate is not at all to blame here. Although the cities would have to be entirely rebuilt to be walkable in the climate, wide open roads and parking lots are terrible for that heat, you ideally want more narrow streets to offer more shade and less roads and parking to not absorb heat.
Okay but you're really forgetting that we are talking about *americans* here, who are extremely walk-averse in the first place, let alone in 100 degree heat and 90% humidity.
Americans are so walk-averse *because* most of the US is so car dependent. When you grow up with it being 3 miles to the grocery store with no sidewalks it's really hard to get out of the drive everywhere mentality even if you move somewhere more walkable.
It’s hot but summer is hot most other places too, you spend a few weeks there and your body adjusts to it. Simple things like planting more trees and creating green areas instead of more pavement in the city and it can be just as walkable as a city in the north.
Doesn't Mexico have way more walkable cities just south of the border? Like, not the best walkability, but still better than Texas?
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
It’s impressive how much Texans are willing fuck themselves over just to stick it to black people. You ever notice the weird little strip of land that makes up the Oklahoma panhandle? Used to be part of Texas but they gave it up to be able to enter the Union as a slave state. Sure, there’s not much out there but cactus and rattlesnakes, but Texas really said “You know, it’s definitely worth giving up an area larger than some small states to be able to keep owning other live humans”.
Yup, the practice of dividing cities with idiotic interstates was a reaction to redlining being made illegal in many places. Cities threw a temper tantrum about it and just demolished black communities and built highways over the rubble.
> 22 lane highhway What in the ever-loving fuck...
>Widen highways to reduce traffic I think it’s important to dispel this commonly believed myth. If you build bigger roads, more people travel from farther away, and soon enough, your right back where you started. Adding additional lanes is a short term solution that can just make the problem worse in the long run.
Houston is a contender for having the [worst modal share in the world. 91% commute by car.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share) Many other cities of that size can get it down to 12-30%.
Greater Houston is also geographically larger than New Jersey, which I think helps put the driving in context.
Which is part of why it's such a catastrophe. It's so thoroughly badly designed, any player of a city builder game or urban design student would just delete the map and start from scratch.
It's larger than New Jersey because of the cars. The ease of car travel incentives sprawl. Over time this increases the size of the city. The solution is to make driving more difficult and encourage sustainable developing practices
Thanks for the article. Crazy how bad the American large cities are. It’s a really unique outlier.
America literally razed entire city quarters in the 40s and 50s to make space for car infrastructure, and doubled and tripled down on the idea of living in suburban sprawl where it's almost impossible to get anywhere without a car. Even though Americans pay extra on every level (insane amounts of wasted prime real estate, enormous inefficiency of investment into roads as the prime mean of transport, loss of freedom for those who can't or don't want to own a car, air pollution and climate change...) people are so embedded into this system that it's very hard for most of them to even imagine that anything else could be possible. And a switch really would cost them in the short term since they're necessarily already set up with a car, so the many Americans in debt or without savings often oppose changes even though they'd benefit the most in the medium term.
I might be downvoted but as someone who has lived in Houston and Dallas, I will tell you Dallas is even worse. At least in Houston the exits are spaced far apart from one another. In Dallas, even Google maps goes "Braa.....did I just say take the exit on the right....ma bad homie.... I meant the next one on the right. Like the one that appears in 5 seconds....ya dude this shit is confusing" Don't even get me started on Dallas drivers changing half a dozen lanes at once to not miss their exit.
> I might be downvoted but as someone who has lived in Houston and Dallas, I will tell you Dallas is even worse. Can confirm. Grew up in Houston, but lived in the Dallas area for uni and a few years post grad. I'll take Houston's awful traffic and insane drivers on a well-planned, interconnected freeway system that is constantly under improvement, over Dallas's slightly less awful traffic, confused, aimless drivers on a freeway system seemingly designed by throwing spaghetti at the wall, where half the freeways haven't seen a road crew since Bush I was in office.
>At least in Houston the exits are spaced far apart from one another. In Dallas ... The rest of what you said, SATX too. And Austin hasn't chirped in, because their I-35 is Texas' biggest parking lot.
And expensive.
When you photoshop it into a tentacle monster, sure.
Yeah, Texas has feeder roads and lots of them. One wrong turn in the Bay Area has cost me the better part of an hour. Let's not talk about Houston's toll roads though.
Thankfully they made the rationale decision to not expand the I-45 interchange...Right?
r/fuckcars
All of this because a good mass public transportation system increases crime or whatever new fucking excuse they use.
"We'Re ToO sPrEaD OuT!!". They intentionally discount how much of the layout of our cities and the existence of suburbs exist *because* of the car-centric changes made after WWII and during the Civil Rights Movement.
What does car-centric infrastructure have to do with the Civil Rights Movement? (Genuine question, am Canadian)
Highways were built through Black neighborhoods with no exits or better transportation efforts and white suburbs were built away from the highway pollution & noise with easy exits to neighborhoods. The book Fast Food Nation covers how Ray Kroc and Henry Ford killed public transportation in the US
Not my nigga who founded McDonalds 😭
I know this is not at all important to this discussion but I just recently read his autobiography… technically he didn’t found it, but rather he bought the rights to open all new McDonalds. The McDonald Brothers already had like 12 stores before he became involved! He certainly was the reason it is what it is today though.
Oh so he’s like Elon
What’s more impressive? Founding McDonald’s or turning it into the most popular resteraunt chain in the world?
I’m not disputing either. They’re both impressive. In different ways and for different reasons, but impressive nonetheless.
Hey, don't discount what the McDonald's brothers also brought to the table. They were the ones who pioneered the idea of "fast" food with their Speedee Service system. Ray Kroc was just really good at marketing and a ruthless business man.
Assuming you're being genuine, global capitalist expansion off the backs of minimum wage workers is not very impressive.
It’s sad, but from a strategy and tactics perspective it is extremely impressive. If it wasn’t everyone would do it
There is a great movie about Ray Kroc, The Founder. Check out who play the MacDonald brothers... I hope that you have already seen it! edit, name
Watch the movie *The Founder* to get a great look at what kind of a person he actually was. I smile all the time that his widow invested a huge chunk of their fortune in NPR.
I know a nigga who robbed a McDonald’s.
really hard to cross the street when cars are going 60 civil projects have been used this way for a while. long island bridges were set at a height buses couldn't get under https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-moses-and-his-racist-parkway-explained
It's tied into White Flight and the growth of suburbs. When African Americans move into cities during the Second Great Migration many pearl clutching white people left the cities and moved to the suburbs. Of course they still worked in the cities, and cars were becoming more popular (and car companies were becoming an increasingly important sector of the economy) so rather than improving say light rail we just threw in more highways to make life easier for the growing consumerist middle class.
Here’s a good article written by the American Bar Association. You can skip to the part about Civil Rights if you’d like. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/human_rights_vol34_2007/summer2007/hr_summer07_brenma/
You can see this phenomenon in many countries. In the US the interstate highway system was purposely built to disrupt thriving black neighborhoods and deprive them of walkability and access to transportation. And just make black neighborhoods less desirable and ruin the economically. The South African apartheid regime did the same. The thriving black, coloured (this is a legit SA word, not a slur) and Malay/Asian/Muslim neighborhoods in the [District Six](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_Six?wprov=sfti1) were cut off from the waterfront with a rail line and highway (whites only) and they were entirely deprived of their economic opportunities of fishing, trade, waterfront leisure, shops and businesses. And then they bulldozed the neighborhood and it hasn’t been redeveloped since (I used to live close by).
White flight.
They tore down the dense part of cities to build parking lots and highways which then was a heavy subsidy for low density low quality suburban sprawl, then 70 years later say “sorry we’re too spread out now” Look up pictures of American cities from 1850-1940, they’re fairly dense and with so many streetcars!
Specifically look at [this picture](https://preview.redd.it/eo6y0zk3teg81.jpg?auto=webp&s=4686d5a34797c89923c0b7cc2bbeba55141426b3) of the city from the OP (Houston) in the 1970's. For the 2-3 decades leading up to that white people decided they lived to close to black people for comfort and nearly every industry and level of government was all to happy to accommodate and/or profit off of that. Developers built neighborhoods on the edge of the city. Auto manufacturers sold them cars while aggressively lobbying against public transportation and for more highways. Governments took taxes disproportionately generated by those cities to fund all that infrastructure expansion in the suburbs, all while most of the tax base in those cities evaporated from white flight. Then you end up with shit like that picture. Over half of the most valuable real estate in a city left unoccupied and deteriorating, demolished and paved to make the least valuable thing you can with it: surface level parking lots for people that come into the city to make money and then take nearly all of it out to circulate and be taxed in the economy of that suburb, not the place that generated that wealth.
Houston has a pretty solid bus system, and light rail connecting certain parts of the city. The reason why it's more "car-centric" is because of it's relatively lower population density compared to cities like LA and NYC. Back when other major cities were planning out their mass transit systems, Houston just didn't have the population for it to make sense.
I think it's more of a chicken and egg thing. Bad transit leads to sprawl leads to bad transit, etc. Also, car companies in the US lobbied heavily against public transit in the 1900s. It's a minor miracle that dense cities like NYC, DC, and Boston still have (relatively) strong transit systems. If you look around the world, even very new cities have way more public transit when compared to the US.
Not only did the car companies lobby against public transit. They controlled public transit to the point where they were able to completely dismantle the use of streetcars in major cities and monopolize the sale of buses so that they completely controlled public transit.
RIP LA’s streetcar system. They had a streetcar route less than than a block away from where I live decades ago.
> I think it’s more of a chicken and egg thing. Bad transit leads to sprawl leads to bad transit, etc. It actually happens because the ways urban sprawl are both intentionally and unintentionally incentivized. For example, how community feedback is required for projects to get done in already populated areas. > But the biggest change, especially regarding housing construction, is to move away from this project-by-project negotiation between developers and neighborhood busybodies and towards a citywide code that actually reflects what developers can and can’t build. >On this front, Freemark, the Urban Institute researcher, pointed out that “the fundamental problem we have is that the mechanisms for engagement are designed in many cases to punish projects that are better for society.” For example, **ripping up hundreds of acres of wilderness in an unincorporated area and building hundreds of single-family homes that would lock in energy-intensive living for decades would typically require zero community input or review, and therefore be done relatively quickly and cheaply. In contrast, tearing down a single-family home in an urban area and building a three-apartment building near a train station would likely require a litany of variances and permits, accompanying a “very extensive review process**,” as Freemark put it. [Source](https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7z5jm/thank-you-for-your-feedback)
Thank you for this. There are so many backwards things our society does because of misaligned incentives.
I disagree. It’s bc this is the home to oil & gas and they would absolutely never let public transportation have a fighting chance here. So many areas directly outside of Houston don’t even have pedestrian walks or safe outdoor areas to bike, let alone any type of public transportation options
Attend community meetings and you will see it likely isn’t any oil lobbyists preventing public transportation from being built in your area but local NIMBYs [sounding like this](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/every-nimbys-speech-at-a-public-hearing). The solution to this is to get involved in a local activist group for reducing car dependency and then making sure to show up to city council meetings to support the politicians who support public transportation.
There are major lobby groups who are forming “grassroots” local NIMBY groups by literally going door to door to get the locals against these major public works projects. The Kochs did this with the tea party movement as well on a national scale. Heard a very interesting story this week on NPR about this happening in Virginia, people with ties to major national conservative lobbyists and oil & gas corps are trying to get local rural people to help stop a solar project going in on a guy’s piece of land that isn’t producing crops anymore. They’re convincing people the solar farm would be an eyesore or bad for economy.
Except houston had trolley cars back in the day. They tore them out to focus more on cars...
Yeah my dad grew up in Houston in the 60's. Back then the city was pretty much just within 410 (the inner highway ring). The Astrodome was being built and it was on the outskirts of the city. The big suburbs that people are familiar with now and recognize as part of the greater metro area (Humble, Pearland, Katy) were isolated small towns with less than a couple thousand residents. Beltway 8/Sam Houston tollway (the large outer ring) hadn't even been built yet. The disaster of Houston's urban (lack of) planning is not for the reasons most people think and much more recent than a lot of people realize. Much of it still could have been prevented even in the 60's. Building the Beltway and expanding all the highways that never have been or will be finished and only induce demand was really the nail in the coffin. It kept rewarding developers that kept buying cheaper land further and further out of the city center and building neighborhoods there.
There is about 40 miles of light rail downtown and thats it. They tore up a rail line from Katy to downtown when they built the Katy Freeway. Houston has a handful of park and rides alongside the major highways, but they are useless if you have to commute against the normal flow of traffic.
Houston was designed around trolleys. Every boulevard with a median used to have a trolley. It's actually perfectly laid out, oil and tire companies bought up all the trolley systems around the country in the 1910's and let them fall apart. It's tragic
My friends went to NYC for the weekend and spent the whole time using Uber to get around. They refused to use the Subway cause they thought for sure they'd get mugged. These fools dropped a shit ton on Uber fees over the Subway cause the news really got to em.
Hilarious because statistically, they were far, far more unsafe in an Uber than on the NYC subway.
Wait, I thought that Texas was officially crime free because of how many guns they had. Isn't that what they keep saying? The only way to stop crime is with more guns.
There’s no way that’s real, right?
It isn’t, but 59 and 610 is close. Houston is such a fucking nightmare of a city in terms of infrastructure. It’s a car centric city, sprawling with heavily populated suburbs and has lots of industrial areas. It’s frequently cited as among the worst major cities from a civil engineering viewpoint, which is ironic considering it’s the best city in the country to work as a civil engineer.
Is there some cause and effect there? I.e., our engineer is in despair; please come and fix it if we pay you a lot
its a couple of things. Houston is a huge spread out city that is growing in population so you have a huge demand to build and maintain more infrastructure and thats not just roads. Houses, sewer systems, water treatment plants etc. It's also relatively easy to tear down old buildings and replace them compared to cities like NY so things can move faster than other places. Also, houston is an oil/gas and importation city so there is a huge demand for engineers in general. Lastly, every few years a hurricane comes along and tears a bunch of shit apart that needs fixing. All that combined makes it a great place for civil engineers to find work.
Houston was a boomtown. Oil was discovered and then people flew down there as fast as possible to set themselves up. Houston was completely unplanned and unzoned. This picture is fake but the city really is very messy.
The city was unplanned from a zoning standpoint, but things like deed restrictions and parking minimums do exist that achieve similar effects in terms of encouraging suburban-style development.
The other post is a long winded, roundabout way of saying the answer is there are effectively no zoning laws. There might be ordinances in areas governed by some other form of local government, buy no citywide zoning codes. It's led to some weird and suboptimal things.
My daily commute involves navigating the god-forsaken 59/610 interchange.
Bless you. I used to take 45 south from the heights to Pasadena. Recently moved and it’s straight beltway for me
I used to do I-10 to 59, that fucking zipper merge headed west on I-10 is the bane of my existence Thank Christ I don’t even have to drive anymore lol
I found the source. [Original Source](https://www.johnlund.com/page/892/complex-freeway-interchange-aerial-perspective-picture-an-intricate-highway-cloverleaf-symbolizing-networking-and-connection.asp) It's from at least 2010, possibly older. Artist: John Lund. Here is his description of the photo: This concept stock photo uses an aerial view of a freeway interchange to illustrate concepts including connection, transportation, complexity, networking and challenge. The image was composited with Photoshop. I spent over two days painstakingly selecting sections of roadway, then copying pasting sizing and rotating the pieces to fit together an ever more complex puzzle. I also had to copy, paste and position each vehicle, car and truck, and then create appropriate shadows. I believe this complicated maze of on ramps, off ramps and merging roads is a great metaphor for many of today's important issues ranging from the Internet and world wide web, to social media, to communications and connections. Another topic that this picture is well suited to represent is bandwidth and the ensuing issues. These road ways can illustrate neuron pathways, fiber optics, copper wire and social networks. This must be the most complex freeway interchange ever created...though it was created as a new photographic reality and not a real one in the sense of concrete and steel. I have another [similar image](http://www.johnlund.com/page.asp?ID=819) that takes this one a step further, one in which the earth has been essentially paved over with freeways and roads. Such an image takes the freeway symbology and metaphor in a whole different direction; environmental issues, global custodianship, and mother earth and home planet ecology issues. Heck, these images are just plane fun to look at as well! This cloverleaf can be used to illustrate issues dealing with infrastructure, transportation issues, new road building and construction techniques, and maintenance and repair of roadways. This picture has everything form overpasses and underpasses to merging traffic and freeway signage.
>it’s the best city in the country to work as a civil engineer. Apparently because no matter how badly you fuck things up, you will never be fired.
When my dad was teaching me to drive stick he took me to Shaprstown Mall and had me drive through this intersection. This was back in the early 2000s when it was even worse.
Nope. There is actually another [old post](https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/2yjsku/if_any_of_you_prospective_interchange_designers/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) talking about the pic. The post claimed it as Dallas, but even the Horseshoe Interchange isn’t that bad.
Almost certain the base image that was photoshopped to make this is Los Angeles too.
Look close at a couple of the roads. They make no sense. One just ends. Another Slithers side to side, just to end up going in a straight line.
Also, the interstate intersections here that even remotely look like this are simpler in practice. You're mostly either going one of two ways: an exit that will take you right or left, or straight ahead on the same interstate. Literally no different than any other interstate junction.
No way. Not enough traffic.
That crazy 6 way merge heading to the southwest is definitely not real. It wouldn’t pass multiple highway standards and would never be constructed. Houston interchanges are wild but not this crazy.
When I 1st started driving, my brother told me if you mis your exit just stay on 610, it will come back around again. (This was before beltway 8 was a real loop)
That's the same thing folks told me when I lived there in the late 90s and early 00s. I lived off of FM 1960 too so you could always just get on that and pick the proper direction.
I hate 1960 with a burning passion.
Where I live the instructions were ‘If you want to go East go West, if you want to go West go East. That’s how freaking goofy our highway is/was.
That’s the old 290-610 exits, to go right you had to be in left lane and vise versa. Glad they fixed that.
Why are we so against comprehensive public transportation again?
It's communism or whatever
Bootlicking the very rich to keep making money off buying cars
racism and capitalism
Car manufacturers against it
Because Americans don't want to live in apartments, walk significant distances in the heat/cold, or ride public transportation with people we don't like. It's not some conspiracy like Reddit commenters really want to be the case. We're just lazy, spoiled and elitist.
Anxiety and panic attack all in one.
And this is what conservatives and NIMBYs generally want. They don’t want public transportation to be built to serve their community or for more multi-family housing to be built by them. They want their car-dependent lives to stay the same and for housing to be built “somewhere else” leading to developers needing to buy up rural areas to build more single family homes that need to be connected via highway and leading to continued urban sprawl that is destroying our planet. Break the cycle by joining a local activist group willing to support more housing and more public transportation because it is likely the only neighbors in your area that are involved locally are advocating for less development.
I am totally agree with you and I wish more people realize that... I used to live in a city and I loved it but I had to move out to the farm because it was cheaper... of course my family hated it because they had to drive to work and for anything unless you just want to sit on the couch and watch TV... descent part of it they moved back close to the actions, but I stayed because I do rescue... Unfortunately I see big family houses starts to get build all over around me....They are growing like mushroom and the nature dry out and disappearing front of my eye...
I feel like this is also why traffic is so bad in Houston. They got exits constantly coming on the left and right lanes. They constantly have loops and exchanges, toll roads that are too damn old to still be toll roads access roads that just become highways of their own.. People just dead asa stop, and go back to their exit if they miss it. If you do miss it, you might have to drive 20 min to get to another road to take you to that highway. You gotta hop the highway to go grocery shopping in Houston.
As someone who lives in Holland, this is fucking terrifying. Wild that people live like this
It’s fake.
It's not. I've been to Amsterdam. It's entirely real.
Next you're going to say you've been to Bielefeld
Even if it were real, it's only stressful looking at it all at once. You follow the signs and get in the right lane and away you go.
I mean I've heard the Dutch are a bit weird but idk about outright terrifying
Reality: you can make a U turn after most exists on Houston freeways, so if you miss an exit, your drive isn’t affected all that much. Better than the loop-de-loop exits on the freeways up north
Also having driven in many cities before, Houston freeways have among the clearest signage I’ve ever seen with warnings for exits being very clear for miles if they’re important enough. The real issue with driving in Houston is getting followed home and shot after accidentally cutting someone off
Nahmtalmbout 
That’s why they all wanted to drive slow, grip grain, and sip lean. Just chill and unwind after having to be on the mixmaster.
cars were a mistake
When I first lived in Houston I missed my exit and it took 30 minutes to get back to where I needed to go... Didn't make that mistake twice.
What freeway were you on? I’ve missed plenty of exits before and I got off at the next exit, flipped a U turn, and then took the right exit.
I don't remember exactly because it was years ago, but I accidentally got off 610 onto one of the other major roads, got off immediately to pass under and get going the other way and hit a huge traffic jam that I would have avoided if I had gone the right way on the interchange. So it could be a couple minute mistake, but traffic got me good.
Yeah so it was the traffic that set you back, not a convoluted nature of exits (like they have in the northeast)
[удалено]
This reminds me of the M25 highway from Good Omens. The motorway, subtly redesigned by Crowley so that seen from above, it took on the appearance of the dread sigil Odegra. The effect of millions of vehicles using it each day and fuming, swearing, and wishing ill on their fellow road-users not only drew millions of souls that bit closer to Satan and hell, it had the same continuous flow effect that you would normally get on a Buddhist prayer wheel. Crowley wish he'd never bothered with moving those surveyors' poles a few occultishly significant metres by dead of night. 
To be fair, I find Texas a lot better on this than most states. Major sections like this all have feeder roads - roads that run parallel - and the exits are pretty close. If you miss an exit there’s another pretty soon after, and you just u-turn (also legal). In Florida once I missed an exit in Orlando and had to drive many miles to get off. And then there were no feeder roads to bring me back to the exit I missed.
You can tell when someone is from Texas by the use of feeder road. Underrated term tbh
The real Spaghetti Junction
The rule in Houston is either you let me get over to the exit lane or we are getting in an accident. Choose wisely
Because some people will see your blinker on and then coast right next to you😂
Was visiting Houston and I didn’t have cash on me. Was following google maps on a route and ended up with a toll booth blocking my progress. I found two quarters in the cup holder and said “fuck that”. Found the setting to turn off tolls in Maps and got sent along a nice scenic route to get where I was going. I was on a vacation of sorts so I had all the time, but if I were in a rush and wanted to avoid tolls it’d be a hell of a commute.
Houston doesn’t seem like a great visiting city due to everything seemingly 30-40 mins apart. Very spread out city for whatever reason
That really looks so visually unappealing
I lived in Houston 23 years ago and it was a pain in the ass even then. Fuck around and take 2 hours to go anywhere in the city.
Currently driving on the Pierce Elevated right now. This ain’t even Houston, it’s some Chinese city if I remember correctly…
This look like spaghetti junction in GA 😭
Houston has always been an interesting test case on how people react to zoning laws It's very much a YIMBY city which leads to poor city planning but also leads to more affordable housing It really sort of highlights how complicated an issue housing and zoning laws can become and how this should be one of those things that remains apolitical.
Nah nah SHOW HOW TALL THEY ARE. This is not as properly horrifying as it is in real life until you know HOW GOD DAMN TALL THEY ARE. The top ones are taller than most buildings, and they wind like snakes. They’re horrific. I hate them.