4chan gets it

And despite the extra lanes, it's still gridlocked. Maybe they need just one more lane...

Looks a bit jammed on the photo though. I'm sure one more lane will fix that. /s

That sounds like extremely bad planning. In essence they could have had several smaller highways that better suited the needs of the users without forcing them all onto this clusterfuck.

Includes the express lanes and the frontage roads. It really shouldn't, you aren't supposed to just drive the entire trip on the frontage roads.

It's absolutely insane how many people die every single day because we thought it was a good idea to let everyone operate multi-ton pieces of heavy machinery at hundreds of km per hour on the reg.

How the fuck is there more regular testing and training for people driving forklifts than Dodge Rams?

Last time I was in Houston I was driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic that was going 95 mph. I looked over to my right and saw a group of five cars pass me going at least 10 to 20 mph faster. This would not have been remarkable except that I was in the right lane and these cars were passing me on the shoulder.

This being Houston, though, that's still probably not remarkable.

Imagine the insides of your lungs after years of that.

I live in a medium-sized city and I learned years ago that if you want to get anywhere on time, stay off the freeway. It's not nearly as wide, but it has on ramps at shit intervals and the on ramps mostly give you no room to accelerate to highway speeds, so it's always congested. I'm actually about to go a couple towns south as I write this and looking at GPS the freeway route which is the most direct will take 20 minutes longer than simply going through back country roads that add an addition 10 miles to the trip.

How far did you have jt to work? Woukd it technically be cyclable (albeit not on the freeway)?

I'm sure another lane or two will fix the problem!

Going 20 mph for any distance on a bike includes and assumption of good health, includes carrying a change of clothes, and shower which most workplace don't offer.

Also, this one. Insane traffic in Los Angeles, 1993.

Future ppl are truly going to consider this time a dystopia.

The Federal Highway Administration has a multi-billion dollar budget, and doesn't include the multi-billion dollar budget each state allocates to their state highway departments, or the multi-million dollar budget most large cities allocate to their streets and highways departments, and many cities unconditionally grant valuable street real estate to individuals to park for free.

It's not an anarchocapitalist conspiracy, it's a massive subsidy for motor vehicle owners.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/13/unspeakable-realities-block-universal-health-coverage-in-the-us/

Broken clock, etc

It's almost like out of a very large amount of people, a few of them might sometimes be smart.

Oil and automotive companies literally tore most of public transport out in US way back when.
They would invest into the local tram companies, buy them out, then close and tear out the lines.

Public transportation in the US is at best, an afterthought. A lot of major cities have buses/trolleys but not many have trains/subways. Only the largest cities have a workable public trans system such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco.

In the US, public transportation is pretty much unusable in bigger cities except for NYC.

America has this weird, masochistic relationship with cars that just gridlocks everyone. But "FreEdoM."

It's insanely bad. Hell, Canada has shown that public transit is viable with the North American development model, but the US simply refuses to invest money into public works.

Vancouver SkyTrain and Montreal REM/Metro are both fast, highly efficient subway systems that are able to navigate single-family housing development. Why can't the US?

Not many U.S. cities have a subway. I think the only substantial subway system is in NYC. The city I live in has a very short commuter rail line that doesn't go to/from anywhere people want to go. Buses are gridlocked in traffic like everyone else, and have to make frequent stops, so it can take something like 2 hours to travel 10 miles. The low-wage workers I know without vehicles just spend $40/day on Uber to commute to work and back (which is a significant percentage of their pay).

Very few cities have any acceptable public transit. The only reasonable options are in the NYC area.

unfortunately it is not the case for most of countries. For example, here, in Azerbaijan, rural public transport basically doesn't exist, and in capital city - Baku - schedules, traffic, prices... They all suck. We only got underground metro, but as that is only sane transport, everyone uses it and on critic hours it also suck. Sadly.

Building subterranean rail after the fact is just not feasible.

Japan probably has the best rail system with JR. To do that in the US, you would probably need to remove a lot of roads. I would welcome it, but I don't know how the public would feel about losing roads to trains.

Dont take it the wrong way but 1.5 hours doesn't sound great for every day travel.

Just one more lane bro. https://youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE?feature=share

I just read it, what a good article. I'm not sure I see the vision at the end, but I totally agree with the way he describes every aspect of the problem.

Some of my favorite excerpts, in addition to the one you quoted:

“The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”

You’ll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them.

These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.

Key word is can be. If transportation planners are lazy enough to only build more lanes on the major highway, who's to say they can build an efficient rail system. The major issue is a misallocation and a general lack of funding for transportation projects.

It's extremely hard to nuance any conversation on any forum when multiple people interact. People almost always assume you're pro or anti something. It's also easier mentally to reject what doesn't match your views.

Debating on the internet is useless most times to convince the other party, but I'm sure some people reading it who haven't made up their mind on the subject can appreciate a well put out idea and maybe consider it before making up their mind.

This seems like a straw-man criticism. I have never seen the anti-car communities attack people in rural areas for needing cars.

Changing to a different form of transportation, unless it involves teleportation, is just moving the problem somewhere else. It might be all electric, and it might get you there twice as fast, but you're still just leveraging a tactic that moves the goalpost and delays the inevitable.

Ultimately, there is no right answer to this. The greater the population, the greater the problem. If everyone who could work remotely started doing so, and the rest were afforded decentralized centers for the onsite labor they must do, this would be a more manageable problem. But eventually, we'd be back where we started - it'd just be a higher concentration of onsite workers generating all the traffic, and they might have less distance to travel.

Coruscant's traffic problems, or maybe 5th Element's, are what we're destined for.

We used to have public street cars where I live that took people up and down the hill, but they sold out to a car company. I believe it lasted 2 years before the car company shut it down all together. Wild stuff!

Yeah, because biking 35km soon after waking up, then another 35km after work, is super easy for sedentary people /s

in most parts of us that is not an option any sane person would choose

I did that until I got hit. I'm not willing to die to get to work.

When I had an actual separated bike path, though, it was wonderful.

I drove 550 miles to another state for work travel, bringing an entire car load of work related stuff too. Doing that on a bike would be pretty hard...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=einsitzer+auto

Yes, german. English pages are mostly making fun of the theme, displaying F1 cars and so on. Different mindset.

Not at all. The 401 at most has 14 lanes across and not the 26 in this photo (at least based on a comment). That being said, the toronto subway system would benefit from an overhaul instead of the proposed highway 413. Additionally, mandating a max price somehow on the 407 could help to significantly reduce traffic on other highways. As much as people like to complain about Toronto, I do find the bus system to be better than most.

That's just an average suburban neighborhood street in Texas.

Seriously, though, that's the Katy freeway in Houston Texas, which is often claimed to be the widest freeway in the world.

You'll get a decent amount of downvotes because we're still not sure if Aptera is a scam or not, but the design is where we should be going.

If we moved away from full-ton SUVs, and focused on small cars, we could add far more lanes and clear up traffic. Our roads aren't going to get any larger. There's no more room in cities. We need the government to incentivize small commuter cars that take less space and energy. 90% of people in those SUVs are driving solo and it makes no damn sense.

You can have all the fun you want playing with your stick. The post is calling out a system that forces people to drive to get around and creates infrastructure like that shown in the image. Driving would be a lot nicer if the roads weren't full of people who would prefer to use other modes.

I love driving too, but fewer lanes with more transit/cycling infrastructure/stricter testing would let those of us who enjoy driving (and are safe doing so) to have a more open road

I felt the same until really settling into my career.