The same reason that the ULA launch system costs more than SpaceX.
Cronyism.
Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
91–100 of 352 posts
Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
#92It’s a shame this country is so obsessed with cars. There’s so much land yet we devote it to destroying lush ecosystems (that help reduce effects of Mother Nature) and replacing it with massive highway projects that end up costing everyone more in taxes/indefinite maintenance costs. Then the effect is 10X’d when useless suburbs are built. More car dependence. More time spent on roads. Traffic slows to a halt as subur…
I'm not sure what you think the alternative is. The US is huge compared to any similarly developed country. Is the answer huge cities right next to thousands of square miles of untouched nature? That hasn't happened in any society on the planet.
It sounds like you just want everyone to live in a city and take public transit everywhere but cities are awful for your mental health[0] and most people in the US do not want to live in a major urban area. You can't have a huge geography and rural or suburban life without private vehicles.
Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That's 1½-2½ commuter rail lines or about 3-4 subway lines. Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure.
During rush hour most people are going from their homes to places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated. The "homes" part is distributed, true, but guess what, once you have a good rail network, it provides decent coverage for that (which you can complement via walkability/bikeability/scooterability :-p, which makes for more liveable environments). And "train commuter rage" is much less frequent than…
> During rush hour most people are going from their homes to places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated.
This isn't as true in Dallas as in other places. The QoL associated with some of these problems in Dallas is part of the reason I left, so you're preaching to the choir, but the sprawl is intense.
Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
#94As somebody who lived in Dallas and drove on the high five with some frequency, I had actually a lot of questions about the design of it. If somebody who understands this could explain I’d be happy. For one, a lot of the overpasses had two lanes. But then they merged down to one right before you got on the highway… What’s the point in having two lanes on the overpass that merge just before you get onto the highway? T…
I have no answer, but this got me thinking: is the overpass's road a similar physical width as the highway?
I've been on some bridges that have two lanes with a very narrow shoulder that then then merge into a single lane (with wider shoulders) at the end of the bridge, with the asphalt width not changing too much. I've always assumed that was so traffic could continue flowing on the bridge should one lane become blocked for some reason. Off the bridge a car can pull off the road if there's a problem to let traffic continue passing. You can't really do that so much on a bridge.
But I'm not a traffic/road engineer so that's just speculation on my part.
Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a quick skim of Wikipedia, it looks like the main benefit to the stack style over a conventional 2-level cloverleaf is capacity (the left-turn leaves are generally at most one lane) and speed (left turns are direct rather than 270deg, so you don't have to slow down as much when taking them). Still, to this layman it seems like a colossal engineering cost to build all those bridges and ramps for relatively modest…
The TFA specifically covers this, so skimming wikipedia should have been totally unnecessary. In fact, the TFA goes further than your wiki skim to add that the merging from the highway to the clover leaf requires slowing down on the highway while entering the highway from the clover requires accelerating. Both of these things are being done in the same piece of road. It does so with graphic animations. You'd probably…
The "T" in TFA stands for "The" so this is sort of like saying "ATM machine."
Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being someone that has sat in a lot of traffic in Texas on these interchanges, the number of vehicles with more than one person is a rounding error. There's a few trucks hauling freight, but they try to miss the cities during rush hour.
> There's a few trucks hauling freight There's a lot of trucks hauling freight. The US has the largest train network in the world, it notoriously handles primarily freight, and still, more than 70% of freight in the US goes by truck. If these roads are the average urban interstate highways, then about 10%ish of the traffic is heavy truck traffic. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/v...
I meant there's few trucks during rush hour. Overnight it's a different story. Last month I was going down south I-35 around midnight and got stuck in construction traffic in Waco and it was about 80% trucks.
Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
#97So... > Q: Why are Texas interchanges so tall? > > Frontage roads need grade separation, adding a layer. > Texas has lots of frontage roads. OK, I buy that Texas has more grade-separated interchanges on average... but I'm not seeing how that turns into "Texas has more higher interchanges" which is what it feels like that question is asking. Frontage roads don't generally exist where 3+ highways intersect, so that sho…
Completely random tidbit of information, in Houston (and only Houston) we call them 'feeder roads.'
Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frontage roads don't generally exist where 3+ highways intersect… Or do they, in Texas? I've lived in several states where frontage roads are common (under various names), and Texas was the place where they were most plentiful. Older interchanges tended to run the frontage roads below grade to make them cheaper. But more recent ones tend to keep everything above grade due to flooding. Or is it just that Texas has one…
Maybe it's just me but I expected these links to open in the recently established apple maps web page. However, on an Android phone, Google Maps opens.
Not just you, I expected the same, and was just as surprised to find it opens Google Maps in Chrome as well.
Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The TFA specifically covers this, so skimming wikipedia should have been totally unnecessary. In fact, the TFA goes further than your wiki skim to add that the merging from the highway to the clover leaf requires slowing down on the highway while entering the highway from the clover requires accelerating. Both of these things are being done in the same piece of road. It does so with graphic animations. You'd probably…
The "T" in TFA stands for "The" so this is sort of like saying "ATM machine."
do you really think anyone actually cares that my comment started with "The TFA" instead of just TFA? Your comment adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.
Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "T" in TFA stands for "The" so this is sort of like saying "ATM machine."
do you really think anyone actually cares that my comment started with "The TFA" instead of just TFA? Your comment adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.
Do you really think the best way to react to a perfectly civil comment attempting to tell you that you're saying something wrong is to get defensive and pejorative?