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?
Yes. Your comment adds nothing to the conversation. It's like posting on the incorrect use of your/you're there/their/they're. Mistakes in grammar happen all the time. When they happen, it is easy for the reader to see the mistake and move on. Corrective comments mean nothing in the end
Corrective comments mean nothing specifically in the case where the author has no interest in correcting their behavior in the future. I realize may fall into this case, but it isn't universal. Some people seek to improve their grammar and avoid mistakes. Pointing them out doesn't have to be viewed as an attack.
Alternative responses are as simple as "thanks" or "you are correct, of course"
First time I visited the US it was Houston, Texas. My host was perplexed because I laughed out loud while we were driving. Experiencing highways and those massive gas stations felt like someone had made a state that mocked America by taking prejudices we have about the American traffic and making them 200% larger in real life. My mind was blown.
I grew up in Appalachia and moved to Texas as an adult. Very similar experience, ride-laugh and all. This place is both amazing and ridiculous.
> more efficient Depends on what you are optimizing for. I can drive to work in 15 minutes, door-to-door. I used to ride the bus and sometimes I would be waiting that long just for the bus to appear. The other factor is weather. Not many of the bus shelters around me (I’m in Austin) are air conditioned. Right now it’s 103F / 39C with a feels-like temperature of 107 / 42. Depending on your health, just walking around…
Have you been to a city(and country) with a good public transport system? I live in Zürich(not from here) and it blows my mind how convenient it is to walk 25 meters to the nearest tram stop and easily get to anywhere in the city. I used to think like you, that having car was a necessity, even freedom. Now I see it for what it is, a ball and chain.
- The municipality of Zurich has an area of 91.88km²
- The Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, urban area (excluding huge swaths of land where people live and presumably need commute from) has an area of 4,524.44km²
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 biggest benefit to stack over a cloverleaf is that cloverleaves have this issue that the same lane needs to be used for offgoing traffic to decelerate and oncoming traffic to accelerate. There's a partial mitigation for cloverleaves, which is to lane segregate the ramps so that there's less pressure for traffic to have to accelerate to highway speed immediately, but stacks eliminate the issue entirely.
Driving around the bay area, it seems that 90% of traffic is caused by shared onramp-offramp lanes, or insufficient distance between them.
Many highways otherwise would have much more capacity. The telltale sign of exit issues is highways that bog down to 15mph for a couple miles, only to open up to 60+ with the same number of lanes.
Total shame and often unnecessary. I wonder how many man-years are wasted as a result.
There are frontage roads at most freeway interchanges in Texas. Typical stack interchange elsewhere has 4 levels: freeway 1, freeway 2, freeway 1 left turns, freeway 2 left turns. Frontage roads add 5th and occasionally 6th levels. The other thing not mentioned is the proliferation of separate express lanes, which often have dedicated flyover ramps as well.
Frontage roads don't necessitate a lot of extra levels. Take the Circle Interchange in Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Byrne_Interchange It's an interchange that's tucked into the normal street grid of Chicago, taking up about 4 city blocks total, and requiring just 3 levels of bridges to get all the traffic to their destinations. The trick is that it relies on a windmill interchange rather than a stack (…
That is correct. All the (recent) freeways I experienced in TX were designed to go ~75 mph as a normal speed, even interchanges/overpasses, except the actual turn. Even then the turns on the cloverleaves were capable of a much higher speed than other places.
>Still, to this layman it seems like a colossal engineering cost to build all those bridges and ramps for relatively modest gain. IMO, maybe Texas does this because Texas gets a lot more taxes than they talk about (through high property taxes), and don't really want to spend them on anything else (like socialism!), so instead they build 10 lane highway systems for the billion cars and trucks every american should own…
One-third of the Texas DPS highway budget comes from federal sources. Another third comes from revenues from oil & gas. About a quarter comes from state gasoline sales tax and registration taxes. So a little more than 90% of the funding for freeway projects in Texas comes from non-property tax sources. But even then, a lot of the recent major highway projects in Texas had some kind of toll component to them whether t…
It’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 wan…
The US is large - but roughly 1 in 10 residents live around LA or NYC. As much as it is large, it is also non-uniform.
First time I visited the US it was Houston, Texas. My host was perplexed because I laughed out loud while we were driving. Experiencing highways and those massive gas stations felt like someone had made a state that mocked America by taking prejudices we have about the American traffic and making them 200% larger in real life. My mind was blown.
Houston native here. I still guffaw when I see a massively lifted truck (but with a pristine bed, no scratches - so not even a work truck).
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…
>Still, to this layman it seems like a colossal engineering cost to build all those bridges and ramps for relatively modest gain. IMO, maybe Texas does this because Texas gets a lot more taxes than they talk about (through high property taxes), and don't really want to spend them on anything else (like socialism!), so instead they build 10 lane highway systems for the billion cars and trucks every american should own…
I think this is spot on, but also keep in mind that Texas is a state built for cars, not people. There are very few places where you can safely live and get around to the things you need, and the state is so big that it’s all very high speed highways. I was just there driving from DFW to Austin and it’s 75mph, and then drove to El Paso where it’s 80 mph most of the way. The scale of highways in TX is unmatched anywhere else I’ve been. It’s pretty incredible and sad to be there. There’s not much care for aesthetics or design of roadways. So there’s some cost that’s gotta be paid because everyone needs a car just to exist in such a big sprawly place. Very catch 22, but no going back at this point. DFW takes over 3 hours to drive acrosss, Houston 2 hours. The metro areas are massive there.