Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

practical.engineering

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 352 posts

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#161

Post by hombre_fatal »

msisk6 wrote: post #72
kube-system wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 500k vehicles not 500k people. While the plurality of vehicles could be single-occupant passenger vehicles, a good chunk of those vehicles are freight, multiple-occupant passenger vehicles, and some are even busses.

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.

1 vehicle = 1 person is especially noticeable when you're in the HOV lane zooming past traffic, a sea of thousands of vehicles that can't take the HOV lane.

In fact there are so few people in the HOV lane that I always feel like I'm doing something wrong when I take it, like I misunderstood the rules. It can't be this easy.

Nah, I really am the only person on the highway with more than one person in the car.

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#162

Post by annexrichmond »

xyst wrote: post #90

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 see this "induced demand" critique a lot, and I am curious - if it's wrong, how is it different than adding housing to a region to make it cheaper?

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#163

Post by msisk6 »

malshe wrote: post #10
robotnikman wrote: post #5

As cool as the engineering is, I avoid such interchanges at all costs since the being so high up gives me panic attacks when driving...

Me too! I can’t avoid them all the time but I slow down as much as I can safely (this is Texas so everyone drives at least 20 miles over the limit) and look straight ahead.

Once I was cruising down the 130 toll road around Austin just after rush hour listening to the radio and just keeping up with traffic. Then traffic started pulling away from me and I couldn't keep up; my truck wouldn't go any faster. Thinking I was having a problem I looked at the dash and noticed I was going 105 mph and was up against the speed limiter on my truck. Yeah, even when the speed limit is 85 that's not enough for Texans. ;)

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#164

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

xyst wrote: post #155
jcfrei wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically yes but a lot would need to change for that to happen in the US. In reality having a car and traveling lots of miles every day is the cheapest variant for most people.

> In reality having a car and traveling lots of miles every day is the cheapest variant for most people. Realistically, it's the _only_ way to get around the US.

That's because the US is built that way. In turn because every city that's not New York has just expanded horizontally with hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of detached house-driveway-backyard-frontyard suburbia.

In most of the Old World, cities have existed for centuries—if not millennia—and were built for the human foot, not the car tyre. Hence most European and Asian city centres are dense, mostly walkable, and fairly small. From the 1800s onward as transport speeds have increased they've built dense mid-/high-rises in the suburban bits, and developed cheap, efficient, and highly-utilised bus and heavy rail public transport, both within and between cities.

Many such cities additionally have 'green belts' to prevent urban sprawl.

Actually I am misrepresenting the situation in the USA.

The US expanded with the railways, and many American cities were built along and at the end of railways.

But then in the 1950s, Americans collectively decided that public transport was useless and they bulldozed through their city centres, ripped up the trams and railways, and splatted veritable plates of highway spaghetti right through the middle of their cities (often through slums and ghettos mainly housing poorer people of African descent).

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#165

Post by hombre_fatal »

yongjik wrote: post #69
criddell wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sounds like you experienced car vs. bus in a car-optimized city and liked the former, which is pretty understandable. In a bus-optimized city, you'd be saying something like "Sure I can drive to work in 15 minutes, but it takes 5 minutes to park, costs $20 a day, and it's ten minutes walking from the parking lot to the office. Much better to take a bus that stops right across the street."

Also, very few US cities have the balls to give buses their own lane. So any time you take the bus, you sit in the same traffic as everyone who took their car instead of zooming past traffic like you should be doing.

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#166

Post by s1artibartfast »

j-bos wrote: post #133
Gud wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Numbers taken from wikipedia.

Switzerland in its entirety is less than 10% of California and smaller than San Bernardino county.

That said, US Metro cores are denser than anything in CH but have worse transit, demonstrating the importance of door to door analysis. Nobody wants to commute via mixed private and public transport.

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#167

Post by Keyframe »

nabla9 wrote: post #26

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.

From european drivers perspective, what surprised me the most (aside from peculiar traffic rules - some actually good) was concrete highways instead of black asphalt. I was especially careful during rain, it "looked" slippery; Later I was told it does actually have some asphalt in it.

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#168

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #139

"the worst symbol of our car-obsessed culture" Nothing against the article, which covers an interesting topic. But this refrain gets tiresome, the railing against our "car obsession." We have a big-ass country. We like to move about it. Many of us don't want or need to live on top of each other. That is all.

> We have a big-ass country. We like to move about it. Many of us don't want or need to live on top of each other. That is all.

Japan is about the size of the entire Eastern Seaboard. Japan has safe, fast, comfortable and competitively-priced high-speed rail through highly mountainous, earthquake-prone terrain.

What's the USA's excuse? No one is asking for a 4500 km-long railway from Los Angeles to New York. But a 1500 km-long one from Atlanta to Boston? Nope, can't do.

Forget that, not even a 700 km-long one between Washington DC, New York, and Boston (where many people arguably 'live on top of each other' already).

The US has no political will to up its public transport game, and your comment epitomises it.

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#169

Post by s1artibartfast »

j-bos wrote: post #133
Gud wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Numbers taken from wikipedia.

To be fair to the parent poster as well, almost everyone within the 5000km2 around Zurich is within a couple minutes walk of public transport.

It is really is quite remarkable. However, I think this is enabled by expensive high density apartment housing.

Americans would consider the apartment sizes inhumane and a supermajority of the population are locked out of our owning a home.

Re: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?

#170

Post by maxerickson »

jcfrei wrote: post #130
consp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people should not have to buy a car as it is a massive drain on finances to keep it running. There are better solutions

Theoretically yes but a lot would need to change for that to happen in the US. In reality having a car and traveling lots of miles every day is the cheapest variant for most people.

People in areas with no transit don't have to drive far.

Lots of people at my office do drive 40-50 miles each way, but it's not because they can't afford the houses that are 5 miles away (in perfectly pleasant neighborhoods, near the central area that most services in the region are located in).

And then the cheaper parts of towns aren't bad either.

People living in the outskirts of huge population centers are the ones driving far for economic reasons.

Post reply on HN