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As someone who recently moved to the Texas triangle, I’m baffled by the lack of good transportation options between the three cities. It’s a 3-4 hour drive and while there is a train, freight gets priority. So the train takes anywhere from 3-7 hours. You can fly but with security any sort of delay and it would faster to drive.
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Check out Vonlane. They are deluxe buses that cover the Texas triangle. We use them for work to move our guys between Houston / Austin regularly and people seem to love it. It's pretty cheap, comfortable, and has wifi.
Cheap? I just checked there and Austin to Dallas return is 270 dollars... On a bus. That's just incomprehensibly expensive to me (as a European).
Question for the HNers in the "Texas Triangle": does it "feel" like a megaregion? I've spent very little time in Texas (only a handful of trips), but my impression was that there's a very stark drop from moderate density urban cores, to sprawling suburbs, to virtually uninhabited interstitials around highways. In other words: it wouldn't occur to me (as a non-Texan) to even think of Austin and Dallas as belonging to…
I never thought about it before - but seeing that chart of "Megaregions", almost none of my work travel within the US from the last 15 years has been outside of those regions.
Question for the HNers in the "Texas Triangle": does it "feel" like a megaregion? I've spent very little time in Texas (only a handful of trips), but my impression was that there's a very stark drop from moderate density urban cores, to sprawling suburbs, to virtually uninhabited interstitials around highways. In other words: it wouldn't occur to me (as a non-Texan) to even think of Austin and Dallas as belonging to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A plan to connect Houston to Dallas with a bullet train has been grinding its way along for years now[0]. Since Texas is loath to use eminent domain, the planning phase has been stalled for a loooong time. [0]: https://www.texascentral.com/project/ Edit: Whoops, wrong project. Still, the plans are there, we just need willing politicians.
Texas is very willing to use eminent domain, but perhaps not for rail projects or there are different statues for such a project. The use of eminent domain is pretty common for pipeline projects
I never thought about it before - but seeing that chart of "Megaregions", almost none of my work travel within the US from the last 15 years has been outside of those regions.
I feel like I'm missing some nuance, because it looks like it's basically just taking the largest population cities in the US and drawing circles around the ones near each other. "Most economic activity happens where the most people live" doesn't seem like a particularly novel insight.
However that someone in Dallas is more likely to choose a supplier in Austin than one in Boston is interesting - once you leave Dallas does the extra distance to Boston mean anything? I can come up with all kinds of weird ideas.
Question for the HNers in the "Texas Triangle": does it "feel" like a megaregion? I've spent very little time in Texas (only a handful of trips), but my impression was that there's a very stark drop from moderate density urban cores, to sprawling suburbs, to virtually uninhabited interstitials around highways. In other words: it wouldn't occur to me (as a non-Texan) to even think of Austin and Dallas as belonging to…
Not to me. I've lived in Dallas for over a decade at this point. I've visited Houston once. I've visited New York at least once a year. Putting aside that we're as far from each other as London is from Paris and Amsterdam, there is damn near nothing between us. When you add in the several hours you spend getting to an airport, getting through security, waiting for your plane to board, then the massive amount of time…
Plus, very few are even thinking of flying between the cities. Car ownership is high that flying to visit one of the other cities is definitely an edge case.
Question for the HNers in the "Texas Triangle": does it "feel" like a megaregion? I've spent very little time in Texas (only a handful of trips), but my impression was that there's a very stark drop from moderate density urban cores, to sprawling suburbs, to virtually uninhabited interstitials around highways. In other words: it wouldn't occur to me (as a non-Texan) to even think of Austin and Dallas as belonging to…
1. Pretty much all the cities in Texas are rather progressive now - like pretty much everywhere else it's an urban/rural divide now. Houston was the first city in the US with a lesbian mayor.
2. Austin is still the tech center, but I've started to see more companies (and people) move to Houston or Dallas as Austin has gotten ridiculously expensive.
3. You are correct about the wide expanses of nothingness in between the major urban/suburban areas, but I don't think that's quite critical to the author's thesis. That said, as Austin has gotten more expensive I lot of areas further out that I used to think of "nothingness" now have seen big booms. Lots of places between Austin and San Antonio in particular feel like they've exploded over the past decade.
4. One thing that I think that you're likely to miss from asking HNers is that, at least among people I know, there is much more "connectedness" among the cities between people and industries not in tech vs. those in tech. E.g. on the upper end folks I know in legal and banking travel fairly frequently between some of these cities, and on the lower end I know a bunch of Mexican immigrants that have friends and family spread out in San Antonio, Houston and Austin.
The big question in my mind is climate change. I've lived in Austin for a quarter century, and while our summers are always hot, last year was a new beast entirely - relentess week after week after week of 105-110 weather. I'm doing everything I can to get out of Austin in the summer now.
Question for the HNers in the "Texas Triangle": does it "feel" like a megaregion? I've spent very little time in Texas (only a handful of trips), but my impression was that there's a very stark drop from moderate density urban cores, to sprawling suburbs, to virtually uninhabited interstitials around highways. In other words: it wouldn't occur to me (as a non-Texan) to even think of Austin and Dallas as belonging to…
Having spent nearly a decade in the San Antonio/Austin area, no. I'd say only recently have San Antonio and Austin even felt connected. But Dallas and Houston are completely different worlds in my mind. It's nearly 5 hours from San Antonio to Dallas, with not much interesting in between.