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Comment by cmurphycode | Hacker News Reader

"I don't think Houston is a city that was designed to be evacuated. It's just not feasible"

Such an interesting contrast to this frontpage post yesterday:

"The highways themselves were specifically intended to facilitate the reasonable objective of Houstonians not to get annihilated by a nuclear blast...[In] case of atomic attack on our key cities, the road net must permit quick evacuation of target areas"

(Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24331698)

So one might ask, if all these highways don't even permit quick transit, what the heck are they doing?

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Houston's population was 1.7 million in 1970[0], it's 6.4 million now. I'm making the guess that their highway system was approximately done in 1970, but it's basically the same story if you put that number at 1980 (2.4 million) and so on.

FWIIW underutilized modern highways are amazingly efficient and pleasant to drive on. As far as I can tell they're limited to recent construction in Europe (Spain for example; it appears to have a 2005 era German highway system designed for 2-3x their population).

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23014/houston/population

There are small cities with overbuilt ring roads in the US that have little traffic. Sometimes porkbarrel spending is a win.

We have two loops in Houston — an inner loop and an outer loop. Freeway expansion is non-stop and we still don’t have enough road for all of our traffic...

Actually, 99 Grand Parkway is almost an entire third loop around the city about 180 miles in length!

I'm making the guess that their highway system was approximately done in 1970

LOL, so much bullshit propagated about a city with 9M residents you can actually visit or research.

The beltway didn’t open until the late 80’s. I-10 was widened twice since then, and the 99 “Grand Parkway” loop is ongoing.

> So one might ask, if all these highways don't even permit quick transit, what the heck are they doing?

Who said that Houston's highways don't permit quick transit? They do. They're just not equipped to easily facilitate a once-in-a-generation exodus of 8 million people all in one day.

Well, considering Rita was in 2005, Harvey was in 2018, and Laura was in 2020, I think that some redesign may be in order. It's occurred more than once in a generation. It's likely to stay that way or get worse.

There was no evacuation for either Harvey or Laura.

Quicker transit than the same roads but half as wide? I guess evacuation is in the aftermath of the nuclear strike to escape radiation for those that were not hurt initially.

Populations, traffic patterns, and risks have evolved since 1950.

The idea was that sprawled freeway-based cities such as Los Angeles were already sufficiently distributed such that risks of nuclear attack were minimised. Effectively they were "pre-evacuated".

2020 is not the 1960s when that may have been part of the decision making and the city was much smaller and less congested. But even then, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t envisioning an evac of 100% of the pop.

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