Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
practical.engineering
practical.engineering
Everything's bigger in Texas, including egos.
Crucially, Texans are highly aware of "everything is bigger in Texas" trope and take pride in it. My favorite example is that everyone knows that Texas State Capitol is taller than United States Capitol (92.24m vs 88m)... But nobody will ever tell you that Texas State Capitol is only 6th tallest state capitol.
Source: lived in Austin for 2 years.
I guessed Nebraska, but was wrong. It’s Louisiana. Both finished in 1932, oddly.
The Texas State Capitol wasn’t the tallest state capitol finished in 1888 - that would have been Illinois - but it certainly was the largest. Indiana also finished their capitol in 1888, but was the shortest of the three. Weird how they seem to bunch up, as if there is some sort of “let’s build a capitol!” movement that takes hold from time to time.
i believe around the same time the empire state building was constructed as well.
I lived in Austin for 7 years and I had no idea about this fact.
Whenever the whole "everything is bigger in Texas" comes up, everyone smiles and rolls their eyes. I now live in Houston and its the same. People here think its kind of a joke. Though Texans definitely do take pride in Texas. I just don't think they take themselves as seriously as your comment suggests.
“You might give some serious thought to thanking your lucky stars you’re in Texas.”
And Kinky Friedman.
https://www.kxan.com/news/motorcyclist-killed-after-falling-...
She was nice. Worked at a local Taco Deli.
Reversing some of the substrings in that string would also result in a very good analogy.
Texans view Americans the same way Americans view the rest of the world - derisively, but it is those viewers who should be derided, and often are, by the groups that they deride.
Somehow I forgot to mention truck nuts. Car culture is something else entirely in Texas.
Something really didn't mesh with me.Too much focus on fakery and "big" I guess. (Especially all that "Roman" and "greek" flair after having just toured the real deal a few weeks earlier)
So we took advantage of the cheap accomodation and visited the stunning places around it.
That's just my own take.
The monorail from Mandalay Bay to Bellagio is free, but it isn’t public transit.
Buc-ee's is the Trader Joe's of Texas, find all kinds of weird things that are actually good, or at least novel. Also, cleanest public restrooms you'll probably ever experience. Decent breakfast tacos too
"I'm from Texas, what country are you from?"
The road concrete is roughened, you have good traction even in less than ideal weather. And concrete lasts an awful lot longer under heavy traffic. Smooth concrete would be like you are worried about, but the high speed roads aren't smooth concrete.
Asphalt is a hydrocarbon product and can sweat. But worse is the oil from cars. Drip, drip, drip--since it's on a hydrocarbon base it loosely bonds with it and simply accumulates. When the rain does come along the roads will be very slippery until there has been enough rain and cars to wash them clean. Until then, hydroplane accidents galore. Be especially careful around gas stations.
Also asphalt is more slippery than concrete. It will spill out oil.
Only poor cities will do asphalt, and they are in constant reconstruction.
I presume you are referring to [Buccee’s](https://buc-ees.com/about/world-record-holder/)
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 suburbs fill up. Geniuses at the state transportation department believe we should just widen the roads. But continue to ignore decades of “induced demand” evidence.
In the specific case of Texas there's also a toll road system, however this only covers a fraction of the highways in the state and the tolls themselves don't account for all the incurred costs.
Realistically, it's the _only_ way to get around the US.
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).
The causality for this was mostly the other way around. There was a lot of empty land around the cities -- unlike most of Europe or Asia -- so once cars became available people started moving there because they could get more space for less money and still commute into the city by car for work.
The real problem is that the people who did this didn't want the city encroaching on their suburban space, but that space was directly next to the city. So they zoned it for single-family homes only and then the only way to add new housing is for the city to expand horizontally. Which needs more roads and parking and reduces use of mass transit which in turn gets discontinued.
What you need isn't mass transit, it's to allow condos and mixed-use zoning in what is currently the suburbs, to reconstitute enough density that mass transit can actually work.
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.
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.
- making it difficult to get around safely by bike
- zoning restrictions that force development to be clumped in certain areas
- underdeveloped public transport with infrequent stops and limited range
- parking space requirements that limit development
- food deserts where people have to drive long distances to get groceries
There are many places in the world that have solved these problems. I don't get why it's so inconceivable to solve them in the US.
Note that the study you link to there is from 1994 and only controlled for the following criteria: sex, age, social class, marital status, unemployment, chronic illness and region of residence. Those aren't the things that put folks on edge about cities in 1994 or in the preceding years. 30 years on from 1994 and now in a different world, many of us are wondering why we're locked out of some of the benefits of a bit more density.
No ones saying we abandon all beyond our city walls to nature, instead they'll be farmland or productive rural activities like we already use them for. But we don't need every city of 500k people to mean that there's a 15 mile radius circle of strip malls in every direction.
It is usually possible to rent small apartments near work in most metro areas, but instead they prefer 3000sqft places to 600sqft and supermarkets to corner stores.
There is a huge amount that would have to change about the American dream and esthetic desires to enable car free European living.
I do agree we should build more density, but there is also still a large amount of convincing people to actually allow it and move there.
It's not like these zoning laws just appeared on their own one day. People vote for these things. People show up to city halls and fight densification. People fight against transit, they don't want those people coming in to their nice quiet neighborhoods and the undesirables in their apartments.
San Francisco 2024 growth rate is minus 2.4 percent. NYC 2024 growth rate minus 2.0. Boston minus 1.0 percent. High rent is more likely the result of NYC, SF and Boston renters being on the bleeding edge of rent setting software. Lucky them.
Neither of these anti car strategies will ever gain traction with any but the youngest, most easily duped Americans, who are already stuck in high density housing for a combination of economic and career trajectory reasons. The approach America has taken for many decades with these young people is “they’ll outgrow it”. And they do, when children arrive and these young people, as their parents and grandparents before them, aspire to that “better family life” that low density housing affords.
This patronizing "they'll grow out of it" is a self fulfilling prophecy when suburbanism is the only option.
To give a concrete example of the apocalyptic talk you mention: We aren't going to be able to do this forever, there isn't enough land. Sure it worked for a couple dozen years while the USA built new highways and sold off it's now-close-enough-for-commuting land, but that time is running out. We can kick the can down the road, but the interest in what's borrowed will come due, though probably in a monetary collapse not a social one. After all, who doesn't want a private island all their own (if they can afford it, and it's maintenance)?
But let's say we can kick the can down the road forever, or functionally forever. Even in that world, for those of us that only want a 1500sq/ft house and a nearby corner store, can we please make that just a possibility? Like, legally? Similarly, can we get some legislative support for 3 or 4 bedroom apartments since as it stands they feel incredibly rare...
The suburbs have a lot of appeal, can we please also build other things at all, sometimes?
How about this, instead of designing your consumer luxury life around needing to go to a store or restaurant 2-3 times a day... instead maybe shape your habits around not being a mindless consumer.
wahhh it really is awful I have to drive for 30 minutes 1x a month to get groceries.
That's a nice luxury to have. I take it you're fortunate enough to live in a very temperate area with palatable weather year-round, rather than somewhere that gets 110° F in the summer, or ice storms in the winter?
Not everyone can afford to live on the beautiful, comfortable, and exorbitantly expensive cities along the west coast.
Okay, we don't get the 110°F in the summer here (only up to the 90's), but we do get the ice storms in the winter.
I still walk to get my groceries if I can, even if it's actively snowing. I just wish they'd plow the sidewalks here, I don't like having to choose between walking in the street or trying to walk on uncompacted snow in my boots while laden with groceries.
If you go to anywhere in Europe you will find plenty of places that prove the opposite.
Cities in the us are basically highway with warehouse around it.
It’s hard to navigate without a car, and public transportation are a afterthought.
We could start by making people who choose rural or suburban life pay the costs of such a life rather than foisting them on everyone else. Roads should either be toll roads or entirely paid for by gas taxes and vehicle registration costs. Gas taxes should have to include the cost of removing the pollutants from the environment.
A major driver of the interstate highway project was military in consideration because of the importance of logistics in being able to move troops around the country.
That's fine. Roll those costs into the price of food. That way, the amount of road tax you pay is proportional to how much goods and services you consume.
Meanwhile, the status quo is that everyone pays into the road system regardless of how much or little they use it - even if they don't own a car.
Roads have to get paid for no matter what. The only choice we have as a society is between taxing everyone versus taxing only the users.
Exactly right, but proving the opposite of what you request.
Once roads are built they're a sunk cost. Roads have to be resurfaced as a result weather damage regardless of how many people drive on them. Road capacity that exists and isn't used is lost. The incremental cost of an additional car driving down a road, the actual wear caused by the act, is trivial. Far less than the pro rata share of building or maintaining the road, or than existing gas tax, or the cost of even the collections infrastructure for road tolls. But the use has value to the driver and plausibly to others in society (e.g. their customers/employers/friends), so we don't want to discourage it unless its value is less than the incremental cost, since the cost of building the road and most of the maintenance is a sunk cost.
Which leads to the conclusion that the sunk cost of the road should be shared by everybody, since everybody benefits from having products delivered and emergency services even if they don't have a car.
Also, what’s wrong with beltways? The main flaw in the interstate highway system, from an urbanist perspective, has always been the highways cutting through the historic urban core, which tend to attract traffic just passing through. Houston has those too, but not really any worse than most American cities. Beltways are really great at diverting such traffic away from the urban core. Unfortunately, as cities expand, beltways tend to become part of the urban core, so farther out beltways need to be built to retain their advantages.
But I'll start with the simple version of the critique. Individual commuters make their decision about whether to make a trip based in part on the time that trip will take (a function of road congestion). Thus, adding road capacity will temporarily lower the cost of a trip, allowing more people to make it until congestion reaches the pre-expansion level. Housing does not have this problem because consumers make decisions about where to live much more infrequently.
As you can tell, "induced demand" is a bad if rather catchy name. To be fair to urban planners, the throughput of an expanded road does increase. However, the experience of using it stays the same or gets worse, and the cost (both $ and space) is disproportionate. Is the pro-transit argument, which I subscribe to.
Of course, the real world includes large real estate firms which are making frequent decisions on housing stock. So I agree that the build-more-housing-and-everything-will-improve crowd is wrong. But I don't think YIMBY/transit and anti-transit are the only choices. The former is a common archetype these days.
US forces had hard time moving about in Iraq due to its lower land use and actual US is 7.7x sparse-er. There's no way American car culture could just stop being car dependent. Abundant fast cars is potentially the only way it can work.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
Whats the point of having all that room if you’re going to trap yourself in a small apartment tower?
So thoroughly was the con job that just now some groups have started to question it. Orgs like Sightline, Stronger Towns, micromobility, renewed interest in mass transit, and so forth.
> Q: Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
>
> Frontage roads need grade separation, adding a layer.
> Texas has lots of frontage roads.
Or do they, in Texas? Or is it just that Texas has one famous one and people extrapolate that to mean the whole state is absolutely smothered in interchanges, until it looks like a scene from The Fifth Element?
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.
Still, to this layman it seems like a colossal engineering cost to build all those bridges and ramps for relatively modest gain.
Stack interchanges increase acheivable throughput because you can often build enough road to allow backups for one direction to not impinge on the other flows.
It's also easier to build effective signage so there's fewer surprise lane changes.
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 enjoy the TFA
Instead, please consider helpfully linking to the animations[1] you're talking about, so that others can find them without having to waste time listening to content they already read.
At a cloverleaf, the weaving between people entering a highway from one leaf and people trying to get onto the next leaf is an utter destroyer of traffic flow, especially when you add in some human behavior, where some people are assholes and won't let people merge in front of them, even when they're trying to merge to the other lane themselves.
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 is also the weave required between exiting off a loop and other traffic entering onto it. you could theoretically get rid of it by bridging one loop over the other but then you may as well just bridge more of it without the 270 degree turn at that point.
and there are also compromise designs like the cloverstack where only two opposite sides are the 270 loops to avoid the weaving problem.
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.
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 that just directly be toll roads or tolled "express lane" projects which often have parts of those toll revenue backed bonds going to fund things like highway interchanges and on/off ramps for the freeways.
The vast majority of the property taxes I pay go towards the schools, the public parks, the fire/police/public service, libraries, and local roads. City+County taxes are ~0.710%, just the ISD and community college is ~1.16%. A massive chunk of those city/county taxes are roads and public service people, with a bit of parks department and other things like that thrown in.
The state gets its cut mostly by sales taxes though. 6.25% is the state sales tax, with things like groceries exempted. Cities can levy up to 2% additional, for a max rate of 8.25%. Of that 2% my city levies, half of that goes to public transit.
In areas where large highways were built over small highways, it isn't so easy to add an additional road.
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 (so the left turns aren't crossing each other in the center), and the Congress Parkway-into-Eisenhower Expressway goes from elevated highway to sunken highway over the course of the interchange. There's even a subway line in the middle of the interchange!
I think the better explanation is that the size of highway interchanges in Texas aren't meaningfully constrained, so there's little pressure to find ways to squeeze in more compact interchanges. Furthermore, I think Texas is motivated to make its interchanges high-speed--the highways look designed for a 65/70 mph speed limit, even near the city core, whereas the Kennedy Expressway near the Circle interchange drops down to 45 mph partially to deal with the confusion of the road (there are exits 51B-J on I-90 in this stretch, yes, that many exits in a single mile of road).
The big thing is space required, and how much structure you actually need. Texas gets hurricanes, which are a big deal, but not nearly as big of a deal as earthquakes out in california, so, building tall things out of concrete is much more viable than most places. The only real issue in some parts of Texas is that the water table is really close to the surface, so, if you want to build tall, you need significant amounts of footing work so it doesn't sink.
Thankfully, I've worked from home for years now, but back in the day, this used to feature heavily in my daily commute. My wife and I worked at the same place, so typically used the US 75 express lane where it existed, and it was a bitch. To go south, you have to get off the highway onto the frontage road and then back onto the highway.
My partner (who moved to Houston around middle school age) and her mom both call it the feeder, but I always assumed it was a midwest thing since mom's side of the family is all from Michigan.
That said, the old Harvard Dialect survey does suggest this is fairly widespread (though definitely more common in the Houston area): http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q_99.html
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 famous one and people extrapolate that to mean the whole state is absolutely smothered in interchanges
Texas has a crazy number of highway interchanges. This is a partial selection of highway interchanges with frontage roads just in Houston. There are probably a hundred more across the state:
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.874104,-95.556634
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.726083,-95.459588
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.784165,-95.561947
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.785693,-95.777690
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.771646,-95.154931
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=29.940698,-95.293735
https://maps.apple.com/?ll=30.128100,-95.229756
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.721469,-95.4944352,3a,75y,11...
Up on the ramp you're coming from the tollway that is, you can see quite a lot from up there.
But on the street view the Google car is heading SW at grade on the 2-lane frontage road, the main freeway lanes are to the right and become elevated, and the overhead ramp had to fly over everything that was already there.
Notice how the frontage roads give a street address and access to properties facing the "limited access" highway.
Apparently no other country makes local stores directly accessible from the highway so 5 layer interchanges just don't exist anywhere else. This is why Texas interchanges are the highest, because they're the only interchanges in the world with 5 layers.
Basically lets trucks use gravity to store their energy when making sharp turns and then get it back for nearly free.
-it doesn't have any lane merges, you can change from one highway to another without merging, your bridge just becomes a new lane on the next road
-these bridges are very long leading up to the turn, so it displaces a lot of traffic and shifts a lot of the lane changing upstream.
It is Texas, so anything is possible.
> At service interchanges it is desirable to design the interchanges with the crossroad above the freeway due to:
> - The crossroad above the freeway results in longer sight distances to the exit ramp and gore area.
> - The crossroad above the freeway allows gravity to assist the operation of both accelerating vehicles (the on-ramp has a down-grade) and decelerating vehicles (the off-ramp has an up-grade). In addition, the resulting grades generally provide longer sight distances.
But that's the main thing I can find right now.
Never understood when major exporters of $thing would also specifically heavily subsidize $thing
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.
I'm even a car guy—I own a stick shift BMW—I just don't have much interest in getting into it to do literally any activity or errand other than walking around the neighborhood.
I see the appeal of both kinds of lifestyle. Some of my best friends live in nice Chicago neighborhoods where they don't need cars. They are not rich or even significantly "well-off" by most standards, and their homes did not and do not cost as much as a house in a suburban area.
The "rules" prevent profiteers from destroying the standard of living for people who moved AWAY from density. Why should such people be herded around the country, hounded out of their homes for someone else's (increasingly a corporation's) profit? That's akin to black people being herded out of their neighborhoods for the construction of a highway.
My confidence about this take is pretty high throughout the continental United States, but in Chicago it is something like 100%, since this is a local policy issue I work on here.
The defense of zoning is not "post hoc," since we're talking about today and in the future. The "racism" attack on it is ad hominem.
I'm not against development, or density in areas that are designated for it. I'm against the vilification of entire neighborhoods under a false narrative that veils a craven profit motive, in combination with an entitled gimme-gimme-gimme delusion that cheap housing is going to rain down on people who could but don't work for it... if only we wipe out those horrible houses inhabited by rich racists.
What, exactly, qualifies as "sprawl" to you? Houses with yards? How do you propose we build those to make them "non-sprawly?" Most of your statement is true, though: "People who like suburban density went ahead and made zoning codes to basically prevent building anything but" that density. So?
Those codes exist in SOME areas. They give people a choice of what kind of area they live in. Yes, yes, they were all racist and evil back in the day. Today they serve a valid and non-nefarious purpose: giving people a choice.
"the few remaining places that don't require a car are rare and super expensive." Do you have specifics on that? Are you saying there are no small towns to live in? That condos and apartments in the downtowns and city centers and town centers and boroughs of United States cities are more expensive than houses?
Take L.A. for instance. It has become very popular to piss and moan about "single-family homes" and to pass craven developer handouts in the guise of sham "housing reform." Meanwhile, dead or dying malls sit with boarded-up anchor tenants (there's an abandoned Macy's a few miles from me) and vast empty parking lots growing weeds.
Also, downtown L.A. is not "full." Nor are other high-density areas across the county, if you look at vacancy numbers. And then there are the tracts of disused, formerly commercial or light-industrial parcels all over the city and county. And yet already-residential areas are targeted for destruction.
And I do mean destruction. In a drought- and heat-plagued area, there is no excuse to promote the wipeout of every last tree and the paving-over of every last yard for the construction of 10 units where a single house stood. Yes, recent state legislation allowed just that, WITH NO REVIEW REQUIRED OR POSSIBLE. A developer's dream.
Meanwhile, vast tracts that have already suffered these effects of "density," the aforementioned malls and parkingn lots, sit empty.
And on top of all this, nothing is being done about the corporate buy-ups of entire neighborhoods. This is even worse than the "shortage" itself, because it takes what housing does exist off the market PERMANENTLY. Corporations don't typically die and leave their homes to their kids. But people do, and corporations are scooping up those houses as fast as they can, exacerbating a home-ownership crisis that deprives Americans of their best way to build wealth.
Single family homes can exist in non-sprawling configurations (e.g. old streetcar suburbs), but in combination with the other rules you wind up with businesses that are required to be far away from homes, to have large parking lots, and therefore be mostly hostile to anyone arriving outside of a car.
I look at the nice rural town I grew up in and the city brownstone neighborhood I live in now, and see two places with lots of real estate demand that could not, in much of America, be built today. The very nature of why these places are appealing comes from the fact they were built before these zoning codes. The businesses and schools are in walking distance of houses and have far too little parking.
I don’t see why we can’t relax some of the rules in some places and let people have a choice.
My neighborhood was an example: A defunct theater behind our multi-unit house was sold to a developer, who built a massive residental building there. Our alderman had promised that new residential developments would be required to include parking with the sale of a unit. That was a lie.
As a result, many of the new residents decided that instead of buying a parking space in their building (where they WERE available), they'd just park on our streets... where we HAD to park because we had no other option. So now our standard of living took a huge hit, because we could no longer come home from work or the grocery store or other trips, and park and go into our homes. We had to circle the neighborhood in ever-larger radii for hours per week looking for parking. Real fun at 1 a.m... in the winter.
I don't know if you've noticed but there are some actual real problems that the US is running into.
Building stuff is cheap relative to having to maintain it over its lifetime and then eventually replacing it. The more you build the more it costs to maintain it all.
That means that from purely an economical perspective there is an optimum where you provide the most transportation for the least amount of money. The US method of building more and more is slowly driving up the cost side of the equation and delivering less and less benefits. That's not hippy-liberal bullshit, but that is just a fact.
Just imagine that instead of adding extra lanes, they would build a good train connection between your cities. You could still drive as much as you want but there would be a lot less people on the road.
Its not that we're obsessed with cars, its that cars are the only option for reasonable, safe transportation right now.
This describes reality in Houston, and I do not get the impression that you’d like Houston at 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.
In fact, the Eastern seaboard is one of the few places in the US where rail travel is a valid option much of the time.
> 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).
https://www.amtrak.com/acela-train
> Acela offers downtown to downtown service between Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and other intermediate cities.
> But a 1500 km-long one from Atlanta to Boston? Nope, can't do.
https://www.amtrak.com/crescent-train
> Convenient trips from the Big Apple to the Big Easy. With service from New York City to New Orleans, the Crescent gives travelers a unique window to the beauty and heritage of the American South. You can tour Monticello or enjoy a wine tasting in the charming Virginia college town of Charlottesville. Or enjoy a stroll through the vibrant shopping and dining scene of Underground Atlanta. As you travel further south, you'll reach New Orleans, where you never run out of things to do. From jazz clubs to Cajun restaurants to Mississippi riverboat rides, the city was simply built to entertain.
So you'll have to change trains in NY to get to Boston, but one can definitely go from Atlanta to Boston by train.
In the end though, practically nobody would take a train from Atlanta to Boston. Even if you made it 200mph HSR, a direct flight would still be faster. And until both ends of that journey really make the city more walkable you're probably going to want to rent a car at your destination anyways so being at an airport at the edge of town versus the train station closer to downtown it doesn't make enough impact for most people.
Don't gete wrong I'm generally pro-train for good city pairs, but chances are I'd never take a train from say Dallas to Phoenix or Denver or Chicago. Flying will just practically always be faster. I'd take one to Houston or Austin or San Antonio though.
I’d argue the real reason people have cars is because if rent for a nice 1-bed only costs 700-1500 it doesn’t make sense to not also own a car. When people talk about a city that’s not “car-obsessed”, they’re usually referring to some place where even the wealthy can barely afford a car.
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? There was always slow traffic because of this.
If it was me, I would always make it so that you lose equal number of lanes To the outgoing overpasses as you will get in incoming overpasses to prevent inefficient lane changes. So if you have six lanes, you get 4 branch off, 2 for each direction on the other highway and keep 2. Then you get the four back from the intersection. No lane change.
But the way they have it, there’s so much merging it , which is harder to drive, and I’m not sure it’s more efficient.
Any thoughts?
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.
But if there are indeed being two lanes added due to the merge, agree that doesn’t make much sense.
If the former, also agree that they should’ve added two lanes instead of one. But that decision could’ve come down to physical limitations, cost, or something else.
While more permanent lanes seems more desirable, for lack of space or money or whatever, this compromise at least increases the capacity of the ramp to absorb the queue before it starts to back up into through traffic.
Of course, in practice the capacity is often not enough.
Around here, two lanes split, then they split into two north and two south, and then they merge again before rejoining the cross highway.
I mean you still end up with that at rush hour but I think that's what they are trying to do. There is no number or lanes they could add that would prevent it from being a parking lot twice a day.
When too many layers are needed, CALTRANS often goes for a tunnel underneath. See CA-92 at I-280, and SF's 19th Avenue at I-280.
At US-101 and I-280 in San Francisco, a frontage road does go through the ramps. The interchange was spread out horizontally to avoid piling up all the levels.
I think literally every interchange in Germany has got its own article: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Autobahnkreuz_in_D...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Interchange
2: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/38.791557/-77.175887
Truly pitiful numbers for a project of this scale lol.
That's 1½-2½ commuter rail lines or about 3-4 subway lines.
Such interchanges are truly a monument to stupidity.
Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure.
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 "road rage" plus a lot more people die or get maimed driving a car/getting hit by a car than they do because of trains.
This is not true and is one of the problems with getting mass transit to work in the US.
Most of the employment in the US is now smeared across the city. I'll give Austin as an example.
Austin employment has spaced out clumps. Downtown. The UT campus. The Domain (old IBM/NI area). The Arboretum. Oak Hill. The "new" airport.
Austin housing has similar clumps, generally dictated by how much you earn. You're probably further out than you would like since the real estate in the center is ridiculous. So, Leander, Hutto, Garfield, or Dripping Springs.
Now, plot the flows on a map. Note the massive pileup in the center as people attempt to change sectors across the city. Most modern cities are like this. There are not two or three obvious points that would get a big chunk of the traffic.
I chose Austin, but San Diego, Pittsburgh, Nashville, etc. all look similar.
And, the news is worse than that. The "white collar" jobs that could be concentrated have also been the most displaced by surburban office parks or by WFH. The types of jobs that most people are employed in (service and warehousing--Walmart/Amazon/FedEx/UPS/etc.) are generally specifically positioned where real estate is cheaper which is almost by definition off of any mass transit connector.
That used to be true in the US. But over the past 50 years, the dominance of the automobile combined with traffic patterns (and related real estate trends) have incentivized the opposite to happen. Suburban commercial development facilitates easier parking, and quicker commutes over secondary highways rather than the traditional congested main arterials into city centers. Many cities in the US already have or are starting to "doughnut". While post-war suburbanites absolutely did commute into the city, many contemporary suburbanites live, work, and shop in surburbs.
I remember a time when shopping at an American department store meant you had to "go into the city" to a place like this:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/dc/99/a2/dc99a2e79cac5ab0fe5f...
Now, when they want to go to a department store, many Americans drive to somewhere like this, closer to their homes:
https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/11/60/12/19333814/3/1200x0.jpg
The same trend has also happened to many other industries across the board.
Department stores are fewer and fewer now. Most of the big malls around the Washington, DC, area are gone.
Not in the slightest in DFW. That High 5 is going to service people coming from many dozens of square miles of suburbs to many dozens of square miles of offices. People are going to be coming from Plano, McKinney, Princeton, Wylie, Garland, Richardson, Sachse, Rowlett and heading to Addison, Northwest Dallas, Carrolton, Irving, Coppell, and Grapevine. That's just the traffic from the Northeast going to West.
It's not like most of these people in the suburbs of Dallas work in Dallas. They mostly don't, they live and work all over the Metroplex. And given its expensive to sell and buy land, people will often buy a house once and stay there even though their jobs might bounce all over the Metroplex.
This is incorrect due to the size of land parcels that Americans aspire to. The typical 0.1+ acre size lot makes it so people are so spread out, no public transit will ever make sense.
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.
These are people coming from several dozen square miles and dispersing into several dozen square miles, flowing through these chokepoints. They're commuting 40, 50, or more miles. You'd need these people to change several bus lines and several train lines. Those busses would be snaking through messy suburbs for them to be actually useful. Those neighborhoods to pick them up are sprawling with poor walkability and a 15 minute+ walk just to the major road bus stop for a lot of those people. And when they get off the train, they're probably going to need a bus to navigate the sparse fields of giant empty parking lots to their actual workplaces.
In fact, for a certain group of people this path practically already has a train service. US-75 runs parallel to the Red/Orange line. Assuming the person starts from Plano to go to their office job in Las Colinas/Irving (a massive assumption here, but practically best case), they won't even need to change trains. Let's ignore how they get to Parker Road station for now (Park and Ride? 15 minute walk through their neighborhood + same time as the park and ride?) and start the clock from there. They're going to commute to the Microsoft offices. They need to get in by 9:00 AM. So they instantly warp to the Parker Road Station, hop on the orange line at 6:46 AM. They get to North Lake College station at 8:07 AM. They then wait for the 229 bus at 8:21, take that 8 stops, hop off, walk a half a mile (~11min), and get there at 8:40. Nearly two hours and they only had to change once. And once again, that's instantly warping to Parker Road Station. Add another several minutes of drive or even more for a bus to connect to the train.
Next, they're going to take the highways, including toll ways. They leave from Parker Road Station, head down US-75, hop on Bush Turnpike, and it is an ~30min trip on average.
Or they want to avoid tolls. They take US-75 to 635 (taking this High Five talked about here), and it takes 30 minutes to an hour.
Now, theoretically this should get a little bit better. There will be a new train line with more of an East-West path that would be useful here. But it'll be a train change at Bush Turnpike Station, and service on this new Silver Line won't be great at first. Potentially a 30 minute wait for the next train at peak times. And it'll still take 50ish minutes after that transfer. So you'd look at maybe a 5 minute train ride from Parker Road to Bush Turnpike, wait 15 minutes for the next train, then still 50 minutes. Plus the 30 minutes for the bus ride and walk. Over an hour and a half, magically warping to Parker Road immediately when the train was about to leave and hopefully only waiting 15 minutes for the Silver Line train. We'll see that it is really like when it opens in late 2025 (hopefully). I'm still excited for it, I'm looking forward to not needing to drive and park all the way out to the airport for travel and having another way to Addison Circle for things like Oktoberfest and other events there will be great.
But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving. This is assuming someone lives close to the train lines in Plano. Their office is one bus line away from the station. Tons of people live even further out from there. Lots of people work at places which would require multiple bus transfers. The train doesn't even go halfway out into the sprawl, and the surrounding cities don't want to join DART.
But honestly, it makes little sense to me to have people living in Fairview, McKinney, Prosper, and Melissa trying to commute to an office job in Dallas/Irving/Grapevine/Westlake/etc. It's insane to me, but people choose it.
But a lot of people here just have a big aversion to taking transit. You're seen as an oddball to many for acknowledging it exists. We live right next to a bus stop that goes to a nice train station. My wife was looking at taking a job that would be immediately outside a train station. She looked at me like I was insane for suggesting she think about taking the train. I usually take it when I go into Dallas and people think it is incredible I survive. I take the bus to the city park with my kids and people wonder what happened to my car.
I do understand the problem in the way the infrastructure is build in the area and that it isn't easy to just change and go to trains, that's not what I was suggesting.
I was specifically responding too:
"Assuming every single commuter is coming from and going to the same place, sure."
And that if of course nonsense. The whole point of a network is that you can route from one place to another. I didn't propose a whole new transport plan for the whole area. And I am not pretending that within 1 year you can change all of Texas infrastructure. I was simply pointing out a fundamentally flawed argument.
> But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving.
Well, this is the best case in particular situation you are describing where that kind of infrastructure has been under-invested in for 100+ years. Its not the best case for public transit.
It should NEVER take 30 min to swap from one train to another. In all of Switzerland you 90% of all connections are 10min or less. That's for the whole country including buses. If the train infrastructure was more modern and electric, trains could likely be faster. If the buses had their own lanes (not like Texas doesn't have enough lanes) the avg speed of the bus could likely be improved quite a lot.
This is just about infrastructure choices, apparently Texas can build tons of super complex incredibly expensive highway interchanges but an electric train that leaves every 15min is apparently impossible.
DoT in Texas is still on that 1960 highway building mania and is still destroying black neighborhoods so that subburban wight people can get to their office jobs at the oil company or whatever. The first step is recognizing the problem, and they are still working on that.
The whole area seems like its pretty dense with a lot of people, I don't see why it couldn't have good transit. Even just with buses on existing roads. As long as you make some room for them and give them the appropriate priority and so on. A lot could be done for not that much money, if people actually wanted.
On of the biggest problem in the US is that your tax system if fundamentally unfair and massively subsidizes suburbia. That's arguable one of the most important things that need to change. I strongly suggest looking at the work done by Urban3 and Strong Towns.
See, that's already an issue. Even in small European cities, you'd expect the trains at peak time to arrive every 5min, in larger cities even every 1-2min
A train every 30min is what I'd consider "3am on easter sunday" level of service, not peak service.
Sure, right now there's not enough demand for that. But as they say, if you build it they'll come.
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.
There's a few trucks hauling freight, but they try to miss the cities during rush hour.
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...
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.
But that could probably be handled by a US Highway and a diamond interchange instead of multiple interstates and a 6-layer interchange.
We're in a catch 22 trap that will cost trillions and likely a century to get out of.
We've actually had similar issues in many post-war suburbs in Germany when trying to convert them to transit in recent years.
The solution isn't to remove all driving, just driving in areas with too much traffic. So park & ride concepts were created. You build train stations at major hubs and at locations at the edge of town and connect them.
e.g. my mum's commute changed from "drive for 45min in traffic" to "drive 5min to the neighborhood train station that shares its parking lot with the hypermarket next door, wait 10min, ride the train for 5min, arrive at the train station next to her office".
Her commute was cut in half, the business can collect revenue from their mostly unused parking lot during the week (it's sized for saturday shopping traffic), the train station doesn't have to build their own parking lot (the operator pays a few cents per train ticket to the business), and every person using this line is one less car on the road.
This model is already profitable (!), but you can expand further.
You can set up bus or tram routes that offer cross-connections between train stations to further connect schools, university dorms, malls, etc.
You can then improve connectivity within of suburbs. Introduce cross-connections between cul-de-sacs for pedestrians and cyclists, connecting suburbs, apartment complexes, local businesses and train stations.
The density won't be high enough to make walking to the train station viable, but cycling to the station certainly will be. That's not a solution for everyone, but it increases freedom of movement for teenagers and retirees.
So far, all of this is possible in the US today.
But we can dream beyond that:
You'd really want to change the zoning around these hubs over time.
Ideally you'd want to build 5-over-1s with an underground parking garage, shops and stores on the bottom floor, and apartments on the higher floors.
For businesses that need more space you can give the bottom floor a larger footprint and add a green roof which provides something of a community backyard for the occupants of the apartments. Bonus points if you build it as a courtyard in the middle with balconies facing the courtyard.
You'd really want to avoid high rises to ensure you get a growing circle of mid-density development around these hubs, somewhat reminescent of what main streets used to look like (or Disney's Main Street USA with two more floors ontop).
A few cities in the US have actually gotten this far already!
European cities, which suffered more destruction from post-war car-centric city planners than from the war itself, have been using these steps to slowly recover.
These steps are also how cities around the world grew during the industrialization, and how the US got the main streets of old in the first place.
Getting this far will take a whole generation, but where do we go from here?
While this would be the end for solving local commuters, it'd only be the beginning for inter-city journeys.
HSR is 2×-3× faster than cars and can be faster than flying for journeys below 1500-2000km, but it only works if you've already got local hubs with a dense transit network connecting them to the rest of the city.
How many years is the break even point before profit is generated charging riders even 100$ per trip?
Some of these highspeed rail projects proposed across the USA have a 1-2000 year break-even excluding maintenance over 2000 years @ 100$/rider/trip
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 can be dangerous.
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.
Numbers taken from wikipedia.
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."
But I do think you are on the right track. I think public transportation in the form of buses doesn't make a lot of sense. But if Musk had been able to deliver on his promise of self-driving cars, then a giant city operated (or at least funded) fleet of small autonomous vehicles offering door-to-door service and route flexibility could change everything.
Car culture builds car cities. Once you have a car city it's nearly impossible to fix it... it's too big and expensive and low density to fix.
Allow higher density housing to be built without opposition (for example up zoning 1 level should be automatically approved: single family home can be torn down to build a duplex, etc). Then reduce and remove parking requirements.
Once that's done density will just go up on its own and... cars don't scale. Traffic will absolutely murder everyone and they'll start demanding public transit.
However this whole path is killed via NIMBY.
I see so many new residential projects with small lots or apartments. That's great! But still the zoning forces just housing, so its just homes on homes on homes for miles.
Where does the bus go? If you have dense city cores with business, commercial, and shopping it makes sense.
Living near Austin, I could take a bus to a place like the domain and have shaded walkways where I could walk to most shops without dying of heat stroke.
If I'm not going to the domain, I'm looking at businesses with huge parking lots strung along stroads. Walking from the bus drop off to a store might just kill you on a day like yesterday where it was 108F, and parking lot temps are closer to 130F.
Also getting to where you want to go over the huge spread out cities may involve waiting for 5 or 6 different busses.
And then hopefully your park and ride is being watched and you're windows aren't broken out.
This interchange provides food and prosperity to millions of people. And it's an incredible feat.
The cynical attitude is just cliche and tacky give it up.
EDIT: There are some more theories here:
https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4238/why-are...
Obviously there may be many contributing factors, but I expect one is dominant. This one is most convincing to me: The flyover ramp generally needs to go over some things and under other things. Additionally, for both safety and rider comfort, the ramp needs to be vertically smooth, not having fast drops or rapid climbs. That means ramp A might pass over ramp B by a lot more than the minimum amount because ramp A also needs to pass over ramp C just a bit later, where it does so by a much lower amount. With many overlapping constraints like this, most ramp intersections are much higher than the minimum clearance even though none can be lowered without either (1) making one of the clearances below minimum or (2) forcing a ramp to rapidly climb/descent.
The theories I've heard as to why TXDOT does this include: they wanted sufficient clearance for mobile oil drilling rigs, military vehicles[0], "just in case", and of course, bragging rights.
You can zoom in and click on the blue dots to see clearances on major TXDOT bridges here:
https://gis-txdot.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/0126e7969bfb4...
[0] The US interstate system wasn't really planned for use by the Department of Defense in time of war, but the bill was named "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways" to help it get passed in Congress. This isn't to say that during a national emergency, the highways couldn't be cleared of civilian traffic.
https://highways.dot.gov/highway-history/interstate-system/5...
The vertical height of things we want to send down the highway are also sometimes larger than the tallest trucks on the highway.
https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/news-journal.co...
Thanks for the pointer though.
I've never seen one built all at once. It's always a bunch of incremental changes over time.
I have seen scenarios in Texas when there is seemingly no other infrastructure or geography that could explain the over building.
The broader question I've always had, that's not addressed in the article, is "so why do California and Texas build so many stack interchanges while the rest of the country mostly does not?"
> And the design that generally provides the most capacity, on the smallest footprint, (often for the highest cost), is the stack.
This would explain why there are plenty in coastal California, where there are tons of people to move around and where space is very much at a premium.
I've lived in CA and the Northeast. I didn't get the impression that either region uses them preferentially. Certainly I see them more in CA, but I feel like that is probably because the number of interchanges is higher, ha!
Stack interchanges are very common for high-traffic areas, some of which wouldn't necessarily show up on your mental radar.
In fact, being from Houston, I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't know what you meant if you said frontage road. It's that pervasive.
From the OP:
>They say everything’s bigger in Texas
Me say:
$ echo "They say everything’s bigger in Texas" | sed 's/They/Texans/' | sed 's/bigger/biggest/'
echo ", including their egos."
I can’t take an engineering article seriously when it leads in with bias-revealing invectives. Does EVERYTHING have to be politicized?
I mean the less you move the cranes around the cheaper I’m sure
Cronyism.
Am I honestly the only one who wants to see a video of him getting punched in the face? He really needs to be punched in the face.