I used to just think of this as yeah sure things are just bigger in America, it’s a huge place with lots of people… but then I realized that the cities with ridiculous numbers of lanes like this aren’t any bigger than cities in the rest of the world. Houston (pictured) isn’t even in the Top 200 biggest world cities.
I’ve looked it up and the Katy Freeway on the picture has an average of 219 000 vehiclra using it per day. Let’s be very generous and assume an average of 1.5 person in each car, so around 329 000 people are moved each day thanks to this highway.
A single metro line or two tramway line moves more people per day than that.
Its crazy. At its widest it has 26 lanes. It amazes me that they just kept widening it, instead of thinking “We’ve added 5 lanes, we should probably find an alternative solution”.
In the city where that exists, they really isn’t much else that’s viable. Decades of bad urban planning mean that comprehensive public transportation is not cost-effective in that area. And “not cost-effective” doesn’t just mean “expensive”, it means “would cost an order of magnitude more than the city budget”. So the only real solution for them in the short term is to build the world’s most ridiculous laughingstock of a road.
Key phrase being “short term” - nobody seems to build with a 20+ year plan to improve the city in America, whereas in European cities every time I visit one I haven’t been to in a decade, I usually notice I’m reaping the benefits of major infrastructure improvements which take decades to plan and build. Short term, selfish (what will get me elected again, or what will pay me the biggest bonus) thinking, and corruption, is what keeps American cities shitty
It’s sprawl. Building up costs too much via some combination of building taxes, NIMBYs, and construction overhead, so people build out instead. Building out means more and more miles of infrastructure (Roads, water, electric, natural gas, signs, gas stations, etc., etc.) per capita.
Then when the people in the sprawled-out suburbs want to visit the city centers anyway, because that’s where jobs and shopping inevitably are (People live where people live), they have to build massive roads to get in and out.
people argue that japan has an easier time doing public transport because it’s a slim island that’s roughly linear from north to south, so it’s easy to serve it by one public transport line.
But the same is true for the US, where most people live either on the east coast or on the west coast. You basically have two slim, linear areas that can be served by 1 line of public transport each.
I think the big problem with Canada, the US, the UK, and other former British colonies is that the legal system gives private property owners a lot of rights.
In places like France or China the government can just say “we’re building this” without a lot of public input. But the second CA put out their high speed rail proposal it was met with hundreds of lawsuits over eminent domain.
Another problem is that the US has stupidly strong private property rights. Everyone whose land is going to need to be confiscated to build the railroad tracks will try to bilk the high-speed rail authority out of every dollar they can, and because the US has a very strong civil court system which strict procedural law, it only costs a landowner a few thousand dollars to cause millions of dollars worth of legal headaches for the rail authority
The difference is that most highways were built in the past before such things like environmental studies were required and before many of the attack vectors used by property owners and other obstructionist parties to block construction were discovered or created. The US no longer builds major roadways, and merely widens existing ones, which in many cases do not require more land to be requisitioned.
interesting. here’s a short reminder that railway tracks existed before highways (even before combustion engines in general). it’s sad that they were neglected so much. maybe they can be built directly adjacent to existing highways? at least along the coastlines …
This idea has been adopted to some degree. The Brightline West high-speed rail project (in construction since 2024, planned to open 2028) connecting Las Vegas with Los Angeles uses existing land along the existing I-15 expressway, which is extremely congested.
I believe it was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that private rail operators were relieved of service requirements for passenger trains, as long as the companies maintained the tracks and gave priority to passenger trains operated by Amtrak, the American state rail operator.
The companies have completely neglected the tracks and many are in poor condition from heavy use by freight trains, and as a result, maximum speeds have been drastically lowered to maintain a level of safety. Many ordinary trains in the US run at around 80-90 km/h, which is miserably slow.
In addition, Amtrak trains are supposed to be able to overtake slower freight trains by using splits in the track (where a section of track splits into two temporarily, the slower train taking one side and the faster train taking the other to pass it). However, as freight rail operators have realised, the number of engineers and conductors needed to run the trains is directly proportional to the number of locomotives, and thus they prefer running fewer, longer, trains than many shorter ones. As a result, freight trains are unbelievably long, some are a good few kilometres in length, which is longer than the entire sections of split track, making such sections worthless as it is impossible to use them to bypass the slower trains.
Where Amtrak has complete control of the tracks, such as in the northeast, service is comparable to European rail providers. For example the Acela service, which runs between Washington (DC) and Boston with stops at Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia. There are 20 trains per day and it reaches a top speed of around 250 km/h. The total journey takes 6.75 hours and travels 735 km (12 stops) meaning the average speed is a comfortable 109 km/h.
I used to just think of this as yeah sure things are just bigger in America, it’s a huge place with lots of people… but then I realized that the cities with ridiculous numbers of lanes like this aren’t any bigger than cities in the rest of the world. Houston (pictured) isn’t even in the Top 200 biggest world cities.
I’ve looked it up and the Katy Freeway on the picture has an average of 219 000 vehiclra using it per day. Let’s be very generous and assume an average of 1.5 person in each car, so around 329 000 people are moved each day thanks to this highway.
A single metro line or two tramway line moves more people per day than that.
Its crazy. At its widest it has 26 lanes. It amazes me that they just kept widening it, instead of thinking “We’ve added 5 lanes, we should probably find an alternative solution”.
In the city where that exists, they really isn’t much else that’s viable. Decades of bad urban planning mean that comprehensive public transportation is not cost-effective in that area. And “not cost-effective” doesn’t just mean “expensive”, it means “would cost an order of magnitude more than the city budget”. So the only real solution for them in the short term is to build the world’s most ridiculous laughingstock of a road.
Key phrase being “short term” - nobody seems to build with a 20+ year plan to improve the city in America, whereas in European cities every time I visit one I haven’t been to in a decade, I usually notice I’m reaping the benefits of major infrastructure improvements which take decades to plan and build. Short term, selfish (what will get me elected again, or what will pay me the biggest bonus) thinking, and corruption, is what keeps American cities shitty
It’s sprawl. Building up costs too much via some combination of building taxes, NIMBYs, and construction overhead, so people build out instead. Building out means more and more miles of infrastructure (Roads, water, electric, natural gas, signs, gas stations, etc., etc.) per capita.
Then when the people in the sprawled-out suburbs want to visit the city centers anyway, because that’s where jobs and shopping inevitably are (People live where people live), they have to build massive roads to get in and out.
Yep, just look at Tokyo.
people argue that japan has an easier time doing public transport because it’s a slim island that’s roughly linear from north to south, so it’s easy to serve it by one public transport line.
But the same is true for the US, where most people live either on the east coast or on the west coast. You basically have two slim, linear areas that can be served by 1 line of public transport each.
It’s even worse in Canada where 50% of the population literally lives in a straight line in Ontario/Quebec
And we’ve been “studying” high speed rail in that corridor for roughly 40 years now. One of these days we’ll build it, I swear!
I think the big problem with Canada, the US, the UK, and other former British colonies is that the legal system gives private property owners a lot of rights.
In places like France or China the government can just say “we’re building this” without a lot of public input. But the second CA put out their high speed rail proposal it was met with hundreds of lawsuits over eminent domain.
Another problem is that the US has stupidly strong private property rights. Everyone whose land is going to need to be confiscated to build the railroad tracks will try to bilk the high-speed rail authority out of every dollar they can, and because the US has a very strong civil court system which strict procedural law, it only costs a landowner a few thousand dollars to cause millions of dollars worth of legal headaches for the rail authority
isn’t that also true for highways?
The difference is that most highways were built in the past before such things like environmental studies were required and before many of the attack vectors used by property owners and other obstructionist parties to block construction were discovered or created. The US no longer builds major roadways, and merely widens existing ones, which in many cases do not require more land to be requisitioned.
interesting. here’s a short reminder that railway tracks existed before highways (even before combustion engines in general). it’s sad that they were neglected so much. maybe they can be built directly adjacent to existing highways? at least along the coastlines …
This idea has been adopted to some degree. The Brightline West high-speed rail project (in construction since 2024, planned to open 2028) connecting Las Vegas with Los Angeles uses existing land along the existing I-15 expressway, which is extremely congested.
I believe it was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that private rail operators were relieved of service requirements for passenger trains, as long as the companies maintained the tracks and gave priority to passenger trains operated by Amtrak, the American state rail operator.
The companies have completely neglected the tracks and many are in poor condition from heavy use by freight trains, and as a result, maximum speeds have been drastically lowered to maintain a level of safety. Many ordinary trains in the US run at around 80-90 km/h, which is miserably slow.
In addition, Amtrak trains are supposed to be able to overtake slower freight trains by using splits in the track (where a section of track splits into two temporarily, the slower train taking one side and the faster train taking the other to pass it). However, as freight rail operators have realised, the number of engineers and conductors needed to run the trains is directly proportional to the number of locomotives, and thus they prefer running fewer, longer, trains than many shorter ones. As a result, freight trains are unbelievably long, some are a good few kilometres in length, which is longer than the entire sections of split track, making such sections worthless as it is impossible to use them to bypass the slower trains.
Where Amtrak has complete control of the tracks, such as in the northeast, service is comparable to European rail providers. For example the Acela service, which runs between Washington (DC) and Boston with stops at Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia. There are 20 trains per day and it reaches a top speed of around 250 km/h. The total journey takes 6.75 hours and travels 735 km (12 stops) meaning the average speed is a comfortable 109 km/h.
I have never been on a road like the one in the picture.
I’d have a nervous breakdown.