I agree with most of your post, except for the Oak Hill comment. I live in the Oak Hill area and can get to the Capital area Downtown in a reasonable amount of time, more often than not. If you have to, there are ways to do it that avoid Mopac. I have a worse time getting from Beltway 8 to Clear Lake on the Gulf Freeway, in the middle of the afternoon (hell, it seems like any damn time of the day!) than I do making that trip on Mopac. Of course, I don't always take Mopac. I'll add that what people tend to forget about Houston traffic is that the city is huge. Sure, it's traffic has improved a lot, thank goodness, but the city is still 50 miles across. It takes me damn near as long to go from Hobby/Clear Lake to the Richmond-Rosenberg suburbs (relatives in both places) as it does to get from Southwest Austin to the suburbs of north/northwest San Antonio on a good day. I'm surprised that they said Thursday is the worst traffic day in Austin. I think they must have been asleep making the survey. Friday, IMO, is easily the most awful traffic day, at least in the afternoon. Like you said, Austin has a couple of bad traffic areas, and anyone who lives there should do what I do... just don't get on I-35. Mopac has gotten much worse the last few years, but it still isn't terrible every time I use it during rush hour. Some days aren't too bad. We would have more of those days if people would just quit rubber necking at accidents, often accidents on the other side of the freeway. Damn fools!
if anyone wants to see bad traffic.. try Mexico City.. I literally was about to throw up while riding in a cab. Running red lights, cutting in an out of traffic, barely missing pedestrians.. There was one time the light was red for a good while as we were running through it.. there was a cop driving in our blindspot and thought we were busted.. well he ran it too.. lol
Good thing about DMV is that public transit system. Puts Texas' ****ty public transport system in perspective.
Good for the cops, then. That's what made the most sense to me (and there are some pretty blatant violators), but I've never known anyone actually pulled over so I wasn't sure.
LOL it's that bad? ****. I might change my hours, leave at 4pm. Hopefully that does the trick Sheesh.
Yeah I agree. I live in DFW and traffic here is worse than in Houston, imo. Driving in Houston, you pretty much knew which freeways would be backed up and at what time. Traffic also generally flows into one direction (towards 610 in the mornings and out in the evenings). In DFW, it is so spread out. You have all these cities around here (Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, Irving, Richardson) and the freeways here go all over the place because of the spread out nature of this place. People say Houston is spread out, but almost the entire metro is on one large grid, with an easy to learn hub and spoke freeway system.
Not surprised to see Seattle in there. With the all the water around the city, there aren't many alternatives if freeways get clogged down. At least now that 520 is a toll road and people avoid it, I can zip across Lake Washington quickly. However, going north to pick up the kids from the grandparents sucks. If I-5 is backed up, there's no alternate freeway or tollway to take.
In the afternoon, avoid 290 inbound + 610 west loop south bound at all cost. I took that route one time.
New York and DC both have tremondous traffic. In NY, it is impossible to make a left turn without running someone over. And DC is constant gridlock at rush hour.
Well, yeah. Any city that grew up after the 19th century spread out in ways you couldn't before, making public transit implementation almost impossible. Urban Sprawl + Rail = no go. It works best in the original big cities on the East Coast since they're more compact.
Not entirely true. Houston's core (inside 610) is a good area where rail can be (and already is) successful. It's just hard to implement rail into the suburban areas, since they are so spread out.
Houston is actually dense for a sunbelt city, when looking at its urban area. Rail can work on Westheimer, Bellaire, etc. The densest part of Houston is the Southwest anyway (homes built close together plus apartments). With the amount of people coming into town in the mornings, and out in the evenings, commuter rail could easily work for the suburban commuters. Houston basically already has that with the Park and Rides.
Houston honestly should invest in a system like Boston's MBTA or Chicago's "L" system. I would love to go around places in the city without a car, but public transportation in Houston is just so poor. I know Houston's rather large but it can be done.
That's because Dallas people are too moronic to see just how bad they are at driving. They are the absolute WORST when it comes to freeway pacing, and creating traffic jams out of thin air. I despise driving in that God-forsaken place. It's like they were TAUGHT to drive in a person's blind spot, and to speed up and slow down accordingly, to ENSURE that they remain in your blind spot. That whole city is full of borderline mentally handicapped people.
