Every other year or so my family and I go to visit my grandparents in India. You wanna talk about people swerving through other cars when it's stand still, try Delhi traffic. Holy s**t. First, you got all sorts of things on the road. Cars, buses, carts, bicycles, people, dogs, even cows. Then, you got the fact that there are no LANES. Light turns green, and you just go, hence the everyone trying to squeeze through tight spaces. No turn signals, so you can't really go around someone to pass unless you're stopped. If you're driving, you have to honk your horn a good 5 or 6 times and wait for the person in front of you to get out of your damn way! After 2 weeks in India, Houston traffic looks like a cakewalk, and it's quiet too cause there's no horns! The drive home from the airport is always the sweetest :grin:
i can deal with everything else except the slow moving folks in the left lane..or the reallly slow moving folks in the middle lanes. i mean come on..just move over and do your 40mph and talk on the phone on the right lanes. other people prefer not to waste their short human life driving. but u know..the 2-3 people behind the slow person causes more traffic than just the guy alone. the "oh i guess i am stuck behind this guy..and i refuse to change lanes"
I have been making the commute from Clear Lake to 290 @ 529 for the past two weeks. One night on the way home it took 45 minutes to get from 290 to I-45. Tried the next night to take 610. What a waste. Dug out some change and am currently using the toll road - Beltway 8. Yes, accidents cause traffic - stupid drivers. However, the biggest cause of traffic is just the rush hour. Everyone empties themselves from the parking lots onto the highways. Then you have people in the right lane trying to get to the left lane to exit off the highway, while the people in the left lane are trying to get to the right lane to exit off t he highway. And when traffic gets backed up on an entrance ramp it will thus become backed up on the exit ramp. People then try to skirt the traffic by taking the service roads which then become congested themselves. The only way to solve this is mass public transit. However, cities like London with mass public transit have some terrible traffic. I never understood why Houston built the Fannin rail line when what it really needs is a rail line running from downtown to the suburbs. I loved taking the bus back in college.
i dont get the point of the metro rail either. you drive your car all the way there just to park about 1 mile away from your destination..then take the rail..wtf?? how about one from the major colleges, and medical center to local communities!??? can you imagine how much less traffic on the major highways would be..
I'm guessing that's the hope with all these new rail lines they are building. There is also studies being done to get a commuter rail going.
Houston's first rail was designed and built by Mayor Bob and his real estate buddies to pump up the value of development land from Downtown to the Med center, converting Houston's lower value, low density development to higher value high density development. It was defensible at the federal level as fighting urban sprawl when the joke was we already had 550 square miles of urban sprawl. As a people mover, a street car is a joke compared to the monorail system proposed by Mayor Whitmire, but Mayor Bob and his cronies had that laughed out of town and we got the slow, street conflicting, non-traffic helping system that on lends itself only to adding value to a couple of blocks on either side of its path. But it did help get us a Super Bowl. And it does provide access for remote employee parking for very expensive land of the Med center.
Why do you need a rail when you have Park and Rides that already do it? I get from the back of Kingwood to downtown in 30 minutes every morning, no matter how bad the traffic is.
Cohete is 100% correct about public transit. The Park and Ride system is complete bull**** because it doesn't do anything to alleviate traffic on the highways. It just takes traffic from the main highway and moves it to busses that congest the HOV lanes. Providing more light rail to the various suburban areas and increasing other public transit options are better options because they don't just move traffic from the main lanes onto the HOV lane; they actually move traffic from the freeways onto other routes. You may get downtown in 30 minutes every morning, but the bus you ride downtown is still part of the traffic problem. Traffic, at its core, is a problem of too little supply with too much demand.
How do you figure? For every bus you see in the HOV, that's like 50 less cars on the main lanes. And buses don't congest the HOV lanes. They fly down them at 65mph just like the cars do. Again, it's not like these buses have 2 or 3 people on them. How do you figure they don't help with traffic when each one is taking 50-something cars off the freeway? Traffic is too many cars on the freeway, not too many people. Which is worse for traffic - a bus with 100 people on it or 100 cars with 1 person in them? Each bus takes 50 cars off the freeway. I don't understand how that isn't helping traffic.
^ upload to YouTurd, click the "share" button below the video, paste it in a post here. To the OP: LOL! :grin: You don't know how to bob-and-weave like me. Only we expert drivers know how to do that. I zig-zag and slalom my Corolla through traffic every morning and get from Clay to Hwy6 to Briar Forest to Eldridge to Downtown in about 1:15. EDIT: Make that about :55 ... in the main lanes, no less. I'll time it tomorrow.
My rant is for the piss poor road and freeway conditions. Inside the loop you've got some really effed up roads and 59 has cracks all over it. The newer youtube embed code doesn't work with the preview, if you submit it and refresh it eventually shows up.
Okay let's see if this works! <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/kzlg3oQMze4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> EDIT: it worked! thanks, v3.o! for a second, i thought i was a dummy.
Your point is well taken. I just think that the overall benefit from light rail and alternatives is greater. One bus may exchange 50 cars for that 1 bus, but one light rail could take off a lot more cars without replacing them with that 1 bus. I can't tell you how many times I've been stuck in traffic on the HOV lane because a bus broke down or was involved in an accident getting on the HOV lane on 290.
Yes, you can. Please tell us. One could argue the same thing with a train or rail. One of the larger point$ to con$ider i$ that having a RAIL or TRAIN $eem$ to be much different in term$ of... of... well... I can't remember right now.
I hate the stretch of Kirby from 59 to Bissonnet because it's riddled with potholes. It's been that way for years
