Go back in time before the Katy Freeway expansion, save the MKT rail lines and turn them in to commuter rail lines from the suburbs to downtown. This is only for the West side, otherwise, more public rail transit.
Agree. A commuter rail system to all the major suburbs. Katy, The Woodlands, Kingwood, Sugarland, Pearland, clear lake, Baytown etc etc… with stops along the way like the energy corridor on I 10 for example. Spent some time in Chicago, and you could park at the train station out in the burbs, and ride the train into the city and always wondered why Houston didn’t have anything like this.
Because Chicago built their system almost 100 years ago. To replicate that in Houston would cost multi-Billions of dollars. Also Chicago and NYC transit is heavily subsidized by taxpayers and they still have gridlock on their highways.
I would love rail as well but no one wants to pay for it.
There used to be a Galveston-Houston Electric Railway that ran from downtown Houston to downtown Galveston from 1911 to 1936, it’s a shame we can’t go back in time for that one as well.
i had a similar thought of taking the 2 middle areas of I-10 and making it metro light rail with one express non-stop from downtown to a katy park & ride and the other with stops along like at silber for the entertainment stuff, and various other points of interest.
Light rail wouldn't work in this situation, it would have to be heavy commuter rail. Then you would have to spend millions adding overhead walkways over the freeway so pedestrians could access the rail.
no overhead needed. Platforms to unload and load are on the elevated section above the cross streets (the ones that run under the freeway. Simple set of escalators or stairs down to then walk to whatever is there. Light rail is ideal in this small stretch of 20-30 miles back and forth. No heavy commuter needed.
I know everytime they add a lane the car dealers sale so many extra cars that fill up those lanes.
You know the study that all of you people quote on induced demand has been shown to be totally flawed, but if you repeat it enough it might come true.
Even drivers who don't want to take public transit should support public transit, because it takes people off the road for them.
Various studies have found that commute time was *highly correlated* to the transit time for the same commute on public transit. The more efficient the public transit, the more people use it, the less rush hour traffic for those who can't or dont want to take public transit. Win-win.
Just dont:
* Try to force people into using it. Make it efficient and they'll do.
* Let it fill up with junkies. No tolerance for vagrancy, keep it safe and clean.
I support public transit expansion. Public transit expansion is not going to eliminate or even reduce congestion in a booming city where people live far away from where they work.
It's not a binary problem.
Building rail to the far flung suburbs encourages more people to move to the far flung suburbs. Some people that move to the suburbs \*might\* use rail for commute trips assuming it's convenient to their destination. But they aren't taking rail to the grocery store, for picking up kids from school, or going to whatever eatery they frequent from their cul-de-sac or gated luxury apartment complex where absolutely no amenities are in safe walking distance. Vehicle miles traveled actually increase when you encourage people to move to the suburbs, whether they commute by rail or not.
We'd better off building dense, walkable, mulit-use communities and then using transit to connect those communities. Rail to Katy is a terrible waste of $ and just promotes more sprawl.
No ones stating start with rail to katy. Eventually though, yes we'd need it. We need big sweeping changes like banning sfh's inside the loop. Forcing density and transit in this area then connecting with transit places like katy to it. I'd love in conjuction if current big suburbs of houston also instituted density centrally in their areas as a place to eventually build a train stop and transit from.
I def agree you start with transit centrally. But my point remains: expanding transit does decrease congestion. Also firm believer in congestion pricing.
>We need big sweeping changes like banning sfh's inside the loop.
We also need a world free of racism, where everyone has unlimited access to whatever resource they need, and can live a meaningful existence. Banning SFHs inside the loop is akin to fantasyland.
It has been done in other cities and it worked. Even in some cities I have visited banned cars entirely in the center of them.
You call it fantasyland but America used to do big things and American's were down. NOw were complacent with comfort regardless of how shitty our cities get.
Yeah, that is a big dream of mine but its not as insane as you make it. It could be done over time in parts transitioning the area over a decade.
I think sometimes our fellow public transit supporters don't recognize that the majority of people prefer to commute by car, and congestion will always exist in big enough cities. If congestion goes down, more people will see that as the easiest option and go that way (why adding lanes "adds more cars") What anti-transit folks don't want to recognize, though, is that there are people like us that are fine with (or need, or prefer) public transit. The goal should be increasing the choice everyone has, so that people that want or need public transit (or bikes, or whatever) can stay off the road.
The point should be to make public transit the best option by utilizing the advantages only public transit has. Light rail that runs along our loops and down highways like 290 and 45 would be a good start. A park and ride where you can get from Cypress to downtown in 30 minutes at peak rush hour would get a lot of people out of cars.
We have this now -- the 217 runs from the Cypress Park and Ride to downtown. It's less than hour door to door (leaving my house, getting to the office) and the time on the bus is close to 30 minutes. There's a slowdown going from I-10 to downtown, but it's fast HOV the rest of the way. It's busy enough it runs every 5'ish minutes during peak hours and it frequently has full buses.
Investing and bolstering public transit doesn’t just mean adding more busses to the existing roads. It means making dedicated, separate bus lanes that take away standard lanes. It means eliminating two lanes from each direction of I-10 and replacing them with light rail.
If we want fewer cars, we have to make it harder for cars to be on the road.
We don’t add public transit to the traffic, we replace the traffic with public transit.
Houston already has dedicated bus lanes on most radial freeways.
Your perspective should be put to work on city arterials where we should fully support the use of lane reductions and other traffic calming measures to make vehicles move slower and make more room for transit, bikes, and pedestrians.
They prefer it because their only option is awful public transit or car. Give them a real system like something in Chicago or NYC or a real good system in Europe or Asia and you’d see massive congestion decreases.
“Houstonians prefer horror films to comedies” “but Houston only allows horror films to be shown in theaters”
That is the reality ^
Chicago and NYC do not have less congestion than Houston.
[https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/?country=CA%2CMX%2CUS](https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/?country=CA%2CMX%2CUS)
[https://inrix.com/scorecard/#city-ranking-list](https://inrix.com/scorecard/#city-ranking-list)
Stop trying to sell transit, particularly transit to the suburbs, as the "cure" for congestion. Transit to the suburbs is a costly tool for giving a few people that might use it more options. We'd be much better off improving transit and development patterns inner city.
I can get on board with this. Transit is ultimately about options. But we shouldn't be selling "build a commuter rail to Cinco Ranch" as the solution to all our problems. Given that kind of investment, why not improve inner Houston's transit network and change development patterns?
The best long term solution is one that already exists in the city: public transit. We have busses and light rail here. We need to massively expand both. We need strong incentives to encourage suburb and exurb commuters to take them. Strong incentives like dedicated, separate bus lanes down the freeway. Tax incentives (positive incentives—London proved that an additional tax burden on car commuters doesn’t reduce congestion).
Those pandemic commutes were pretty nice. Though, people did get a little too comfortable swerving across 5 lanes to hit their exit at the last second.
Build commuter rail for the suburbs to the city center and build light rail within the city center. If you aren't willing to build light rail you can do busses but the busses need to have their own dedicated controlled access lanes.
More rail based transit.
Or subsidised Uber rides to take advantage of our existing roadways perhaps using dedicated lanes.
Also more protected bike only pathways for inner loop residents to get them out of their cars. Takes cars off the road.
Uber doesn’t fix it because it’s still primarily 1 commuter per car. Yes, the average occupancy would go up, but the driver isn’t actually staying at the destination.
I know of towns up north that did away with extra parking and paid Uber etc a subsidy to ferry town residents to central locations within town. It can work as you’re cutting down on overall volume, and also eliminating parking decks/open lots.
A half measure yes but proven to work.
How does that cut down on overall volume? I see how that solves a parking problem but not a traffic problem. Especially if you're replacing the parking lots with businesses, it could actually increase the total number of trips.
I get fewer cars, but are people making fewer trips? In NYC there are fewer car trips (including cab trips) because transit is frequent, fast, ubiquitous, and cheap, and cabs are extremely expensive to use on a daily basis. If the Ubers are subsidized and there's no alternative mode, wouldn't people just use the Uber like they would their own car? I'm just trying to understand the mechanics.
Getting HTXers to embrace NYC-style transit is a hard sell especially given recent negative news out of NYC around transit safety (similar headlines out of SF, Chicago, and LA).
Frequent cheap Ubers get more single drivers off the road. And is a good start. Can be one of many arrows.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. If people are taking *the same number of trips*, but doing it in Ubers instead of their own vehicles, that's the *same number of cars on the road*. That solves a parking problem, but not the traffic problem.
Let me maybe do some of the work for you. If you subsidize it by some token amount like $2 a ride for rides starting or ending in the CBD and and use that as a bargaining chip to, say, eliminate street parking and surface lots (with a land use magic wand), that would probably take some cars off the road, but it would do so by *making car trips downtown more expensive and difficult,* inducing mode shift, schedule shift, moving closer to work, or telecommuting, not just by converting the same number of single driver car trips to Uber trips. Now that I'm working it out, that actually could be a good idea haha, though if you don't pair it with improvements in alternate modes it could also just push more companies to the suburbs.
You don’t think one car doing dozens of trips in a day is better than dozens of cars doing single trips? It’s not a silver bullet by any means but is a good start.
Oh I definitely think it's better. One of the most promising impacts of robotaxis if they ever actually work is being able to get the same or more trips out of drastically fewer total cars. But a) if humans are driving them it's a phenomenally expensive proposal b) the thing that's better about it is much fewer cars in *parking lots.* If anything the number of cars *on the road* would *increase* if car trips are made cheaper and easier and parking isn't a concern.
The problem is you’re thinking traffic is caused by cars, not by humans.
It’s commuters. Individual people going from point Katy to point Downtown.
If we find a way to get 50% of those commuters to take Ubers instead of driving their own cars, we’ve now increased the average people per vehicle (one commuter and one driver in 50% of cars) but every single commuter still equals one car on the road. The total number of cars hasn’t changed.
The creates a weird thing in the numbers where it *looks* like we’ve improved traffic because now there are 50% more people moving with the same about of traffic (that additional 50% is the Uber drivers). But those additional people wouldn’t need to be on the road if they weren’t driving the commuters. So it’s a wash.
The goal is to get multiple *commuters* per vehicle. A typical car can carry up to five. A bus can carry something like 30. A light rail train something like 90-100.
Unless these subsidized Ubers are going to pick up multiple commuters, they don’t really reduce road congestion. And if they are going to pick up multiple commuters, why not just have a dedicated bussing service, instead?
Getting Houstonians to give up driving their own car is the struggle. It’s not something unique to public transit. It’s the perception of freedom and autonomy that we’ve been led to see a car giving us.
Nope, it’s the safety, time and cost problem, if you have a safe subway no junkies and homeless walking around, 5 minutes schedule, 3 minutes rush hour schedule, cheap fare, a lots of people will get rid of the car.
Time and cost, absolutely. Safety is largely a perceptual problem. Our sense of what is safe is often skewed pretty far from what is, in fact, safe. You’re more likely to get hurt in a car accident than you are to get attacked on public transit, but we perceive cars to be safer than public transit.
So, yeah, public transit needs to appear to be safe, but the presence of homeless people doesn’t make it unsafe.
I like the last idea. Covered and elevated bikeways would be a game-changer.
With the rise of E-bikes with 200-300 miles on a single charge, this would make the city a lot more maneuverable during times of high traffic.
Commuter trains from suburbs. Massive light rail transit in addition to that. Walkable neighbourhoods. A reversal of global warming so walking isn’t deathly.
You can debate the politics of it all you want, but if the question is how to fix gridlock in the long term, then the answer is to make car travel less desirable than other options.
That said, places that have taken active measures to dissuade car usage don't seem to have the public turn against public transportation.
Its not. Its to make alternative more attractive. Making life harder for drivers, without giving them any better alternative, doesnt fix anything. It just makes people miserable.
Did you not notice that the first part of my post was to massively increase public trans? I agree, public trans needs to be better to meet transportation demand. The second part of that plan is fixing the structures that currently favor cars over public trans.
Our culture and social structures make us addicted to cars. To an addict, it seems like injustice when there access is removed.
No matter how good you make transit, there will always be people for whom it does not fit. Trying to make these people miserable just because they dont have the same needs or wants as you is not helping society, its just being a dick. Giving people freedom is always the best policy.
I work from home, for what matters.
I didn't say we should make drivers miserable, I said we should take steps to discourage driving. As an example you could look at how increased taxes on cigarettes pay for anti smoking efforts.
Some people dont have good alternatives to driving, some *never will*, and penalizing them would be both immoral and unproductive.
Just work on making the alternatives better and people will use them. Its really not a hard concept.
We should work to build alternatives to driving. Choices have been made to build the social structures that make driving a neccessity. We have to build alternative structures that turn driving into a luxury and then we should treat them like any other luxury: tax them to pay for necessities.
This isn’t plausible, but I can dream.
Add another loop system similar to Beltway 8 & Grand Parkway.
Add freeways between the existing freeways (with the exception of 288, although it might prove useful in the future).
More realistic???...
Allow more work from home. Make office hours more flexible. Find metro systems that don't take forever to get where you want to go (the thing is Houston is so spread out).
We aren't going to solve gridlock unless we have an economic collapse. Detroit solved theirs like this.
But we can give people options with better city design. The basic problem is that people live too far away from where they work and shop. Suburban, spread-out design promotes longer trips (both personal vehicle trips and transit trips cause congestion in suburban oriented cities).
The best we can do is to build dense, walkable, bikeable communities where people live close to where they work. It's not going to solve congestion but it will give people options not to have to battle it every day.
Zoning laws (plopping a giant apartment building on a two-lane street in residential neighborhood disrupts traffic), enforcing traffic laws and creating harsher penalties for looking at your phone while driving and a transit system that is adaptable and based on more local movement.
Stop building parking lots for each establishment and build a denser city.
No ones going to use public transport if they have to walk a mile in heat/no shade.
Light rail that is monitored by security(basically have to pay to ride) so the suburban people don’t cry about homeless people getting to Katy the woodlands and sugar land 🙄
Lanier owned 1,700 acres of Katy prairie that became more valuable once the Grand Parkway passed through and development began there. He voted six times as highway commissioner to approve segments of the regional parkway, abstaining only from the vote on a stretch that would pass through his land, according to Chronicle archives. Later, as Metro chairman, Lanier directed millions to fund design work on the parkway.
He also is credited with orchestrating a coup by the Metro board in 1989 that killed then-mayor Kathy Whitmire's $650 million plan to construct a state-of-the-art monorail.
It was a defining moment not just because he decided to run for mayor when Whitmire fired him. Opponents say his persistent criticism of rail is a key reason Houston has remained so car dependent.
Although Lanier loomed large - political insiders said even his successor as mayor, Lee Brown, needed Lanier's approval to build the first modest stretch of light rail - transit proponents said his death will not spark a rush to rail. Too many others continue to block such projects, including U.S. Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston.
Supporters contend Lanier did not hate rail; he just doubted it was worth the cost.
Doubted rail worth it
Lanier saw the proposed monorail as a distraction from what he considered the city's real problems. He argued crime and deteriorating infrastructure would bankrupt the city as middle class residents would leave for the suburbs with their tax base in tow.
And so the man who helped start the residential boom west of Houston as a developer got to work trying to save the urban core. Although some criticized how he funded the efforts, few argued that they were not successful.
[Lanier's legacy extends from the suburbs to the city](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Lanier-s-legacy-extends-from-the-suburbs-to-the-5972745.php)
People saying more public transport are incredibly naive. This is America, furthermore Texas, we like our cars and trucks. You could build a light rail going literally everywhere, I still would never take the bitch. Good flying cars would work.
> This is America, furthermore Texas, we like our cars and trucks. You could build a light rail going literally everywhere, I still would never take the bitch.
I would take it any chance I got. I hate our "cars and trucks", and driving sucks. I'm only in my early 30s and my vision is already getting worse to the point where I don't feel safe driving at night, so it sucks that there aren't really any affordable alternatives for people like me.
I lived in the suburbs of Seoul for a couple years, god did I feel free having that transportation system. Being able to live an hour from Seoul and have a way to get into the city for only a few bucks was incredible, I'm out in Cypress and there is no way for me to that here.
You're not wrong though, this will never be "solved" because it's ultimately a cultural issue, we're never giving up cars because Americans as a whole are too individualistic to give a shit about the collective, unlike countries that heavily promote and invest in accessible public transportation.
I would think most people would prefer it if it was actually reliable and punctual. Would you rather an hour plus gridlocked Friday drive in traffic to get out to your suburban home, or a 45 minute train ride with a few stops while you enjoy a cold tall boy and play on your phone/read a book/ whatever.
So yeah exactly we could have a billion trains running every direction at every moment, I still wouldn’t want to be bothered by all the trash it attracts. I’d drive myself if it took 2 hours more.
It’s totally fine that transit isn’t for you and I’m not trying to change your mind, but having taken transit only once does not lend you very much credibility here. 1/1 is hardly an average. Just like driving (and everything else in life) there’s a learning curve. First-time transit users tend to stick out like a sore thumb, just like brand new drivers do. With experience, you’re less likely to be messed with while simultaneously being more capable of avoiding or handling this type of interaction.
Proper enforcement of traffic laws would actually go a long way. It's illegal to even be in the left hand lane of a highway, unless you're passing, i.e. not driving 35 MPH. It's actually just as illegal to drive excessively below the speed limit as above it. Again, if you're driving 45 MPH in a 60 MPH zone, you get ticketed (unless you're in the right hand lane with flashers, which is the proper procedure). Waiting until the last minute to get over to your exit and cutting people off is illegal. Stopping in the middle of the damn highway because you're trying to get over is illegal; you're supposed to accelerate to pass. Distracted driving. Man, half the people on the road should be getting tickets. The list goes on. All of these things and more cause massive traffic issues, but police basically only enforce speeding, because it carries the largest fines.
on paper, rail lines. in reality, getting rid of more people working in downtown, and having businesses spread to the outskirts. smarter relocation of the workers to where they work.
So you think “in reality” it’s more feasible to make hundreds of private businesses move to an outskirt area of Houston than to have a single entity (city of Houston) build more public transport?
Your idea also comes with a pretty crazy assumption that everyone working at any given business in downtown is from a single outskirt area and I promise you that’s almost never the case. I work in downtown and we have people coming in from every direction of Houston at my workplace. With your proposal some people might drive way less while some would drive way more
Go back in time before the Katy Freeway expansion, save the MKT rail lines and turn them in to commuter rail lines from the suburbs to downtown. This is only for the West side, otherwise, more public rail transit.
Agree. A commuter rail system to all the major suburbs. Katy, The Woodlands, Kingwood, Sugarland, Pearland, clear lake, Baytown etc etc… with stops along the way like the energy corridor on I 10 for example. Spent some time in Chicago, and you could park at the train station out in the burbs, and ride the train into the city and always wondered why Houston didn’t have anything like this.
Because Chicago built their system almost 100 years ago. To replicate that in Houston would cost multi-Billions of dollars. Also Chicago and NYC transit is heavily subsidized by taxpayers and they still have gridlock on their highways. I would love rail as well but no one wants to pay for it.
There used to be a Galveston-Houston Electric Railway that ran from downtown Houston to downtown Galveston from 1911 to 1936, it’s a shame we can’t go back in time for that one as well.
i had a similar thought of taking the 2 middle areas of I-10 and making it metro light rail with one express non-stop from downtown to a katy park & ride and the other with stops along like at silber for the entertainment stuff, and various other points of interest.
Light rail wouldn't work in this situation, it would have to be heavy commuter rail. Then you would have to spend millions adding overhead walkways over the freeway so pedestrians could access the rail.
no overhead needed. Platforms to unload and load are on the elevated section above the cross streets (the ones that run under the freeway. Simple set of escalators or stairs down to then walk to whatever is there. Light rail is ideal in this small stretch of 20-30 miles back and forth. No heavy commuter needed.
More public transit and more remote work
And Stop adding lanes to highways. All it does is add more cars.
I know everytime they add a lane the car dealers sale so many extra cars that fill up those lanes. You know the study that all of you people quote on induced demand has been shown to be totally flawed, but if you repeat it enough it might come true.
Even drivers who don't want to take public transit should support public transit, because it takes people off the road for them. Various studies have found that commute time was *highly correlated* to the transit time for the same commute on public transit. The more efficient the public transit, the more people use it, the less rush hour traffic for those who can't or dont want to take public transit. Win-win. Just dont: * Try to force people into using it. Make it efficient and they'll do. * Let it fill up with junkies. No tolerance for vagrancy, keep it safe and clean.
I support public transit expansion. Public transit expansion is not going to eliminate or even reduce congestion in a booming city where people live far away from where they work.
This is false like extremely false. The more people you move to commuting by rail get those people off roads. Therefore reducing congestion
It's not a binary problem. Building rail to the far flung suburbs encourages more people to move to the far flung suburbs. Some people that move to the suburbs \*might\* use rail for commute trips assuming it's convenient to their destination. But they aren't taking rail to the grocery store, for picking up kids from school, or going to whatever eatery they frequent from their cul-de-sac or gated luxury apartment complex where absolutely no amenities are in safe walking distance. Vehicle miles traveled actually increase when you encourage people to move to the suburbs, whether they commute by rail or not. We'd better off building dense, walkable, mulit-use communities and then using transit to connect those communities. Rail to Katy is a terrible waste of $ and just promotes more sprawl.
No ones stating start with rail to katy. Eventually though, yes we'd need it. We need big sweeping changes like banning sfh's inside the loop. Forcing density and transit in this area then connecting with transit places like katy to it. I'd love in conjuction if current big suburbs of houston also instituted density centrally in their areas as a place to eventually build a train stop and transit from. I def agree you start with transit centrally. But my point remains: expanding transit does decrease congestion. Also firm believer in congestion pricing.
>We need big sweeping changes like banning sfh's inside the loop. We also need a world free of racism, where everyone has unlimited access to whatever resource they need, and can live a meaningful existence. Banning SFHs inside the loop is akin to fantasyland.
It has been done in other cities and it worked. Even in some cities I have visited banned cars entirely in the center of them. You call it fantasyland but America used to do big things and American's were down. NOw were complacent with comfort regardless of how shitty our cities get. Yeah, that is a big dream of mine but its not as insane as you make it. It could be done over time in parts transitioning the area over a decade.
I think sometimes our fellow public transit supporters don't recognize that the majority of people prefer to commute by car, and congestion will always exist in big enough cities. If congestion goes down, more people will see that as the easiest option and go that way (why adding lanes "adds more cars") What anti-transit folks don't want to recognize, though, is that there are people like us that are fine with (or need, or prefer) public transit. The goal should be increasing the choice everyone has, so that people that want or need public transit (or bikes, or whatever) can stay off the road.
The point should be to make public transit the best option by utilizing the advantages only public transit has. Light rail that runs along our loops and down highways like 290 and 45 would be a good start. A park and ride where you can get from Cypress to downtown in 30 minutes at peak rush hour would get a lot of people out of cars.
We have this now -- the 217 runs from the Cypress Park and Ride to downtown. It's less than hour door to door (leaving my house, getting to the office) and the time on the bus is close to 30 minutes. There's a slowdown going from I-10 to downtown, but it's fast HOV the rest of the way. It's busy enough it runs every 5'ish minutes during peak hours and it frequently has full buses.
Investing and bolstering public transit doesn’t just mean adding more busses to the existing roads. It means making dedicated, separate bus lanes that take away standard lanes. It means eliminating two lanes from each direction of I-10 and replacing them with light rail. If we want fewer cars, we have to make it harder for cars to be on the road. We don’t add public transit to the traffic, we replace the traffic with public transit.
Houston already has dedicated bus lanes on most radial freeways. Your perspective should be put to work on city arterials where we should fully support the use of lane reductions and other traffic calming measures to make vehicles move slower and make more room for transit, bikes, and pedestrians.
They prefer it because their only option is awful public transit or car. Give them a real system like something in Chicago or NYC or a real good system in Europe or Asia and you’d see massive congestion decreases. “Houstonians prefer horror films to comedies” “but Houston only allows horror films to be shown in theaters” That is the reality ^
Chicago and NYC do not have less congestion than Houston. [https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/?country=CA%2CMX%2CUS](https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/?country=CA%2CMX%2CUS) [https://inrix.com/scorecard/#city-ranking-list](https://inrix.com/scorecard/#city-ranking-list) Stop trying to sell transit, particularly transit to the suburbs, as the "cure" for congestion. Transit to the suburbs is a costly tool for giving a few people that might use it more options. We'd be much better off improving transit and development patterns inner city.
I can get on board with this. Transit is ultimately about options. But we shouldn't be selling "build a commuter rail to Cinco Ranch" as the solution to all our problems. Given that kind of investment, why not improve inner Houston's transit network and change development patterns?
The best long term solution is one that already exists in the city: public transit. We have busses and light rail here. We need to massively expand both. We need strong incentives to encourage suburb and exurb commuters to take them. Strong incentives like dedicated, separate bus lanes down the freeway. Tax incentives (positive incentives—London proved that an additional tax burden on car commuters doesn’t reduce congestion).
*choo choo*
People learn how zipper merging works (lol)
We gotta get more people reading those reddit posts telling people to do it
If everyone could see my info graphic we'd have total social peace I promise /s
Always live close to where you work. You’ll never get that time back.
Aggressively towing fake paper plates cars and halving the population Thanos style.
Allow people that can to wfh.
Total economic collapse.
Those pandemic commutes were pretty nice. Though, people did get a little too comfortable swerving across 5 lanes to hit their exit at the last second.
I want two of them!
Give it time, they’re coming.
Live closer to where you work.
Density is needed then. Destroy sfhs in the loop
One solution. Sync the traffic lights.
Build commuter rail for the suburbs to the city center and build light rail within the city center. If you aren't willing to build light rail you can do busses but the busses need to have their own dedicated controlled access lanes.
Drivers need to put down their phones and drive. That is the biggest cause of daily traffic.
More rail based transit. Or subsidised Uber rides to take advantage of our existing roadways perhaps using dedicated lanes. Also more protected bike only pathways for inner loop residents to get them out of their cars. Takes cars off the road.
Uber doesn’t fix it because it’s still primarily 1 commuter per car. Yes, the average occupancy would go up, but the driver isn’t actually staying at the destination.
I know of towns up north that did away with extra parking and paid Uber etc a subsidy to ferry town residents to central locations within town. It can work as you’re cutting down on overall volume, and also eliminating parking decks/open lots. A half measure yes but proven to work.
How does that cut down on overall volume? I see how that solves a parking problem but not a traffic problem. Especially if you're replacing the parking lots with businesses, it could actually increase the total number of trips.
Fewer cars with one car (the Uber) serving as the workhorse. Like yellow cabs in NYC.
I get fewer cars, but are people making fewer trips? In NYC there are fewer car trips (including cab trips) because transit is frequent, fast, ubiquitous, and cheap, and cabs are extremely expensive to use on a daily basis. If the Ubers are subsidized and there's no alternative mode, wouldn't people just use the Uber like they would their own car? I'm just trying to understand the mechanics.
Getting HTXers to embrace NYC-style transit is a hard sell especially given recent negative news out of NYC around transit safety (similar headlines out of SF, Chicago, and LA). Frequent cheap Ubers get more single drivers off the road. And is a good start. Can be one of many arrows.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. If people are taking *the same number of trips*, but doing it in Ubers instead of their own vehicles, that's the *same number of cars on the road*. That solves a parking problem, but not the traffic problem. Let me maybe do some of the work for you. If you subsidize it by some token amount like $2 a ride for rides starting or ending in the CBD and and use that as a bargaining chip to, say, eliminate street parking and surface lots (with a land use magic wand), that would probably take some cars off the road, but it would do so by *making car trips downtown more expensive and difficult,* inducing mode shift, schedule shift, moving closer to work, or telecommuting, not just by converting the same number of single driver car trips to Uber trips. Now that I'm working it out, that actually could be a good idea haha, though if you don't pair it with improvements in alternate modes it could also just push more companies to the suburbs.
You don’t think one car doing dozens of trips in a day is better than dozens of cars doing single trips? It’s not a silver bullet by any means but is a good start.
Oh I definitely think it's better. One of the most promising impacts of robotaxis if they ever actually work is being able to get the same or more trips out of drastically fewer total cars. But a) if humans are driving them it's a phenomenally expensive proposal b) the thing that's better about it is much fewer cars in *parking lots.* If anything the number of cars *on the road* would *increase* if car trips are made cheaper and easier and parking isn't a concern.
The problem is you’re thinking traffic is caused by cars, not by humans. It’s commuters. Individual people going from point Katy to point Downtown. If we find a way to get 50% of those commuters to take Ubers instead of driving their own cars, we’ve now increased the average people per vehicle (one commuter and one driver in 50% of cars) but every single commuter still equals one car on the road. The total number of cars hasn’t changed. The creates a weird thing in the numbers where it *looks* like we’ve improved traffic because now there are 50% more people moving with the same about of traffic (that additional 50% is the Uber drivers). But those additional people wouldn’t need to be on the road if they weren’t driving the commuters. So it’s a wash. The goal is to get multiple *commuters* per vehicle. A typical car can carry up to five. A bus can carry something like 30. A light rail train something like 90-100. Unless these subsidized Ubers are going to pick up multiple commuters, they don’t really reduce road congestion. And if they are going to pick up multiple commuters, why not just have a dedicated bussing service, instead?
Getting Houstonians to give up driving their own car is the struggle. It’s not something unique to public transit. It’s the perception of freedom and autonomy that we’ve been led to see a car giving us.
I've felt more free in places where I'm not forced to own a car if I want to get to work or commute around town.
I agree completely. That’s why I said the “perception” of freedom.
Nope, it’s the safety, time and cost problem, if you have a safe subway no junkies and homeless walking around, 5 minutes schedule, 3 minutes rush hour schedule, cheap fare, a lots of people will get rid of the car.
Time and cost, absolutely. Safety is largely a perceptual problem. Our sense of what is safe is often skewed pretty far from what is, in fact, safe. You’re more likely to get hurt in a car accident than you are to get attacked on public transit, but we perceive cars to be safer than public transit. So, yeah, public transit needs to appear to be safe, but the presence of homeless people doesn’t make it unsafe.
Carpooling programs had similar success in the 80s and 90s, but have fallen out of fashion. We could bring those back.
It's all single occupancy vehicles. It's really pretty sad at how few cars you see in the HOV lane
Please don't send tax dollars to Uber.
I like the last idea. Covered and elevated bikeways would be a game-changer. With the rise of E-bikes with 200-300 miles on a single charge, this would make the city a lot more maneuverable during times of high traffic.
Vote out Whitmire
OP coming in clutch here keeping the rail-in-Houston weekly post streak alive. 🫡
Commuter trains from suburbs. Massive light rail transit in addition to that. Walkable neighbourhoods. A reversal of global warming so walking isn’t deathly.
AI coordinated traffic
That doesn’t solve the problem of volume. While it may not be stop and go, it will still be slow. Just consistently slow.
Drastically expand public transportation, take steps to discourage car use.
>take steps to discourage car use. This is how you turn people \*against\* public transit.
You can debate the politics of it all you want, but if the question is how to fix gridlock in the long term, then the answer is to make car travel less desirable than other options. That said, places that have taken active measures to dissuade car usage don't seem to have the public turn against public transportation.
Its not. Its to make alternative more attractive. Making life harder for drivers, without giving them any better alternative, doesnt fix anything. It just makes people miserable.
Did you not notice that the first part of my post was to massively increase public trans? I agree, public trans needs to be better to meet transportation demand. The second part of that plan is fixing the structures that currently favor cars over public trans. Our culture and social structures make us addicted to cars. To an addict, it seems like injustice when there access is removed.
No matter how good you make transit, there will always be people for whom it does not fit. Trying to make these people miserable just because they dont have the same needs or wants as you is not helping society, its just being a dick. Giving people freedom is always the best policy. I work from home, for what matters.
I didn't say we should make drivers miserable, I said we should take steps to discourage driving. As an example you could look at how increased taxes on cigarettes pay for anti smoking efforts.
Some people dont have good alternatives to driving, some *never will*, and penalizing them would be both immoral and unproductive. Just work on making the alternatives better and people will use them. Its really not a hard concept.
We should work to build alternatives to driving. Choices have been made to build the social structures that make driving a neccessity. We have to build alternative structures that turn driving into a luxury and then we should treat them like any other luxury: tax them to pay for necessities.
Starting commutes insanely early is the only work around I’ve found. It is a total waste of time to sit in traffic for hours.
This isn’t plausible, but I can dream. Add another loop system similar to Beltway 8 & Grand Parkway. Add freeways between the existing freeways (with the exception of 288, although it might prove useful in the future). More realistic???... Allow more work from home. Make office hours more flexible. Find metro systems that don't take forever to get where you want to go (the thing is Houston is so spread out).
At this point, we can’t ignore it any longer. Something has got to give.
Your dream includes *another* loop?
Actually, yes. We don't really see what Beltway 8 has done for traffic around Houston, but we would see the difference if it wasn't there.
We aren't going to solve gridlock unless we have an economic collapse. Detroit solved theirs like this. But we can give people options with better city design. The basic problem is that people live too far away from where they work and shop. Suburban, spread-out design promotes longer trips (both personal vehicle trips and transit trips cause congestion in suburban oriented cities). The best we can do is to build dense, walkable, bikeable communities where people live close to where they work. It's not going to solve congestion but it will give people options not to have to battle it every day.
Zoning laws (plopping a giant apartment building on a two-lane street in residential neighborhood disrupts traffic), enforcing traffic laws and creating harsher penalties for looking at your phone while driving and a transit system that is adaptable and based on more local movement.
Jetpacks
There’s a self-driving sky-taxi company coming in 2030.
Stop building parking lots for each establishment and build a denser city. No ones going to use public transport if they have to walk a mile in heat/no shade.
Commuter rail /thread
Work from home. My sanity came back
This!!!!!
Self driving cars are the only real hope. Once they all are self driving, there really won't be traffic.
I thought of this too. Good idea.
Ticket and tow everyone who goes around traffic in the exit lane and then causes a backup jamming themselves back in.
And license suspension, not that that ever stopped a paper plate Altima
Massive depopulation
Make downtown bypass lanes for each individual highway
And only allow busses on them.
Light rail that is monitored by security(basically have to pay to ride) so the suburban people don’t cry about homeless people getting to Katy the woodlands and sugar land 🙄
More lanes!
Just one more pretty please I promise it’ll fix it 🥺
Are you saying this for all of the freeways?
Lanes aren’t just for freeways! Let’s have 10-lane feeders and 6-lane surface streets!
Good point 🙏🏾
NASA needs to invent some sort of rocket based transportation system.
Boy have I got news for you. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
[удалено]
Kathy Whitmire actually had plans for a monorail.
Go back in time and tell people to not move to Houston.
Lanier owned 1,700 acres of Katy prairie that became more valuable once the Grand Parkway passed through and development began there. He voted six times as highway commissioner to approve segments of the regional parkway, abstaining only from the vote on a stretch that would pass through his land, according to Chronicle archives. Later, as Metro chairman, Lanier directed millions to fund design work on the parkway. He also is credited with orchestrating a coup by the Metro board in 1989 that killed then-mayor Kathy Whitmire's $650 million plan to construct a state-of-the-art monorail. It was a defining moment not just because he decided to run for mayor when Whitmire fired him. Opponents say his persistent criticism of rail is a key reason Houston has remained so car dependent. Although Lanier loomed large - political insiders said even his successor as mayor, Lee Brown, needed Lanier's approval to build the first modest stretch of light rail - transit proponents said his death will not spark a rush to rail. Too many others continue to block such projects, including U.S. Rep. John Culberson, R-Houston. Supporters contend Lanier did not hate rail; he just doubted it was worth the cost. Doubted rail worth it Lanier saw the proposed monorail as a distraction from what he considered the city's real problems. He argued crime and deteriorating infrastructure would bankrupt the city as middle class residents would leave for the suburbs with their tax base in tow. And so the man who helped start the residential boom west of Houston as a developer got to work trying to save the urban core. Although some criticized how he funded the efforts, few argued that they were not successful. [Lanier's legacy extends from the suburbs to the city](https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Lanier-s-legacy-extends-from-the-suburbs-to-the-5972745.php)
Build and incentivize subdivision development away from the city. Get public transport network revamped. Give tax incentive to using public transport.
I love these fantasy posts.
The purge.
Move
Plague.
People saying more public transport are incredibly naive. This is America, furthermore Texas, we like our cars and trucks. You could build a light rail going literally everywhere, I still would never take the bitch. Good flying cars would work.
People can’t even drive on the roads and you want them in the air?
It’s long been my understanding that in order to have flying cars, they must also be self driving due to how shit people are operating things
> This is America, furthermore Texas, we like our cars and trucks. You could build a light rail going literally everywhere, I still would never take the bitch. I would take it any chance I got. I hate our "cars and trucks", and driving sucks. I'm only in my early 30s and my vision is already getting worse to the point where I don't feel safe driving at night, so it sucks that there aren't really any affordable alternatives for people like me. I lived in the suburbs of Seoul for a couple years, god did I feel free having that transportation system. Being able to live an hour from Seoul and have a way to get into the city for only a few bucks was incredible, I'm out in Cypress and there is no way for me to that here. You're not wrong though, this will never be "solved" because it's ultimately a cultural issue, we're never giving up cars because Americans as a whole are too individualistic to give a shit about the collective, unlike countries that heavily promote and invest in accessible public transportation.
I would think most people would prefer it if it was actually reliable and punctual. Would you rather an hour plus gridlocked Friday drive in traffic to get out to your suburban home, or a 45 minute train ride with a few stops while you enjoy a cold tall boy and play on your phone/read a book/ whatever.
I live downtown. I have taken the metro exactly once and was harassed by a drunk homeless crackhead. I’ll pass bro.
I feel like that happens just being downtown or in town period. Might as well have some public transportation to go with the crackheads lol
So yeah exactly we could have a billion trains running every direction at every moment, I still wouldn’t want to be bothered by all the trash it attracts. I’d drive myself if it took 2 hours more.
Sorry you had to interact with a human 😢
It’s totally fine that transit isn’t for you and I’m not trying to change your mind, but having taken transit only once does not lend you very much credibility here. 1/1 is hardly an average. Just like driving (and everything else in life) there’s a learning curve. First-time transit users tend to stick out like a sore thumb, just like brand new drivers do. With experience, you’re less likely to be messed with while simultaneously being more capable of avoiding or handling this type of interaction.
O&G switches to geothermal and they all go to Nevada.
Proper enforcement of traffic laws would actually go a long way. It's illegal to even be in the left hand lane of a highway, unless you're passing, i.e. not driving 35 MPH. It's actually just as illegal to drive excessively below the speed limit as above it. Again, if you're driving 45 MPH in a 60 MPH zone, you get ticketed (unless you're in the right hand lane with flashers, which is the proper procedure). Waiting until the last minute to get over to your exit and cutting people off is illegal. Stopping in the middle of the damn highway because you're trying to get over is illegal; you're supposed to accelerate to pass. Distracted driving. Man, half the people on the road should be getting tickets. The list goes on. All of these things and more cause massive traffic issues, but police basically only enforce speeding, because it carries the largest fines.
on paper, rail lines. in reality, getting rid of more people working in downtown, and having businesses spread to the outskirts. smarter relocation of the workers to where they work.
So you think “in reality” it’s more feasible to make hundreds of private businesses move to an outskirt area of Houston than to have a single entity (city of Houston) build more public transport? Your idea also comes with a pretty crazy assumption that everyone working at any given business in downtown is from a single outskirt area and I promise you that’s almost never the case. I work in downtown and we have people coming in from every direction of Houston at my workplace. With your proposal some people might drive way less while some would drive way more
Thanos snap.
Dense, walkable nodes connected by efficient mass public transit.
The answer is so simple and logical that it will never happen!