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Re:Why Are Texas Interchanges So Tall? by oblio on Tuesday August 20, 2024 @05:12PM (#41304124)
During rush hour most people are going from their homes to places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated.

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.

Re:Why Are Texas Interchanges So Tall? by vel0city on Tuesday August 20, 2024 @06:04PM (#41304571)
> which are generally highly concentrated.

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.

Re:Why Are Texas Interchanges So Tall? by kube-system on Tuesday August 20, 2024 @06:08PM (#41304591)
> During rush hour most people are going from their homes to places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated.

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.

Re:Why Are Texas Interchanges So Tall? by cafard on Wednesday August 21, 2024 @06:07AM (#41308665)
My father commuted suburb-to-suburb for most of the years I lived at home, say 1958 to 1975. My impression was that this was not unusual then. But I had limited information about what any particular grownup did.

Department stores are fewer and fewer now. Most of the big malls around the Washington, DC, area are gone.

Re:Why Are Texas Interchanges So Tall? by eightysixfour on Tuesday August 20, 2024 @05:27PM (#41304251)
> During rush hour most people are going from their homes to places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated.

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.

Re:Why Are Texas Interchanges So Tall? by bsder on Tuesday August 20, 2024 @05:49PM (#41304449)
> places of employment, which are generally highly concentrated.

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.

Re:Why Are Texas Interchanges So Tall? by lotsofpulp on Tuesday August 20, 2024 @06:08PM (#41304589)
> 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).

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.