And it could be made ineffective as regional expansion continues. As soon as enough people who are willing to pay the toll saturates capacity you end up with the same issue (“just one more lane bro”). I see this all the time in the DC metro area’s toll express lanes that often save no significant time.
Another effective way to control highway congestion is to get people off of highways and invest in your transit system, make it better than driving so that people don’t drive as often.
But maybe Houston is too far gone for that.
For comparison, the Chicago red line extension project adds 5 miles of heavy rail for about twice the cost, so 4x more per mile. But the Houston toll lane project doesn’t do anything positive for adjacent property values like new rail stations do. Chicago will get money back from more property taxes and the new stations will relieve traffic on the Dan Ryan.
Transit lines get faster as ridership increases due to the ability to increase schedule frequency, the exact opposite of highways.
I am not saying Houston should magically turn into 1800s-era urban fabric but maybe some decent park and ride commuter transit would be a start? There are cities in Texas with 6 figure populations that have NO public bus system.
Increase the toll prices to reduce congestion, increase the number of buses on that route, and use some of the money for either expanding the road or building another more-or-less parallel road.
This stretch of road is already using congestion/dynamic pricing. I've never had to go slower than 85mph the entire way.
It’s like Disney World. They can fill the parks with people willing to pay $200 a day for tickets alone. If you can’t afford it then it doesn’t matter that other people get to get in.
Highways just don’t scale well. Two train tracks can move about the same number of people as 15 lanes of highway.
[1]the kind who have so few problems that freeway proximity makes it high on the list of things that inform where they choose to live
Light rail has been there since before the toll lanes.
This is not a small medical center, some of the hospitals are skyscrapers.
Houston’s red line has similar ridership levels to Chicago’s third busiest L line.
The two metro areas have a very similar population.
In Houston the rail does not actually extend to any suburbs, if they have that in Chicago it would probably make a big difference.
I got the idea when they were building it in Houston that a large bit of the Metro system is geared toward transporting people in lower-income areas who can't afford cars, so they can gain employment downtown and in the med center.
When it comes to toll roads most suburbs have a long-established freeway commute, but directly west from downtown a major suburb is known as the International District containing a large concentration of immigrants. The only traffic solution leading in that direction was built as a tollway instead.
It all started with the Beltway 8 toll bridge with toll that was cheaper than the gas saved by taking alternate routes.
By now the toll road authority has expanded and embraced a growth mindset for so long, and in recent years gotten so expensive, that any upcoming candidate for County Judge may be able to prevail on a single-issue of lowering the tolls alone.
This is how most US cities view public transit: poor people only.
Only a handful of US cities treat it as something that everyone uses, places like NYC, Chicago, DC, and Boston.
Houston should have an equivalent to the Metra or MBTA commuter rail.
You Americans are so funny. Japan is hotter and more humid yet public transit and walking are not an issue. Taipei similar story, rapidly building out rail in a hotter place.
You build the rail, then upzome the areas around stations and over time those giant ashfault lots go away and become urban centres.
Is it?
https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/9247~143809/Comparison-of...
People like you are funny too but its easy to make posts like yours. Density in most urban parts of Japan and Taipei are wildly higher than say a Houston Texas. Again like I said, you are oversimplifying the problem which I get it, its easy to do. I don't think this is as simple as "build the rail, then upzone the area around stations", would happy to be wrong but I think like all of the world there are cultural and historical reasons for the difference.
It would take decades, you need buy in from both tax payers, commercial buildings, retail spaces, home builders etc.
It would be great if you could have a central planner like a China to just build a city with all the infrastructure in place but in places like America, that does not happen and so its a very tough egg to crack. Keep in mind its not just about being hot, definitely lots of Japan and Taiwan are very humid but you are also in city centers that have 8-9x the density of Houston. Lots of things to do and often you are most likely not walking that far, relative for city walking. I could walk a mile in Houston and still have not left my starting spot.
I'm being harsh, Houston isn't completely terrible. There is a lot of culture and diversity. But you can't really get to it because everything is too far, and you're already tired from commuting 10 hours that week.
I mean, ideally, I could say I want to live all on my own in a mansion far away from everyone else. But I still want access to the world's best food, entertainment, and socialization. But it's just not possible.
Everything is compromises. We can't be erecting hundreds of miles of road and acres of parking lots so people have a 10 by 10 foot lawn, you know? And ultimately it will come back to them, too. Because commuting does suck, and I think most people know it sucks. They just can't, or won't, put two and two together on their lifestyle and commuting. They're inherently linked!
The tradeoff isn't live like rats. That's the tradeoff RIGHT NOW, because we designed our cities for maximum suckage.
But really, you can have reasonable space and a decent commute. Light rail goes a long way, and not spending 50% of your land on parking lots does too.
When you design your cities around cars, there are really no winners. People might think that's just the natural cost of having a home, but it's just not. You can have denser cities with more space per person. Because, remember, most of the space in Houston is currently worthless. It can't actually be used by people.
So it's still dense where it matters. The pockets of goodness are just that. Between the roads and parking lots there's little dense pockets of life, and that's where everything actually happens.
Look, think of it this way. If we don't spend 50% of our most valuable space on parking lots, your home can be 50% larger. AND in an area where it matters, instead of in Timbuktu.
Light rail is terrible and anyone acting like it’s not is immediately written off as a non thinker imo. If you’re gonna do rail do it right.
Meaning, I don't think people are commuting 2 hours or three or whatever because they LIKE to. Rather, they're victims of poor poor urban design, and most of them, too, would prefer not that.
I don't think a single soul is moving to Houston because of the commute. They're doing it in spite of the commute. But wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to do that?
Ultimately its optional, it's a choice. We could have Houston without the commute. Everyone could live the life they want without a commute, if we just put in the time and effort to design our urban spaces around that. And, if people really do want to commute - more power. I don't think that's a desire that will ever be rare to find. But we probably shouldn't be optimizing for shit, right? Or, at least, what I think we both agree most people think is shit.
I do think there is room for more these "New Urbanist" style developments which I have seen a few of in Texas. w the builder puts retail buildings centralized in the development. Lots of real parks and other type of shared resources for the community. Something where you still have a house with a yard but you can walk to the coffee shop in your neighborhood.
It costs money which taxpayers don't want to pay (unless it benefits them personally,) it requires long term planning which governments are incapable of, and it smells like socialism.
A rail system, no matter how fast and efficient, can never get close to matching that.
Sure you can find plenty of random places it would take longer for me to get to by train, but for places I actually want to get to, the subway is faster.
I live in the DC area which has an excellent Metrorail system, and it is still nowhere near close enough to being able to replace the average trip by car unless you in DC proper.
Now imagine how much worse things would be in Houston.
Spoiler: All of them should be this way
Absent that we'll need to wait for population growth (not happening, if anything we're going the other way) or immigration (ha) to fill our cities up to NYC density.
Note that NYC itself used to be even more dense than it is today. No other U.S. city is likely to reach even NYC's current density in any near- to medium-time scale.
Nope: One need only wait for the financial collapse that is fast approaching nearly every municipality in the US due to the relative scale of infrastructure buildout + maintenance as compared to its tax base.
The "standard" American city is 100% unambiguously completely financially impossible.
This is obscured by the fact that cities traditionally account for their infrastructure as depreciating assets whose value goes to zero rather than as perpetual liabilities with exponentially increasing maintenance costs, where the expected maintenance burden of a road already far exceeds its "asset value" on day one of its creation (when it's added to the city's balance sheet as "an asset.")
The American sprawl pattern is financially impossible.
Nice snark though!
It's maybe not "fair" that some people can use this option indiscriminately every day, but at least it is an option that everyone has access to. There's no physical barrier stopping you from using the Texas toll roads if you really needed to in an emergency. All that will happen is a bill will appear in your mailbox about 30 days later. If you choose to not pay it, the chances something bad will happen are approximately zero.