i believe around the same time the empire state building was constructed as well.

“You might give some serious thought to thanking your lucky stars you’re in Texas.”

And Kinky Friedman.

https://www.kxan.com/news/motorcyclist-killed-after-falling-...

She was nice. Worked at a local Taco Deli.

Texans view Americans the same way Americans view the rest of the world - derisively, but it is those viewers who should be derided, and often are, by the groups that they deride.

Something really didn't mesh with me.Too much focus on fakery and "big" I guess. (Especially all that "Roman" and "greek" flair after having just toured the real deal a few weeks earlier)

So we took advantage of the cheap accomodation and visited the stunning places around it.

Realistically, it's the _only_ way to get around the US.

Lots of people at my office do drive 40-50 miles each way, but it's not because they can't afford the houses that are 5 miles away (in perfectly pleasant neighborhoods, near the central area that most services in the region are located in).

And then the cheaper parts of towns aren't bad either.

People living in the outskirts of huge population centers are the ones driving far for economic reasons.

Neither of these anti car strategies will ever gain traction with any but the youngest, most easily duped Americans, who are already stuck in high density housing for a combination of economic and career trajectory reasons. The approach America has taken for many decades with these young people is “they’ll outgrow it”. And they do, when children arrive and these young people, as their parents and grandparents before them, aspire to that “better family life” that low density housing affords.

Okay, we don't get the 110°F in the summer here (only up to the 90's), but we do get the ice storms in the winter.

I still walk to get my groceries if I can, even if it's actively snowing. I just wish they'd plow the sidewalks here, I don't like having to choose between walking in the street or trying to walk on uncompacted snow in my boots while laden with groceries.

That's fine. Roll those costs into the price of food. That way, the amount of road tax you pay is proportional to how much goods and services you consume.

Meanwhile, the status quo is that everyone pays into the road system regardless of how much or little they use it - even if they don't own a car.

Roads have to get paid for no matter what. The only choice we have as a society is between taxing everyone versus taxing only the users.

Instead, please consider helpfully linking to the animations[1] you're talking about, so that others can find them without having to waste time listening to content they already read.

1: https://youtu.be/-16RFXr44fY?t=185

Many highways otherwise would have much more capacity. The telltale sign of exit issues is highways that bog down to 15mph for a couple miles, only to open up to 60+ with the same number of lanes.

Total shame and often unnecessary. I wonder how many man-years are wasted as a result.

Another third comes from revenues from oil & gas.

About a quarter comes from state gasoline sales tax and registration taxes.

So a little more than 90% of the funding for freeway projects in Texas comes from non-property tax sources.

But even then, a lot of the recent major highway projects in Texas had some kind of toll component to them whether that just directly be toll roads or tolled "express lane" projects which often have parts of those toll revenue backed bonds going to fund things like highway interchanges and on/off ramps for the freeways.

The vast majority of the property taxes I pay go towards the schools, the public parks, the fire/police/public service, libraries, and local roads. City+County taxes are ~0.710%, just the ISD and community college is ~1.16%. A massive chunk of those city/county taxes are roads and public service people, with a bit of parks department and other things like that thrown in.

The state gets its cut mostly by sales taxes though. 6.25% is the state sales tax, with things like groceries exempted. Cities can levy up to 2% additional, for a max rate of 8.25%. Of that 2% my city levies, half of that goes to public transit.

In areas where large highways were built over small highways, it isn't so easy to add an additional road.

https://www.google.com/maps/@29.721469,-95.4944352,3a,75y,11...

Up on the ramp you're coming from the tollway that is, you can see quite a lot from up there.

But on the street view the Google car is heading SW at grade on the 2-lane frontage road, the main freeway lanes are to the right and become elevated, and the overhead ramp had to fly over everything that was already there.

Notice how the frontage roads give a street address and access to properties facing the "limited access" highway.

> At service interchanges it is desirable to design the interchanges with the crossroad above the freeway due to:

> - The crossroad above the freeway results in longer sight distances to the exit ramp and gore area.

> - The crossroad above the freeway allows gravity to assist the operation of both accelerating vehicles (the on-ramp has a down-grade) and decelerating vehicles (the off-ramp has an up-grade). In addition, the resulting grades generally provide longer sight distances.

But that's the main thing I can find right now.

Never understood when major exporters of $thing would also specifically heavily subsidize $thing

I see the appeal of both kinds of lifestyle. Some of my best friends live in nice Chicago neighborhoods where they don't need cars. They are not rich or even significantly "well-off" by most standards, and their homes did not and do not cost as much as a house in a suburban area.

The "rules" prevent profiteers from destroying the standard of living for people who moved AWAY from density. Why should such people be herded around the country, hounded out of their homes for someone else's (increasingly a corporation's) profit? That's akin to black people being herded out of their neighborhoods for the construction of a highway.

My neighborhood was an example: A defunct theater behind our multi-unit house was sold to a developer, who built a massive residental building there. Our alderman had promised that new residential developments would be required to include parking with the sale of a unit. That was a lie.

As a result, many of the new residents decided that instead of buying a parking space in their building (where they WERE available), they'd just park on our streets... where we HAD to park because we had no other option. So now our standard of living took a huge hit, because we could no longer come home from work or the grocery store or other trips, and park and go into our homes. We had to circle the neighborhood in ever-larger radii for hours per week looking for parking. Real fun at 1 a.m... in the winter.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

These are people coming from several dozen square miles and dispersing into several dozen square miles, flowing through these chokepoints. They're commuting 40, 50, or more miles. You'd need these people to change several bus lines and several train lines. Those busses would be snaking through messy suburbs for them to be actually useful. Those neighborhoods to pick them up are sprawling with poor walkability and a 15 minute+ walk just to the major road bus stop for a lot of those people. And when they get off the train, they're probably going to need a bus to navigate the sparse fields of giant empty parking lots to their actual workplaces.

In fact, for a certain group of people this path practically already has a train service. US-75 runs parallel to the Red/Orange line. Assuming the person starts from Plano to go to their office job in Las Colinas/Irving (a massive assumption here, but practically best case), they won't even need to change trains. Let's ignore how they get to Parker Road station for now (Park and Ride? 15 minute walk through their neighborhood + same time as the park and ride?) and start the clock from there. They're going to commute to the Microsoft offices. They need to get in by 9:00 AM. So they instantly warp to the Parker Road Station, hop on the orange line at 6:46 AM. They get to North Lake College station at 8:07 AM. They then wait for the 229 bus at 8:21, take that 8 stops, hop off, walk a half a mile (~11min), and get there at 8:40. Nearly two hours and they only had to change once. And once again, that's instantly warping to Parker Road Station. Add another several minutes of drive or even more for a bus to connect to the train.

Next, they're going to take the highways, including toll ways. They leave from Parker Road Station, head down US-75, hop on Bush Turnpike, and it is an ~30min trip on average.

Or they want to avoid tolls. They take US-75 to 635 (taking this High Five talked about here), and it takes 30 minutes to an hour.

Now, theoretically this should get a little bit better. There will be a new train line with more of an East-West path that would be useful here. But it'll be a train change at Bush Turnpike Station, and service on this new Silver Line won't be great at first. Potentially a 30 minute wait for the next train at peak times. And it'll still take 50ish minutes after that transfer. So you'd look at maybe a 5 minute train ride from Parker Road to Bush Turnpike, wait 15 minutes for the next train, then still 50 minutes. Plus the 30 minutes for the bus ride and walk. Over an hour and a half, magically warping to Parker Road immediately when the train was about to leave and hopefully only waiting 15 minutes for the Silver Line train. We'll see that it is really like when it opens in late 2025 (hopefully). I'm still excited for it, I'm looking forward to not needing to drive and park all the way out to the airport for travel and having another way to Addison Circle for things like Oktoberfest and other events there will be great.

But this is also kind of a best case of someone taking the train versus driving. This is assuming someone lives close to the train lines in Plano. Their office is one bus line away from the station. Tons of people live even further out from there. Lots of people work at places which would require multiple bus transfers. The train doesn't even go halfway out into the sprawl, and the surrounding cities don't want to join DART.

But honestly, it makes little sense to me to have people living in Fairview, McKinney, Prosper, and Melissa trying to commute to an office job in Dallas/Irving/Grapevine/Westlake/etc. It's insane to me, but people choose it.

But a lot of people here just have a big aversion to taking transit. You're seen as an oddball to many for acknowledging it exists. We live right next to a bus stop that goes to a nice train station. My wife was looking at taking a job that would be immediately outside a train station. She looked at me like I was insane for suggesting she think about taking the train. I usually take it when I go into Dallas and people think it is incredible I survive. I take the bus to the city park with my kids and people wonder what happened to my car.

There's a lot of trucks hauling freight. The US has the largest train network in the world, it notoriously handles primarily freight, and still, more than 70% of freight in the US goes by truck.

If these roads are the average urban interstate highways, then about 10%ish of the traffic is heavy truck traffic.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2020/v...

In fact there are so few people in the HOV lane that I always feel like I'm doing something wrong when I take it, like I misunderstood the rules. It can't be this easy.

Nah, I really am the only person on the highway with more than one person in the car.

How many years is the break even point before profit is generated charging riders even 100$ per trip?

Some of these highspeed rail projects proposed across the USA have a 1-2000 year break-even excluding maintenance over 2000 years @ 100$/rider/trip

Numbers taken from wikipedia.

But I do think you are on the right track. I think public transportation in the form of buses doesn't make a lot of sense. But if Musk had been able to deliver on his promise of self-driving cars, then a giant city operated (or at least funded) fleet of small autonomous vehicles offering door-to-door service and route flexibility could change everything.

I see so many new residential projects with small lots or apartments. That's great! But still the zoning forces just housing, so its just homes on homes on homes for miles.

Where does the bus go? If you have dense city cores with business, commercial, and shopping it makes sense.

Living near Austin, I could take a bus to a place like the domain and have shaded walkways where I could walk to most shops without dying of heat stroke.

If I'm not going to the domain, I'm looking at businesses with huge parking lots strung along stroads. Walking from the bus drop off to a store might just kill you on a day like yesterday where it was 108F, and parking lot temps are closer to 130F.

Also getting to where you want to go over the huge spread out cities may involve waiting for 5 or 6 different busses.

And then hopefully your park and ride is being watched and you're windows aren't broken out.