Fuck Cars

After widening was completed in 2008, a portion of the highway west of Houston is now also believed to be the widest in the world, at 26 lanes when including feeders. - (Wikipedia)

WTF

Houstonian of 30+ years here.

Even with the insane number of lanes available, driving anywhere inside beltway 8 between like 12 pm and 8pm is hell on earth. And outside those hours, you’re playing chicken with drunk drivers.

Before I started working remote, I used to clock my average speed to and from work. Most of the time it was 15-20mph on a 65mph freeway. Literally bicycle speeds. Without cars or gridlocked traffic, I could have commuted faster on a bike.

More than one person dies in Houston traffic every day on average. This is probably the shittiest and most expensive form of mass transit mankind will ever build. At least I hope this is as bad as it ever gets, lol.

This will soon become top 100 most popular photos. Its synonymous with car dependency and post WWII American urban planning

Government offloaded transportation onto individuals and parking onto business, now everyone is worse off.

4chan can be surprisingly perceptive sometimes.

How common/usable is subway in bigger cities? Here in Prague we have an amazing public transport, even with priority lanes for buses at some places and most importantly a pretty decent subway. I've never had an issue getting anywhere around the city in a short time (I can get anywhere in the city within 1.5 hour max (that is including suburbs around Prague), around 30 mins to places around the center), and the cost of an unlimited year-long ticket is just 150EUR.

Ah ha! I see the problem. It looks like more lanes may be needed.

But you dont get it, managers need you at the office so they can feel important. You just need to lose 3 hours of your day, spend more money and pollute more, STOP BEING SELFISH!

This reminds me of Andre Gorz - the social ideology of the motor car . Essentially:

The invention of the personal automobile, and destruction of public transportation, was a triumph of capitalist drug-peddling; suddenly, all at once, everyone's personal mobility became dependent on a single, new commodity, gasoline. Without it, we are unable to function, since urban sprawl and suburbanization now means we can't even walk to work if we wanted to.

And going by time, by spreading everything out, it ended up taking the same amount of time to get to work, in 1900 as in 1980.

I still can't get over how two lanes wide rail system can be more efficient than whatever I'm seeing now.

That gave me a good chuckle.

It's odd how we've commoditized such selfishly resource hungry transportation. I like walking to stuff as long as where I live is safe.

This is true. Commuting in an urban or suburban environment should be significantly easier than it currently is. Public infrastructure needs to improve and become less car-centric. That being said, if you live in a rural area or a small town where there is very little traffic, or if you need to pick up groceries for your family of 4+, cars are needed. People in anti-car communities do not like to hear this, but I do not think cars should be criticized for merely existing. Current infrastructure should be criticized for only considering them. I think that while holding on to the idea that car=bad is fun, it also sours people who genuinely rely on cars to the movement and limits what actual progress could be made by these communities to make walkable cities a reality. Thank you for listening to my ted talk.

This shit is pure madness

The answer is because local governments prioritized cars over streetcars and public transportation:

The real problem was that once cars appeared on the road, they could drive on streetcar tracks — and the streetcars could no longer operate efficiently. "Once just 10 percent or so of people were driving, the tracks were so crowded that [the streetcars] weren't making their schedules," Norton says.

> Me playing Cities: Skylines

Just get a bicycle bro