Correction: At 5:12, we use Boston as an example of a successful urban highway removal project that resulted in congestion-reduction. Many of you correctly pointed out that this example isn’t quite right, because they moved several highway lanes underground. You can read more about that project here: www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/12/29/years-later-did-big-dig-deliver/tSb8PIMS4QJUETsMpA7SpI/story.html When it comes to congestion-reduction, highway removal projects are inherently complicated, but here is more information about some of the environmental and racial justice impacts of a proposed federal plan to remove urban highways: www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-01/urban-highway-removals-could-get-federal-help?sref=PxYB8Mnq
What I don't get is how much of a fight some Americans put up when there area wants to put in some new buses or light trains. Like, isn't it neat to just pay a few $ and get into the centre of a town without having to pay parking?
The problem is that in many cities these modes of transports are unsafe, especially for women at night due to a lack of police protection and or maintenance over time.
Like the guy from "Not just Bikes" said: People always talk about wanting to have the freedom to drive. But what about the freedom to not have to drive?
@@easyflamer Yes but also that's an incomplete answer. Because the obvious retort to that would be "well obviously driving is faster than travelling by bike or on foot, duh, that's why highways exist" (just playing devil's advocate here). So the more complete point would be that even for distances that could and should be well manageable on foot or on a bike, and that you would prefer to use for a variety of reasons (environmental concerns, not wanting to look for a parking spot, the traffic being too bad, whatever, you shouldn't really need a reason to want to have options), often in North America it's just plainly dangerous or extremely impractical to do it (because of stuff like pedestrian bridges that make you take a detour of a mile or something).
@@krystofdayne I'm literally 10 minutes from downtown. I can see the buildings from my neighborhood but I can't get there on foot or on bike because there are no bike lanes and no way to cross the highway. It's the only place we could afford to live.
“Adding car lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity." - Lewis Mumford, 1955 Edit: Cool, thanks for the likes! :D Greetings from Cologne, Germany - where a 6 lane highway Bridge is being replaced by a 12 lane bridge 🤦♂️
Until you loosen it to the point where the obesity suddenly disappears. If you build out an amount of highways and roads that exceeds the available demand, surely congestion won't be an issue anymore? Although I'm sure there are issues with cost and practicality to take into account.
One of the biggest cons ever was selling the American Dream as living 1 hour commute from work, where you can't walk to any store, can't go outside cause of dangerous pedestrian paths, & "freedom" means requiring an expensive car (insurance/maintenance) to go anywhere with no public transportation access or even sidewalks
And for any Europeans visiting this after the fact, it is literally _anywhere._ Where I grew up I needed a car and at least 20 min to get to the nearest "convenience" store. When I moved to town it was still necessary to take a car because there were no sidewalks and bikes would (and _very_ often did) get run over, sometimes on purpose out of outrage that a bicycle had the audacity to use a car lane (even though that's the law).
You don't have to live like that though. I live in America and neither of my parents commute an hour to work, i can walk to school, my town center, walmart, and many other places easily. If you choose to live in a closed off subdivision, that's your fault.
@@borahaeist3215'its your fault' not everyone can afford to live in a walkable area. In Toronto its expensive every, but slightly cheaper in the new suburbs being built at the edge of farmlans. No sidewalks there. 3 mil to be in a house near downtown
Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Paris, and Taipei's subway system changed my mind about public transit. I used to think that car ownership is the only way to go. Technically it still is in the US. But I can't imagine driving in those cities
I think it has a lot to do (especially with HK and Taiwan) with total landmass being really small, so they can't really afford space-eating highways. Take a look too at Singapore, where purchase of private vehicles is really controlled
@@AlizarineSilvermoon With HK and Taipei that might be true but he pointed out Shanghai which could have enough landmass for highways, but it doesn't use it for that. So some cities aren't limited by size, they just want to provide different modes of transport. The cities in the us can take a page from their book and see that most transit there works around the city and the metropolitan area.
@@AlizarineSilvermoon And because the landmass is small in those cities, they wouldn't need to build as many transit lines to serve the city because each line would be carrying a lot of people. Houston is very spread out, which means you would need a lot of transit lines to serve the city, and each line would not be carrying as many people because the population density is smaller.
Or just more types of people infrastructure instead of what's allowed car dominance that has obviously just made things worse for everyone XD (and don't anyone say "how are we gonna pay for it?" You do the changes each time the roads come up for maintenance and vote for leaders better than what we've got. Stop making the same old same old the only option)
My local government is a great counterpoint of this though. The town needs residential development, but the local government refuses to approve the construction of dense residential buildings that do not have any commercial space. That results in a surplus of empty business real estate in a city that currently only needs residences. It also results in sprawl of residences outside the city's borders.
As someone who can't drive, the car-centric society in America is very hard for me and others like me. Now that I'm loosing my vision I'm now to ask my mom if i can go to a friend's house bc I can't go if she won't. I'm in my 20s asking my mom to drive me places like a child again. It's rather humiliating for those who start losing their vision.
I hope you can move to somewhere nice like a streetcar suburb or Europe, I hate how badly vision-limited people are treated in America, for all the blind-assistance infrastructure they built they forget about how their streets and roads are so anti-pedestrian and that seriously screws over people who can’t see to drive.
It's humiliating for so many people. I grew up in a toxic house, and I couldn't even get away from the house for a breather because there were no sidewalks, and the closest bus stop was 20 minutes away. Children can't learn independence. Teens can't do after-school clubs and such unless they're chauffeured around by their parents. Seniors can't get around once they're old enough to lose reaction time, vision, etc. Many people with disabilities can't drive, either. People say "driving is a privilege, not a right", but you have to wonder... Is it really okay that all the aforementioned groups literally can't "earn that privilege" to drive, all because of the infrastructure? It's heinous.
It's true. The Big Dig buried I-93 through central Boston, added cloverleafs on the West End, and added a new I-90 bridge over the inner harbor. The project had a cost overrun of about 190%. We shouldn't look to the Big Dig for inspiration in solving our freeway problems, except to see how much a city improves when you restore local pedestrian access and hide a blighted freeway.
@@nealehardt7957 agreed, I think South Korea highway removal is better example for this, they removed the highway on the river entirely and resulted in less traffic.
As a local resident who drive on Katy freeway it’s a nightmare during rush hour. Actual they were going to build commuter trains from Katy to Houston by using an old MKT rail line but one Republican name John Culbertson who was voted out in 2018 denied Harris county to build commuter rail an instead make Katy freeway wider so they did an well like you said vox it only work temporarily . Personally if their was a commuter rail or light rail route available in my area I would take it every day but unfortunately it’s unlikely it will happen.
How about "hanging lines" i.e. bridge over the road? Or, alternatively, "line reserved for public transit, police and special vehicles"? Step 1 - find factories and rail line construcors who may be in this Step 2 - find lobby potential (corruption potential) Step 3 - Lobby (corrupt) rail line (as bridge over all road or built-in like a tramway). I don't know how it is in US reality, but in soviet russia we're have another solution: - local transport for collecting and local delivery people - magistral transport for far transit. So, probably it's better to lobby special "A" line only for public transit, taxies and ambulances, police, etc with building "Bus terminals" with fast pass-trough stops for M-routes and roundabout for the local busses. Local transit is ok to have 1 run for 15 minutes, and ads like "ride over the city for price of a liter of gasoline!". But you're need to speed-up via pre-selling tikets to prevent queue at the station.
Katy is a place that I think a Park and Ride facility would work really well. Its far enough for the train to be quicker, and there is parking for all them suburban suvs
The Katy Freeway is the largest Freeway on Earth, spanning *_twenty-six lanes each way_* and costing Texas 2.3 billion dollars to build and 8 million dollars a year to maintain. It still jams.
Yeah, my first reaction was "Surely you'll run out of additional drivers eventually." But it turns out you may not get there even with a 26-lane highway. And money (including maintenance costs) and space to build aren't limitless, to say nothing of the potential for accidents when crossing up to 12 lanes of traffic to get to your exit.
But people are leaving San Francisco because it costs too much to live there, and there are more options to work remotely, so you don't need to live near the tech capitols in California. And where are the largest number of the people moving. Texas, because the taxes are lower.
Mexicano aquí, la autopista que rodea el centro de la capital son 5 carriles por sentido y la que rodea toda la ciudad es igual pero con un "segundo piso" de cuota Jaja
I LOVE driving, but having lived in (Washington DC), or extensively visited cities that had amazing public transportation infrastructure (London, UK and Toronto, Canada), I strongly advocate for better public transportation to get around more efficiently. I fail to understand why the USA doesn’t have a high speed rail network like Japan or France running from Boston to Miami and NYC to Chicago.
@@st3pn56 no I'm sorry but stop using the size card, that's not the real reason. For example, although France is smaller than the US, it's still massive and spread out. The US could connect some of the major cities in the Eastern region, and as long as it's done properly, it would work and would become financially feasible. How many domestic flights are currently made between those cities? Imagine having the option to take the train which may have a longer travel time, but with none of the faffing about with the airport. Do not dismissed high speed rail. Sure it's not going to be adequate between NY and LA, but for closer cities it's really a no brainer
@@tonyye8680 you're right, it absolutely wouldn't. That was just an argument showing the size is not an excuse. To fix traffic, you need the above, proper regional, suburban commuter rail. Then better transport in the cities, whether that's a great bus service (London busses), trams, metro, good walking routes.
Alexander nah, it’s opposite. If you don’t build American city with endless sprawling communities, relying on cars, but build a high density, full of ped. paths city with services near homes, then it’s much easier to make pedestrian oriented city
Civil Engineer: *Spends most of his life trying to figure out how the road is should be constructed to reduce congestion* Average Cities Skylines player: *I'll just remove all traffic lights, and they'll figure it out*
@@Gummmibaer what exactly is inducing car traffic? I am for efficient / effective public transportation but also bring up the interchange due to the safety aspect they provide for drivers
Boston did not remove the freeway downtown. We buried it under the city leaving the boulevard that you see now above ground. It looks nicer and leaves space to make other forms of transit easier, but that freeway 100% still exists. It is considered a success (the project itself, not the cost and time), but is also the most expensive highway project ever undertaken in the US.
Yeah this is why I am always skeptical of Vox videos. I also live in Boston and for them to miss such an important distinction is incredibly disappointing. The Big Dig improved a lot of things but we still have some of the worst traffic in nation even after all the work we've done.
I don't think cities like Houston are going to build freeways underground. Not sure of the reason but might have something to do with water table and sea levels. That's also why our overpasses can seem like a roller coaster ride to some people. I've met people from Houston afraid of the heights so they avoid the freeways with high overpasses. Me when it rains heavy in Houston and water pours down from the overpasses: look at the beautiful waterfalls Houston has.
From a political standpoint there's also significant lobbying groups who'd rather have giant supermarkets rather than small ''just around the corner'' stores. Regardless, in order to expand highways you need to create more space, which is likely going to move someone further away from where they need to go, thus adding yet another vehicle on the same road you just expanded.
Mexico have a solution for this. In Mexico the most common store is called Oxxo. They are very small stores with little inventory but they offer such a high convenience. They can be as high as 5 Oxxos between a 1 mile radius of every Mexican. They have all the basic items: cheese, eggs, tortillas, veggies, beans, jam but most importantly you can pay almost anything: light, water, internet, TV , taxes, school fees, mortgages, travel. Even electronic transfer from account to account. It's super convenient in one place you can do everything and it's very close to your home and work from all the country you can always find the same basic products.
In City Skyline , it is also important to increase the funding! Funding will increase the amount of buses/trains/airplanes coming out. Try it in creative mod ( unlimited money) and thank me later :)
I find it surprising that induced demand is extremely bad only for cars, but good for public transport and anything that isn't a car. For example the more people take a bus/train the better the system can get because high ridership eventually leads to improvements that make things better and more direct/frequent. The more people use a bike the more bike lanes there will be and the better riding a bike can get. That's just how bad and inefficient cars are as a form of transportation, when induced demand works again them but not other forms of transportation.
You can skip high speed rail, and focus on reliable regional rail. At the very least regional trains must be a bit faster than car at freeway speed. Not the speed limit, the typical speed.
@@dbclass4075 Hmm... As a UK inhabitant myself, I'm going to say the UK can't skip high-speed rail, since our conventional rail system is at capacity, and we simply can't run any more trains. I don't claim to know what it's like in the US, but I do agree on the notion that commuter rail needs improving to replace cars, but high-speed rail also needs building to replace airplanes. That's why I think a HSR line between Los Angeles and either San Francisco, Las Vegas or San Diego are such good ideas, because they are the right distance to compete with some of the world's busiest air corridors.
I’m all for rail, but the premise of the video was that even adding public transport options doesn’t reduce demand. The whole idea is that the more transportation volume into a city, the more demand.
@@iismitch55 What? It does reduce demand *on roads*. Fundamentally, there's a minority of people who have to drive, (and a minority who can't drive), and everyone else is doing whatever's most convenient or whatever they're used to.
I luckily live in an area where almost everything I need is in a mile or less of walking. I have always hated living in places that require you to have a car to live. Neighborhoods built with hundreds of homes but the closest grocery store is five miles, work is ten miles, shopping for household and clothing is five or more miles. It is just a receipts for living in a car and working to own a car. All the money I would normally spend owning a car, I can instead spend on me.
@@lecookie007 These kind of city does exist in other country easily y'know? well not always within 1 miles (1.6 km) but I can get most of my needs within 2 km of my residence. Like veggies? there's a small grocery mom&pop store just 200 m away. Clothes? there's small boutique here, or I can go to larger store 1.5 km away. The farthest place I had was my workplace, about 3 km away since it's located near town center. Rather the american suburban +full zoning style is the rarer ones in the world. Like I get the reason to zone office+industrial (my country kinda did), but stuff like grocery stores and other daily needs shouldn't be 'zoned' hard, like by making a giant suburban that's consist of just housing, but make smaller ones so that there's place for stores, like grocery stores or smaller department stores for clothing to exist between housings.
The Katy Freeway is honestly the saddest thing I have ever seen. A train network connecting the city of Houston would have been so much cheaper, and would occupy a lot less space than the monstrosity that is Katy Freeway.
Another problem with adding lanes is that if people are still commuting to the same work area, they still have to get on and off at the same exit, which basically reduces all freeway traffic to one lane. It isn't like each lane has its own on-ramps and off-ramps!
I think too much focus is made on transportation and not much is in the destinations themselves. If the destinations are closer together, then walking becomes feasible, no need for motorized travel between them. Many communities all over the world, people achieve their daily tasks without a vehicle of any kind because all their needs are walking distance. With more walkable places, public transport becomes more a more effective solution as the demand for people going to and from the same destinations increase justifying high volume high frequency service. With low density places where not many people are going to and from the same places at the same time, car travel makes more sense. Public transport is not very efficient because the ridership will not be there to justify high frequency service. And so in these places, buses only stop in 30 -1 hour intervals which is not pleasant nor convenient.
You definitely need density for an ideal system but it can work without it, my town is pretty low density, less than half that of London but it’s still 3 times more than American suburbs, roughly 6000 people per square mile, and you regularly see buses moving between the neighbourhoods and destinations like the pedestrian mall in the centre, or the industrial estate, or the airport. If you have big destinations compacted together where you know people will want to go, then if you make bus routes frequent enough people will use them to travel, you just need to position the bus stops well enough that it’s never more than a 10 minute walk (ideally 5 minutes) from people’s houses.
@@justanotheryoutubechannel Broad density measurements may not accurately reflect the actual walkability. Los Angeles county is considered dense, but its almost uniformly sprawl. For most of it, its very hard to get around without a personal vehicle. Businesses and residences are also segregated which necessitates longer travel lengths. European towns are considered low density but much of the buildings are actually fairly concentrated (usually around a rail station). Walking is still fairly feasible. What makes it low density is that there are vast rural lands.
@@Basta11 That’s true. In my town though I can confirm it is mostly low density terraced housing, if it was all high rises it would have a huge population by comparison, and it is pretty walkable. But like you said it does have clusters around train stations, and compared to us towns it probably feels like being in an old city. Traditional “ideal” walkable neighbourhoods are usually dense city blocks built into 15-minute communities, but I think you can definitely have a less dense area than that which still works, especially if it has clusters of higher density areas connected via transit.
As someone who has driven in this highway I can say they nailed the explanation. There are people who once had about a 45 minute commute (very common in Houston) now take 1 1/2 hours. Communities keep popping up further and further down the rod and it keeps getting worse.
Texas is getting awful. I advocate for public transportation but it’s hard to with their mindset. Also, way too many cookie cutter, poor quality homes/neighborhoods being built. Looks disgusting.
This is due to a market failure when it comes to housing costs. Once people have families, a studio apartment ain't going to cut it anymore, and condo's and sfh's in the central cities are prohibitively expensive for the middle class and lower class due to supply and demand. No easy fix
@@FirebirdCamaro1220 Yes, there is an easy fix. Start building apartment buildings with shops on the ground floor, parks and public transport system and it will get fixed. Younger people will buy those small apartments, then move out to a bigger one or maybe a house when they have kids and then the new generation will move to the small apartments, etc. Build the houses close to the apartments and shops so they are walkable neighbourhoods and not isolated from everything. Another thing they should do is make homes smaller. In the US you have tiny apartments, big houses, then super highend multi million dollar homes. There is nothing in between. It's a cultural shift the US and Canada have to make to fight climate change and provide their population with a better quality of life.
The reason that Boston had success in reducing congestion was due to a particular 2 mile stretch that had 2.1 miles of on ramps before moving in underground. By removing the constant on/ off of traffic flow was improved and congestion reduced especially with better designed exits and on ramps.
I wish Rhode Island would spend money to revamp 95 through Providence. Traffic is horrendous due to the US 6 and RI 146 on/off ramps being so close to each other.
The US has such an intense car culture, and buses are generally seen as 'low class' forms of transportation, on top of many city governments being too cheap to build better infrastructure...I'm afraid the problem will stick around for a while.
in cities, there are good subway services and good amtrak service, even in rural areas. many americans dont consider public transportation because they think cars are better and faster when a lot of the time its the opposite
Sadly the American belief that we have a superior way of thinking and a way of life is so ingrained into many Americans that they’ll dismiss ideas simply on the basis that it’s foreign and we need a “American solution”, if they even believe we need a solution at all.
Cause we all agree that traffic lights are fair and balanced except when it’s 5am and there’s no one at an intersection with the light is red but you can see the cop in the shadows lurking waiting to pounce on the one to run it
@@Big007Boss Most of Europe have gone over to roundabouts. They help with some issues when it comes to traffic flow. So is not odd that they are popular. And generally is more the flow then the capacity then help with. But one should not underestimate how much flow matter.
Yes, make more people stop driving and use public transport instead. Soon we will get to the point that even the rich would use take buses, trains and taxis.
I wish my country (Indonesia) realised this. There are always highway constructions going on everywhere. Meanwhile, public transport construction takes a backseat.
hi neighbor , I am not sure Malaysia the same or not, but they are building a highway through Sarawak & Sabah ,but tbh we need it as we only have small crumbling road before. My city of Kuching was planing to build a MRT but it was cancelled,traffic here is very very bad, atleast they are investing on bicycle lanes and free busses
@@brandonchan4537 I think your country's capital city, Kuala Lumpur, is without the shadow of a doubt a contestant for the most kilometers of highway per capita. In Google Earth when you turn on the Road option, the tangle of orange lanes (that means highway haha) looks a lot more of a spaghetti than most Spaghetti Junctions in the world.
Building highways are not bad. Just like other things, too much is inherently bad. Sekarang di sini transportasi publik sudah mulai digencarkan. Di Jawa udah enak ada KRL, di Denpasar sebelum Covid macet melulu pas jam sibuk karena gak ada pilihan lain selain lewat jalan raya.
It reduced congestion at street level however - despite the fact that Downtown Boston was the destination for the majority of these people. The highway going THROUGH was moved underground, but the accesses (additional 2 lane flyovers, etc) that were dotted along the +1.5 mile stretch sent underground were severely reduced. At certain points, you had 2 and 3 lane access (!) lanes, now there is only a single entrance/exit (spread in different points) along the entire stretch. Additionally, the highway wasn't just the part sent underground - it was also the 8 lane avenue on the surface parallel to the entire length.
Wow! in Milwaukee back in the 70s there was a plan to build lots of freeways within the city. But they never went through with those plans because they went through a lot of culturally important areas of the city and people worried they would be cut off from outside travelers. And now those areas are still some of the nicest areas of the city.
Not ‘all’ they did, but extremely important, and it should’ve been said. A huge benefit of Boston’s plan was separating local traffic from regional traffic. A boulevard is better land use and can make the city tax revenue. Same thing happened with Seattle’s Viaduct. Turning a highway in a city into a tunnel is a good solution in car-centric America. But it costs a lot. San Francisco is case of a city only replacing the highway with a boulevard
I laughed at that pretty hard. The idea that they just replaced the road with a tree-lined boulevard and everything just solved itself is pretty childish.
At street level in Boston, elevated 93 was removed and replaced with a lovely boulevard. But 93 was simply buried under downtown, not actually removed.
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 Are you kidding?? That's a terrible idea. What we should do is get rid of cars, ESPECIALLY in the big cities. There are a large number of ways to do that and to do that well.
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 This isn't bad idea, but it ignores the problem for commuters. Alternative commuting methods are the better option, rather than hiding the problem in tunnels.
as someone who regularly drives on the katy highway, i can say with full confidence that you are completely and utterly right. it's always so congested... and for what
I don't believe this is an issue of Americans being reluctant to *live* in more dense housing, it's a reluctance of entrenched residents to allow such housing to be built. Most US cities currently ban even duplexes on the vast majority of their residential land area.
Failure to provide infrastructure and opportunity with that density also plays a role. Density much include "living" spaces such as parks, gardens, workshops...the kinds of things suburban and rural residents often have access to in their own homes, but that might be shareable and managed in cities. Of course, improved quality of life leads to the other deterrent to dense housing...cost.
America: Separate the cities into residential and commercial areas Place them far apart Do not provide mass transportation options People have to use cars and there is traffic America: Surprised pikachu face
It's also not just induced demand; it's also the Braess's paradox. This can be observed not only in car traffic, but also in things like the electric grid. The *only* way to solve our traffic problem in the long run is described by the Downs-Thomson paradox, which, in the most simple terms, states that the travel time of one mode can only be as fast as its fastest alternative. In the end, why take the train when you can drive there faster? Why drive when you can bike there quicker? That, combined with induced demand, is why our traffic problem is so chaotic. There are great success stories around the world, but one great example is Amsterdam. It used to be heavily congested with cars like our cities just a few decades ago, and yet, now it's known as the cycling paradise with an amazing public transit system. In addition, driving in Amsterdam is no longer a nightmare due to the fact that cars have different roads to take that are indirect but designed for them. A UA-cam channel called "Not Just Bikes" have made some great videos on this and I highly recommend folks who might be interested in this.
@@uptorest True, but you also have to factor in the external costs...the car, maintenance, insurance, etc...Once accounted for, I suspect transit is more comparable than you think.
Sadly you can predict code but you can't predict people who drive the wrong way down a one-way road!!!! Like seriously how do people manage to do that!!!??
@@Ryan_Rail But one thing Cities have correct: Best way to reduce traffic jams is not to build more lanes per se, but to build more dedicated roads and alternative routes to get from point A to B. But that is not feasible in real life, because that would cost too much and also take up too much valuable real estate and/or industry space.
@@Wistbacka there are many causes and solutions to traffic jams, there is no silver bullet. But I think planning the zoning and flow of the city is by far one of the most important aspects when starting a new city, something that is difficult to do in existing metropolitans
Honestly and unfortunately, this is the typical "civil engineer" solution and it won't work. If you think about this, highway is like you get rid of all signal lights on a road but we still see congestion coming (like the ones shown in the video)
i have built the perfect indian utopia with no traffic lights and called it Mumbai. so this gave me a chuckle. it would work if cars could collide with eacher without crashing.
America in general, but even the two way streets are wide as 💩. I've seen two way streets in japan that are what americans would call the shoulder of a road. Then again, Asia tends not to have monster trucks driving on all the roads.
Honestly having grown up in a small town in the UK with good public transport links everywhere, On my travels around the world I've always lowkey felt sorry for cities/areas that really aren't easily navigable by foot or easy public transport beyond busses. I get many parts are rural, But big built up cities & metropolitan areas have little excuses. The thought of spending hours driving from a suburb to a city or something along those lines has always terrified me, I know its not avoidable for everyone even some parts of the UK, But forever grateful that most of us at least have a choice with a wide reaching rail network/inner city trams/tubes.
@@champanzee6486 this exact sentiment is the very reason why US won't get any change. "Yeah we have been built that way", but the sunk cost of automobile culture is a more important factor now
Public transport will solve the US cities, sadly the US never invested in anything serious ever so far. So it all has to be done now. Maybe take an example on how China is solving this. They built a superior road and train network the last decades.
Really wish the US would embrace improve public transportation, but that won't happen for as long as big oil investors like the Koch Brothers continue to lobby for more and more personal vehicles, as opposed to better trains, buses, subways, and pedestrian mobility.
I agree with your main point, but just to correct an incorrect part, big oil investors are actually pro buses and were actually one of their biggest advocates when they were first being invented. Since big car manufacturers are still the ones who make them, they are awarded massive government contracts to make a bunch of them, they use up significantly more fuel than a standard car, and typically they facilitate even more lobbying opportunities in the form of dedicated bus lanes. Big auto and oil companies actually killed wider adoption of public train networks by proposing buses since they would use the existing highways that they were also lobbying for, so big auto and oil companies are not anti-public transport, they are anti-public transport methods that don't net them any money, so they aren't actually against buses.
Not only because of the lobbyists but because the average american has grown too used to the comfort of a car. No matter how much you argue you have to admit that a car is way more comfortable than public transport. The biggest being you don't have to stick to a time table and can leave whenever you want.
@@waffle2434 this is complicated. I would still say they’re not pro public transit, they just realize they have to do something. Both of their efforts to support buses have ulterior motives, so I don’t know if you can call that a pure support for public transit. As you said in the 40s 50s and 60s, it was about getting rid of the street cars of other cars could move more freely and that the buses would use their oil. And today their efforts to support buses and bus lanes are so the developing countries don’t build subways and that these countries keep using their oil and cars.
@@anwitmondal6417 This really depends on where you live, in a big city absolutely not, as someone who lives in a big city with a highly developed train and subway network, I would attest that trains and subways (if done right) are significantly more comfortable than cars, because I never have to deal with traffic, trains, where I live, are never delayed, they come by every five minutes, and are significantly faster than any car I have ever been in. I can get from my job to my apartment in under 10 minutes during peak traffic because of trains, the same trip in a car would take at least 30 minutes because the roads are so congested during morning rush hour, I could walk to my job faster than driving there. On top of this, I do not have to worry about the hassles of driving, so I can actually be productive on my commute, and the yearly membership pass I pay to board the train every day is significantly cheaper than any car insurance or car payments I have ever seen. Don't get me wrong, I still think cars are indispensable and really the only means of transport in rural areas since there really is not an economical way to maintain public transport in low-density areas, but in big cities, there really is not a point to owning a car.
I live in vancouver and this pain feels so real. The biggest issue with our highways is the bottlenecks, but every time they fix one a new one forms further down the line. We're currently debating replacing an aging tunnel with a massive 10 lane bridge but the bigger problem will be that the bridge is followed by a bottleneck further down the highway. We could spend 10 billion dollars just to push the bottle neck further down the road or we could just build a more functional city by utilizing mass transit and more "city within a city" models. Neighborhoods where we have towers with grocery stores and shops on the lower level so you dont even need to commute to pick up groceries. Thankfully this city has a decent public transit system or else things would be 10 times worse.
Also, something this video neglects to discuss it the physical point of bottlenecks. Even if you add 24 lanes on a highway, when all trafic leaves that highway on 1 or 2 lanes, it is going to bottleneck one way or another. More roads is never a good option, even from a "flow" perspective.
Bingo. I don't see this cited nearly often enough. All infrastructure built around private vehicles is inherently too low-capacity to handle travel in and around cities. There's a reason public transit used to be called "mass transit." It is able to move much larger numbers of people much faster than private vehicles can, as long as it's built right.
It is indeed make enough connecting roads as well. Finally any highway wider than like 2x5 roads is effective as the traffic on the left lanes have to cross so many lanes on the right to exit. Or for example a 2x4 divides into 2 times a 2x2 road that works alright.
You are saying this ironically but you are actually right. Amsterdam get rid of of several highways and future projects that american city planners wanted to implement in their city. Nowaways Amsterdam is famous for being the city of bicyclists and the traffic there is one of the best in the world.
Its not the highways, its the lack of Efficient Public transport and the US culture of owning a car to commute. Government should encourage people to use the Public Transportations and invest more on public transports.
I love it. You can walk around downtown Boston now and small businesses and restaurants have flourished. I commuted into Boston for years and never had to go through downtown. And then on weekends I would take the rail in and walk around. Downtown is like a a park now.
@GNR Forever Boston is a great city, you should definitely go to visit one day. I used to live in Lowell, MA but ironically ended up moving to Houston. It's hard to tell which has worse traffic.
"But, the risk for going into Kate Freeway is that the traffic congestion may still occur during rush hour, so if you want faster route and less congestion then we suggest that you go into Pickle Parkway, the highway that impose the 85-mph speed limit."
The highway “removed” in Boston was actually turned into a tunnel, part of an enormous network of highway tunnels built over 20 years at great cost and remaining stubbornly congested. Not the best comparison for this video unfortunately.
Yeah, this is a horribly researched video. Also...the Katy Freeway remains heavily congested at peak hours, but overall, it's not *as* slow along the entire corridor as it was before it became one of the world's widest freeways. That, despite the corridor carrying a good 70,000-90,000 extra vehicles per day along any given point compared to a decade ago. Plus, weekend traffic congestion is most definitely lower than before it was reconstructed. I can actually list a lot of examples of reduced levels of congestion, after a corridor was widened. US 50 in the Sacramento foothills is a good example, where despite continued growth, the freeway still operates at faster speeds nearly two decades after HOV and truck climbing lanes were added.
For them to miss such a glaring distinction is incredibly disappointing. Boston has some of the worst traffic in the nation despite all the work we've done to try and fix things. Don't get me wrong, the Big Dig helped a lot but to say we got rid of our highways is just completely false. This is why I never trust Vox videos unless I double check the information myself.
Exactly. I think more North American cities would benefit from having more public rail networks, connecting downtown to the edge of surburbs, at least.
@@patrickkotowski5780 Im not saying making roads bigger is wrong or unnecessary. But gentrification of cities and improving public transport is the real solution. Of course, that would mean ending suburbanization and its rac*st origin
That is the thing i HATE about when im in Texas. (I split my life like half the year in DFW/Houston, the other half in Mexico City) and the reliance on highways and cars is such a necessary mean of transportation even for the simplest things. But when im in mexico, Walking, Bus, the lovely Metro, Kombis. Taxis on the rare occasion. That is one of the HUGE ➕'s to living in 🇲🇽
Math does eventually show that adding more lanes would relieve highway congestion, it just takes quite a few more. City populations are NOT infinite and eventually equilibrium would be reached.
(did not occur to me at all) do admit. .. it's awesome to drive on that highway in the morning(late night) at 80mph, clear traffic. //Granted it forced me to get over my highest fears moving down to Houston where ppl drive 50mph even on the small small roads.
The Katy Freeway is nothing compared to the 401 through Mississauga. The 401 have lesser lanes than the Katy Freeway. The 401 through Mississauga have the widest point of 22 lanes.
Cities Skylines traffic doesn't really work the same way. 99% of cars on the road are citizen-owned, and whether citizens drive depends on distance, speed limits, and whether they own a car. Plus, people in Cities Skylines cannot work from home! They must get to work somehow.
@@roryhanlon927 Of course you can't. You need to either build more underground lines or invest in other modes of transport (i.e. bikes). But it still takes people off the streets. London is already a mess despite all its public transport and probably is always going to be like that due to its old, narrow, historical roads. But, imagine if each one of those people took their cars instead of the underground.... It would be quicker to walk from Croydon to Westminster than drive...
@@braytenr2185 of course America is broken either way. Even if they expanded their train network stations wouldn't be built in the city centre like European cities. They would be put in the edge of the city sometimes an hour by car from the centre.
@@braytenr2185 start with the central parts of large cities and get frequent buses in a grid network and work out from there. Would be unrealistic for my gargantuan city’s land area to immediately provide service everywhere, but the core township has more density, less cars per household, tighter/more walkable street grid. Very possible to build a nice transit base in American cities and then fan out from there
@@braytenr2185 not really it’s making better use of the what we already have not starting over: gigantic ROWs mean ample space for bus lanes, oversupply of surface parking lots ripe for investment, horrible land use planning increases average trip length and drains city coffers - not to become manhattan everywhere, but commercial nodes within walking distance of residential areas and more diversity in the housing types offered.
I'm from Houston and I can say that without remote work opportunities it's only going to continue to get worse regardless of new roads or less roads. Salaries are not scaling with inflation so more people are having to work that may not have worked in the past. Plus the population is growing. The jobs get concentrated in certain areas so people drive.
Well Beijing was infamous for that... So as Shanghai... Even both cities have a robust public transport system... (Their problem is: their metro don't have express trains which skip stations. The city got so big it makes more sense if you drive to other side of the city instead...)
China messed up by copying America's city planning model and incentivizing urban sprawl, wide open spaces, and parking lots everywhere, instead of following the example of Japan and South Korea. Their cities have huge populations that would benefit from mixed-use zoning and transit-oriented development but they decided that being able to drive long commutes from suburban homes to the city center was somehow a first-world privilege.
Those lanes will eventually free up as China's population begins to shrink at an enormous rate in the next 30 years. Talk about overbuilding infrastructure.
More importantly, induced demand also works for public transport and bike infrastructure, i.e. if you improve the thing you want commuters to use even though nobody uses it right now, people will start using it once it's built
Yes, but walking and cycling as well. Any alternative you give people will release pressure on the roads, and fortunately pretty much every option (with the possible exception of private helicopters) is also more environmentally friendly than using a car to commute.
@@random-np3gn Depends how you build your cities. The US infamously has a lot of urban sprawl, which does indeed disincentivise walking or cycling, but most cities in the world are dense enough for it to be perfectly possible.
Is that what it was? I didn't know a servi....aaaaah. you mean congestion. I got all excited thinking there was an app that told you how to avoid driving
As an everyday user of Katy fwy over the last ten years I have a few comments that invalidate many of the points made in this video: 1) there is a big reason why authors show the statistics only up to 2014, as in 2018 the expansion plan was finally finished with solving the biggest bottleneck of i10 which is the i10, 290 and 610 (all are at least 6 lines big) intersection at uptown. Once that was done the 290 became a light speed tunnel with no traffic anytime (thanks to increase from 3 to 6 lines of traffic in each direction and HOV lines), i10 received additional lines to exit to 610 not blocked by 290 traffic, drivers now have a flexibility in selection of morning and evening commute routes depending on the traffic conditions at one of the highway options. 2) HOV lines provide fast way to drive in and out downtown in times of worst rush hours - it is also friendly to the modern trends as you need just one passenger on board with you to enjoy it for free, 3) westpark can back you up at any time. Also just as a honorable mention - 290 expansion turned its traffic situation from one of the worst in Houston to the most reliable highway at any time during the day or night
But that'll only connect Dallas and Houston. Inside Houston...gonna take longer. Still, it's no doubt a step in the right direction, and the fact that Texas is getting it done before Cali(even though Cali started wayyy earlier) is very much a positive.
@@TheSeniorTaco Infrastructure stimulates economic and population growth and improves site conditions for companies. So we'd all profit, if a railway existed. Climate change is the next problem our generation faces. If trains are not profitable, we have to make them profitable to combat climate change. The truth is, cars and planes are so profitable because too many of the costs, that exist when using a them, are externalized. The high cost of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are not reflected in a car, in gas or in a ticket price. Who pays in the end? Society. Right now it's hungry Texans suffering from severe weather, having to pay all the damages out of their own pocket. That's climate change. Anywhere else, someone has to see the doctor because of health issues created by local pollution. There goes money to the doctors appointment and an unnecessary health complication. Somewhere someone is going to pay with money. The question is, do we want that to be the person, who has nothing to do with the creation of these damages or do we want it to be the person, who profited off creating the damage. It's unfortunate some people are paying with their homes, their health and even their lives. Those costs can be avoided and they should. Anyways, wasn't HSR a private project? It definitely should be subsidized. Btw. how many people use the fire department or call 911? That's probably 2% of the people. The entire point of collecting taxes is to fund institutions that are necessary but wouldn't be profitable because so few people use them. Climate change makes rail necessary.
Notably, roads for cars are by far the least-efficient way to provide for travel capacity, in terms of cost and land area per traveler, compared to any form of public transit or bicycle or pedestrian infrastructure. Once you have a single lane of transit or other non-car infrastructure, its capacity can expand to be greater than most freeways without needing any further expansion. Even if you did need to expand a transit line’s capacity to two lines, or a bikeway or sidewalk to extra lanes, it’s still taking up less space than a freeway. Bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit commuters can easily pack into far less space than the same number of people each surrounded and separated by their own individual automobile can.
In the long-term it is better to invest in autonomous driving, because traffic jams practically always happen because of small human behaviours on the road which AI driven cars won't mimic. CGP Grey has a good video on that.
@@jinjunliu2401 AVs are unproven technology that still requires 4000lb metal boxes to drive quickly in the same space as pedestrians and cyclists, and it still takes space to park those vehicles. All of that space for parking has forced the US to build things so far apart that you have to drive places. Removing cars means things can be built much closer together and cars are then no longer needed to go everywhere.
@@jinjunliu2401 No matter how clever your cars become, they still take up (including the gaps between cars) about fifteen square metres, and most likely will still carry only one or two people. Buses, trams, trains and bicycles are all far more space-efficient.
Correction: At 5:12, we use Boston as an example of a successful urban highway removal project that resulted in congestion-reduction. Many of you correctly pointed out that this example isn’t quite right, because they moved several highway lanes underground. You can read more about that project here: www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/12/29/years-later-did-big-dig-deliver/tSb8PIMS4QJUETsMpA7SpI/story.html
When it comes to congestion-reduction, highway removal projects are inherently complicated, but here is more information about some of the environmental and racial justice impacts of a proposed federal plan to remove urban highways: www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-01/urban-highway-removals-could-get-federal-help?sref=PxYB8Mnq
Okay
This was 4 minutes ago? Man I’m a huge fan but even I have never been this early
Dang
Is there anything in the US that doesn’t have a racial angle?
Wait so if you guys got that wrong, where did the 62% reduction come from?
What I don't get is how much of a fight some Americans put up when there area wants to put in some new buses or light trains.
Like, isn't it neat to just pay a few $ and get into the centre of a town without having to pay parking?
Auto manufacturers have lobbied so that public transportation doesn’t grow like it should
The problem is that in many cities these modes of transports are unsafe, especially for women at night due to a lack of police protection and or maintenance over time.
But what if THE POORS want to use them? Then THE POORS will be able to go ANYWHERE and not just their designated poor person areas.
Americans have a "ME FIRST" attitude. My car. My house. No sharing. Public trans is for the poor.
what if you are the poor?
So building more highway lanes is like opening more tabs on Google Chrome....
Yes
in the future 20 + line or more maybe
... if you are annoyed by slow loading pages. (To finish your sentence.)
Oooohhhh that hit real hard.
It's like loosening your belt to stop an obesity related heart attack
Like the guy from "Not just Bikes" said: People always talk about wanting to have the freedom to drive. But what about the freedom to not have to drive?
What’s stopping you from not driving?
@@UnkleGaga cause north American cities prioritize car travel so much that traveling on foot, bike, or bus takes hours longer
@@easyflamer Yes but also that's an incomplete answer. Because the obvious retort to that would be "well obviously driving is faster than travelling by bike or on foot, duh, that's why highways exist" (just playing devil's advocate here). So the more complete point would be that even for distances that could and should be well manageable on foot or on a bike, and that you would prefer to use for a variety of reasons (environmental concerns, not wanting to look for a parking spot, the traffic being too bad, whatever, you shouldn't really need a reason to want to have options), often in North America it's just plainly dangerous or extremely impractical to do it (because of stuff like pedestrian bridges that make you take a detour of a mile or something).
@@krystofdayne I'm literally 10 minutes from downtown. I can see the buildings from my neighborhood but I can't get there on foot or on bike because there are no bike lanes and no way to cross the highway. It's the only place we could afford to live.
@@UnkleGaga car centric infrastructure
“Adding car lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity." - Lewis Mumford, 1955
Edit: Cool, thanks for the likes! :D
Greetings from Cologne, Germany - where a 6 lane highway Bridge is being replaced by a 12 lane bridge 🤦♂️
this sums it up precisely. I wish more people were aware of this analogy by Mumford when it comes to highway expansion projects.
What a way to explain the congestion. We need to reduce traffic itself rather than allowing more space for traffic.
Couldnt say it better than that!!!
Wait, 1955? If this quote is real then we've known about this long before a lot of highway expansions were done
Until you loosen it to the point where the obesity suddenly disappears. If you build out an amount of highways and roads that exceeds the available demand, surely congestion won't be an issue anymore? Although I'm sure there are issues with cost and practicality to take into account.
Me, an intellectual who have played Cities Skylines: Yes, I understand traffic
The crying avatar is icing on the proverbial cake!
@@DeViceCrimsin_ Ironic
has*
Industrial area turns to spagity on ramp town
America should just install the TM:PE mod
(And use more roundabouts)
One of the biggest cons ever was selling the American Dream as living 1 hour commute from work, where you can't walk to any store, can't go outside cause of dangerous pedestrian paths, & "freedom" means requiring an expensive car (insurance/maintenance) to go anywhere with no public transportation access or even sidewalks
Yeah, no kidding.
And for any Europeans visiting this after the fact, it is literally _anywhere._ Where I grew up I needed a car and at least 20 min to get to the nearest "convenience" store. When I moved to town it was still necessary to take a car because there were no sidewalks and bikes would (and _very_ often did) get run over, sometimes on purpose out of outrage that a bicycle had the audacity to use a car lane (even though that's the law).
You don't have to live like that though. I live in America and neither of my parents commute an hour to work, i can walk to school, my town center, walmart, and many other places easily. If you choose to live in a closed off subdivision, that's your fault.
@@borahaeist3215ok now imagine if you lived in a rural area or the suburbs
@@borahaeist3215'its your fault' not everyone can afford to live in a walkable area. In Toronto its expensive every, but slightly cheaper in the new suburbs being built at the edge of farmlans. No sidewalks there. 3 mil to be in a house near downtown
Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Paris, and Taipei's subway system changed my mind about public transit. I used to think that car ownership is the only way to go. Technically it still is in the US. But I can't imagine driving in those cities
This right here.
And you can basically go everywhere on public transport which are actually quick and reliable
I think it has a lot to do (especially with HK and Taiwan) with total landmass being really small, so they can't really afford space-eating highways. Take a look too at Singapore, where purchase of private vehicles is really controlled
@@AlizarineSilvermoon With HK and Taipei that might be true but he pointed out Shanghai which could have enough landmass for highways, but it doesn't use it for that. So some cities aren't limited by size, they just want to provide different modes of transport. The cities in the us can take a page from their book and see that most transit there works around the city and the metropolitan area.
@@AlizarineSilvermoon And because the landmass is small in those cities, they wouldn't need to build as many transit lines to serve the city because each line would be carrying a lot of people.
Houston is very spread out, which means you would need a lot of transit lines to serve the city, and each line would not be carrying as many people because the population density is smaller.
Houston: *the highway is really congested*
Biffa cities skylines: *hold my tea*
Lane mathematics!
“Let’s put a roundabout in this intersection”
-Biffa (every video, probably)
Hvordan har du det? (This is how you say it in Norwegian.)
Hahaha!!! The moment I saw this video I heard Biffa say “Lane mathematics”
@@ali-sxchtwithm6380 “Jeg har det bra. Hvordan har du det” (is this how you say it in Norwegian?)
Imagine how much better it would be if they created a train network
Or just more types of people infrastructure instead of what's allowed car dominance that has obviously just made things worse for everyone XD (and don't anyone say "how are we gonna pay for it?" You do the changes each time the roads come up for maintenance and vote for leaders better than what we've got. Stop making the same old same old the only option)
A *proper*
With those billions of dollars they invested, they could have made thousands of miles of railway. Wayless than that is enough.
Not Amtrak lol
They would’ve have to uproot the city and build it all over again if they really wanted a train network… US suburbs are too sparse to support trains.
Ah yes, the residential-commercial mixed zones. Or, as the rest of the world calls it, how towns have been built since the advent of agriculture.
that's facts right there
Towns were made bc of trains back in the years in the us
For THOUSANDS of years
Thats literally what should happen have houses and a little shop at the bottom ground flour for needs or whatever
My local government is a great counterpoint of this though. The town needs residential development, but the local government refuses to approve the construction of dense residential buildings that do not have any commercial space. That results in a surplus of empty business real estate in a city that currently only needs residences. It also results in sprawl of residences outside the city's borders.
Astronaut: Huston, we have a problem.
NASA: What you blew an engine?
Astronaut: No... The traffic jam is visible from Space!
Houston*
“Huston”
As someone who can't drive, the car-centric society in America is very hard for me and others like me. Now that I'm loosing my vision I'm now to ask my mom if i can go to a friend's house bc I can't go if she won't. I'm in my 20s asking my mom to drive me places like a child again. It's rather humiliating for those who start losing their vision.
Sorry to hear that
yeah, I really think it's an unhealthy, time-consuming and unsustainable way of living
😢
I hope you can move to somewhere nice like a streetcar suburb or Europe, I hate how badly vision-limited people are treated in America, for all the blind-assistance infrastructure they built they forget about how their streets and roads are so anti-pedestrian and that seriously screws over people who can’t see to drive.
It's humiliating for so many people. I grew up in a toxic house, and I couldn't even get away from the house for a breather because there were no sidewalks, and the closest bus stop was 20 minutes away. Children can't learn independence. Teens can't do after-school clubs and such unless they're chauffeured around by their parents. Seniors can't get around once they're old enough to lose reaction time, vision, etc. Many people with disabilities can't drive, either. People say "driving is a privilege, not a right", but you have to wonder... Is it really okay that all the aforementioned groups literally can't "earn that privilege" to drive, all because of the infrastructure? It's heinous.
Boston didn't remove the highway, they put it underground... And the congestion is still awful, just underground...
Bear this mind when people suggest flying cars as solution: it will not solve it, it just expands the problem upwards.
Not only did we put it underground but in the process of doing so it made traffic terrible during its construction a nice quick 16 years
It's true. The Big Dig buried I-93 through central Boston, added cloverleafs on the West End, and added a new I-90 bridge over the inner harbor. The project had a cost overrun of about 190%. We shouldn't look to the Big Dig for inspiration in solving our freeway problems, except to see how much a city improves when you restore local pedestrian access and hide a blighted freeway.
@@nealehardt7957 agreed, I think South Korea highway removal is better example for this, they removed the highway on the river entirely and resulted in less traffic.
@@Banom7a That said, their urban development+mass transit are sensible too
As a local resident who drive on Katy freeway it’s a nightmare during rush hour. Actual they were going to build commuter trains from Katy to Houston by using an old MKT rail line but one Republican name John Culbertson who was voted out in 2018 denied Harris county to build commuter rail an instead make Katy freeway wider so they did an well like you said vox it only work temporarily . Personally if their was a commuter rail or light rail route available in my area I would take it every day but unfortunately it’s unlikely it will happen.
Why did John Culbertson deny Harris County to build a commuter rail?
@@Belioyt vested interests ofc.
How about "hanging lines" i.e. bridge over the road? Or, alternatively, "line reserved for public transit, police and special vehicles"?
Step 1 - find factories and rail line construcors who may be in this
Step 2 - find lobby potential (corruption potential)
Step 3 - Lobby (corrupt) rail line (as bridge over all road or built-in like a tramway).
I don't know how it is in US reality, but in soviet russia we're have another solution:
- local transport for collecting and local delivery people
- magistral transport for far transit.
So, probably it's better to lobby special "A" line only for public transit, taxies and ambulances, police, etc with building "Bus terminals" with fast pass-trough stops for M-routes and roundabout for the local busses.
Local transit is ok to have 1 run for 15 minutes, and ads like "ride over the city for price of a liter of gasoline!". But you're need to speed-up via pre-selling tikets to prevent queue at the station.
Katy is a place that I think a Park and Ride facility would work really well. Its far enough for the train to be quicker, and there is parking for all them suburban suvs
Cy-Fair boys wya
Simple. Just remove all the roads and you won't have any traffic.
Task Manager (Not Responding)
Don't forget traffic manager to change the lanes
Finally someone with common sense
Modern problems require modern solutions
Thank you for the laugh
"Because, if we build it, they will come."
One sentence that answers the whole Question of the Video
They won't come- they are building new malls and retail, and people aren't coming.
@@someotherdude minecraft?
@@someotherdude 😂
Yes, that’s what a closing statement does
Then we should build a bunch of interstate freeways in North Dakota alleviating congestion in places like Houston and LA. Brilliant.
If we build more, more will come. Indeed.
and here i came to say “so in summary ‘if you build it they will come’”
i also should have waited to the end of the video
@@Plexdet Let us hope so
@@Plexdet This is always misquoted. It’s “if you build it, he will come”.
This made more sense than what she tried to explain
The Katy Freeway is the largest Freeway on Earth, spanning *_twenty-six lanes each way_* and costing Texas 2.3 billion dollars to build and 8 million dollars a year to maintain.
It still jams.
26 lanes total, not each way!
Yeah, my first reaction was "Surely you'll run out of additional drivers eventually." But it turns out you may not get there even with a 26-lane highway. And money (including maintenance costs) and space to build aren't limitless, to say nothing of the potential for accidents when crossing up to 12 lanes of traffic to get to your exit.
Boston didn't remove the highway downtown. They simply replaced it with a tunnel. San Francisco would've been a better example here.
Or Portland OR
@@lawrencewilliams4829 portland also made a tunnel after the highway removal
Tunnels are just more expensive roads.
But people are leaving San Francisco because it costs too much to live there, and there are more options to work remotely, so you don't need to live near the tech capitols in California. And where are the largest number of the people moving. Texas, because the taxes are lower.
Yes. This video is a bit of a mess.
Me, a Colombian who only knows “highways” with 4 lanes at most and are congested 24/7, watching this video: interesting
Literalmente te veo comentando en todos los videos que veo???
Le gustan las trufas y los likes.
Totally agree Trufaman.
Mexicano aquí, la autopista que rodea el centro de la capital son 5 carriles por sentido y la que rodea toda la ciudad es igual pero con un "segundo piso" de cuota Jaja
Viva mi país 😎
I LOVE driving, but having lived in (Washington DC), or extensively visited cities that had amazing public transportation infrastructure (London, UK and Toronto, Canada), I strongly advocate for better public transportation to get around more efficiently. I fail to understand why the USA doesn’t have a high speed rail network like Japan or France running from Boston to Miami and NYC to Chicago.
Unlike Japan or France, the US is HUGE while the population is spread out. Its just not economically feasible
@@st3pn56 at least they can try to make rail network between Boston and Baltimore/DC
@@st3pn56 no I'm sorry but stop using the size card, that's not the real reason.
For example, although France is smaller than the US, it's still massive and spread out.
The US could connect some of the major cities in the Eastern region, and as long as it's done properly, it would work and would become financially feasible.
How many domestic flights are currently made between those cities? Imagine having the option to take the train which may have a longer travel time, but with none of the faffing about with the airport.
Do not dismissed high speed rail. Sure it's not going to be adequate between NY and LA, but for closer cities it's really a no brainer
@@SomeGuy-lw2po I don’t think that’s gonna improve the traffic my guy
@@tonyye8680 you're right, it absolutely wouldn't. That was just an argument showing the size is not an excuse.
To fix traffic, you need the above, proper regional, suburban commuter rail. Then better transport in the cities, whether that's a great bus service (London busses), trams, metro, good walking routes.
Warning: There are *a lot* of Cities: Skylines jokes
At least its not Fortnite. I'M A PROUD HATER!
Good
@@sandeegrey5977 so am I
Thank you for the warning, now atleast i know what these comments are referencing to
@@sandeegrey5977 so you're proud of being a hater
Cities: Skylines players: Give me 4 hours i'll fix this.
To be fair, cities skylines makes it difficult to build a pedestrian focused city 😕
Hugo there, hugo there and hugo there.
@@mashisma Don't you mean SimsCity?
Hey, at least we get some more buses and trains!
Alexander nah, it’s opposite. If you don’t build American city with endless sprawling communities, relying on cars, but build a high density, full of ped. paths city with services near homes, then it’s much easier to make pedestrian oriented city
Civil Engineer: *Spends most of his life trying to figure out how the road is should be constructed to reduce congestion*
Average Cities Skylines player: *I'll just remove all traffic lights, and they'll figure it out*
Basically so
so freaking trueeee. thats exactly what i did and created mumbai city.
@@HR15DE haha
I just put roundabouts everywhere!
That'd be true in real life too, vox has some videos on how the lack of signalization on roundabouts make drivers more careful
TLDR: You need public transport.
And more roundabouts/diverging diamond interchanges
I think: "Invest into public transit instead into new roads" would make more sense.
Public transport? For poor people? In MY backyard????
@@colonelkush nope, cause thats just another form of induced car traffic.
@@Gummmibaer what exactly is inducing car traffic? I am for efficient / effective public transportation but also bring up the interchange due to the safety aspect they provide for drivers
Boston did not remove the freeway downtown. We buried it under the city leaving the boulevard that you see now above ground. It looks nicer and leaves space to make other forms of transit easier, but that freeway 100% still exists. It is considered a success (the project itself, not the cost and time), but is also the most expensive highway project ever undertaken in the US.
Yeah this is why I am always skeptical of Vox videos. I also live in Boston and for them to miss such an important distinction is incredibly disappointing. The Big Dig improved a lot of things but we still have some of the worst traffic in nation even after all the work we've done.
They also built bypasses, other highways to carry much of the load the now-underground highway used to carry.
I don't think cities like Houston are going to build freeways underground. Not sure of the reason but might have something to do with water table and sea levels. That's also why our overpasses can seem like a roller coaster ride to some people. I've met people from Houston afraid of the heights so they avoid the freeways with high overpasses.
Me when it rains heavy in Houston and water pours down from the overpasses: look at the beautiful waterfalls Houston has.
My transport engineering professors says: " The better transportation is don't transport anyone!" Jobs and activities can be LOCAL.
That's true. It's more healhty, more economic, more eco-friendly and more natural to humans who for most of their existens used their feet to travel.
Euclidean zoning is the worst thing to happen to urban planning.
Your professor is a whacked out lib who hates his own country.
Haha...in other words, have the building come to YOU. Genius !
Walkability ftw
From a political standpoint there's also significant lobbying groups who'd rather have giant supermarkets rather than small ''just around the corner'' stores. Regardless, in order to expand highways you need to create more space, which is likely going to move someone further away from where they need to go, thus adding yet another vehicle on the same road you just expanded.
Mexico have a solution for this. In Mexico the most common store is called Oxxo. They are very small stores with little inventory but they offer such a high convenience. They can be as high as 5 Oxxos between a 1 mile radius of every Mexican.
They have all the basic items: cheese, eggs, tortillas, veggies, beans, jam but most importantly you can pay almost anything: light, water, internet, TV , taxes, school fees, mortgages, travel. Even electronic transfer from account to account.
It's super convenient in one place you can do everything and it's very close to your home and work from all the country you can always find the same basic products.
@@no-one_nobody I think most of the world has this type of shops, we in Malaysia have local private businesses everywhere
@@brandonchan4537 True but I think that never in the massive scale on Mexico, Oxxos are in many countries of Latam
Both small stores and large stores are needed, just like big roads and small roads.
@@no-one_nobody I like your list of essential food items. Cheese, eggs, tortillas.
As a City Skylines player, we know this pain.
As cities skylines player you’ll be smart to use public transport,
At least in CS, building more roads doesn't incentify people to drive cars more. But yes, you're absolutely right.
Has Houston tried turning on
de-spawning? 🤔
In City Skyline , it is also important to increase the funding! Funding will increase the amount of buses/trains/airplanes coming out. Try it in creative mod ( unlimited money) and thank me later :)
@@ericseventeen17 "Can't come to work today, boss, my car despawned again".
I find it surprising that induced demand is extremely bad only for cars, but good for public transport and anything that isn't a car. For example the more people take a bus/train the better the system can get because high ridership eventually leads to improvements that make things better and more direct/frequent. The more people use a bike the more bike lanes there will be and the better riding a bike can get. That's just how bad and inefficient cars are as a form of transportation, when induced demand works again them but not other forms of transportation.
Now those who criticize rail transport, like high-speed rail, and favour road transport now have no excuse for defending the road industry.
You can skip high speed rail, and focus on reliable regional rail. At the very least regional trains must be a bit faster than car at freeway speed. Not the speed limit, the typical speed.
@@dbclass4075 Hmm... As a UK inhabitant myself, I'm going to say the UK can't skip high-speed rail, since our conventional rail system is at capacity, and we simply can't run any more trains. I don't claim to know what it's like in the US, but I do agree on the notion that commuter rail needs improving to replace cars, but high-speed rail also needs building to replace airplanes. That's why I think a HSR line between Los Angeles and either San Francisco, Las Vegas or San Diego are such good ideas, because they are the right distance to compete with some of the world's busiest air corridors.
@@mastertrams Regional rail will have less public resistance than high-speed rail. Perhaps regional rail first before high-speed rail.
I’m all for rail, but the premise of the video was that even adding public transport options doesn’t reduce demand. The whole idea is that the more transportation volume into a city, the more demand.
@@iismitch55 What? It does reduce demand *on roads*. Fundamentally, there's a minority of people who have to drive, (and a minority who can't drive), and everyone else is doing whatever's most convenient or whatever they're used to.
I luckily live in an area where almost everything I need is in a mile or less of walking. I have always hated living in places that require you to have a car to live. Neighborhoods built with hundreds of homes but the closest grocery store is five miles, work is ten miles, shopping for household and clothing is five or more miles. It is just a receipts for living in a car and working to own a car. All the money I would normally spend owning a car, I can instead spend on me.
Or invest it
Where is this magical place you live in? ...... sounds rude as I'm typing this but I'm actually just curious
@@lecookie007 probably New York
@@lecookie007 These kind of city does exist in other country easily y'know? well not always within 1 miles (1.6 km) but I can get most of my needs within 2 km of my residence. Like veggies? there's a small grocery mom&pop store just 200 m away. Clothes? there's small boutique here, or I can go to larger store 1.5 km away. The farthest place I had was my workplace, about 3 km away since it's located near town center. Rather the american suburban +full zoning style is the rarer ones in the world. Like I get the reason to zone office+industrial (my country kinda did), but stuff like grocery stores and other daily needs shouldn't be 'zoned' hard, like by making a giant suburban that's consist of just housing, but make smaller ones so that there's place for stores, like grocery stores or smaller department stores for clothing to exist between housings.
Haha!! Talking about Singapore? Tbh I've never gotten the urge to own a car
The Katy Freeway is honestly the saddest thing I have ever seen. A train network connecting the city of Houston would have been so much cheaper, and would occupy a lot less space than the monstrosity that is Katy Freeway.
Making a bigger highway to make traffic better is like trying to speed up your Internet by opening more Google tabs
@@MustacheCashStash125um opening more tabs is like putting more cars on the road, complete opposite.
I am shocked by this fact that we've known for decades.
It was first noticed in the 1700s in london lol.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot. Nothing is going to get better, it's not.
Another problem with adding lanes is that if people are still commuting to the same work area, they still have to get on and off at the same exit, which basically reduces all freeway traffic to one lane. It isn't like each lane has its own on-ramps and off-ramps!
I think too much focus is made on transportation and not much is in the destinations themselves. If the destinations are closer together, then walking becomes feasible, no need for motorized travel between them. Many communities all over the world, people achieve their daily tasks without a vehicle of any kind because all their needs are walking distance.
With more walkable places, public transport becomes more a more effective solution as the demand for people going to and from the same destinations increase justifying high volume high frequency service.
With low density places where not many people are going to and from the same places at the same time, car travel makes more sense. Public transport is not very efficient because the ridership will not be there to justify high frequency service. And so in these places, buses only stop in 30 -1 hour intervals which is not pleasant nor convenient.
You definitely need density for an ideal system but it can work without it, my town is pretty low density, less than half that of London but it’s still 3 times more than American suburbs, roughly 6000 people per square mile, and you regularly see buses moving between the neighbourhoods and destinations like the pedestrian mall in the centre, or the industrial estate, or the airport. If you have big destinations compacted together where you know people will want to go, then if you make bus routes frequent enough people will use them to travel, you just need to position the bus stops well enough that it’s never more than a 10 minute walk (ideally 5 minutes) from people’s houses.
@@justanotheryoutubechannel Broad density measurements may not accurately reflect the actual walkability.
Los Angeles county is considered dense, but its almost uniformly sprawl. For most of it, its very hard to get around without a personal vehicle. Businesses and residences are also segregated which necessitates longer travel lengths.
European towns are considered low density but much of the buildings are actually fairly concentrated (usually around a rail station).
Walking is still fairly feasible. What makes it low density is that there are vast rural lands.
@@Basta11 That’s true. In my town though I can confirm it is mostly low density terraced housing, if it was all high rises it would have a huge population by comparison, and it is pretty walkable. But like you said it does have clusters around train stations, and compared to us towns it probably feels like being in an old city. Traditional “ideal” walkable neighbourhoods are usually dense city blocks built into 15-minute communities, but I think you can definitely have a less dense area than that which still works, especially if it has clusters of higher density areas connected via transit.
As someone who has driven in this highway I can say they nailed the explanation. There are people who once had about a 45 minute commute (very common in Houston) now take 1 1/2 hours. Communities keep popping up further and further down the rod and it keeps getting worse.
Texas is getting awful. I advocate for public transportation but it’s hard to with their mindset. Also, way too many cookie cutter, poor quality homes/neighborhoods being built. Looks disgusting.
@@zacharyg3366 Agreed!
Houston is probably one of the worst designed cities in all of the US, if you dont have a car youre basically on house arrest
This is due to a market failure when it comes to housing costs. Once people have families, a studio apartment ain't going to cut it anymore, and condo's and sfh's in the central cities are prohibitively expensive for the middle class and lower class due to supply and demand. No easy fix
@@FirebirdCamaro1220 Yes, there is an easy fix. Start building apartment buildings with shops on the ground floor, parks and public transport system and it will get fixed. Younger people will buy those small apartments, then move out to a bigger one or maybe a house when they have kids and then the new generation will move to the small apartments, etc. Build the houses close to the apartments and shops so they are walkable neighbourhoods and not isolated from everything. Another thing they should do is make homes smaller. In the US you have tiny apartments, big houses, then super highend multi million dollar homes. There is nothing in between. It's a cultural shift the US and Canada have to make to fight climate change and provide their population with a better quality of life.
"The suburban experiment is possibly the greatest misallocation of resources in history" - The Geography of Nowhere - James Howard Kunstler
@Burt P Hard to recognize it for what it is when it's all you see and exposed to.
@@Calebakeenhughes agree, it’s the worst idea ever. People should live close to where they work.
Catchy, but the suburbs are simply the result of liberals making cities unlivable.
@Burt P no sir, I own my own home 5 mins from downtown.
@Burt P Houston isn’t a little city, also 5k sqft lots is plenty big for living in the city. I’m not Poor 🤷🏽♂️ since that’s what you’re implying.
Highways are like a factory, once you mess one part of it the mess will pile on and affect other parts
Yes indeed
It's called queuing theory and it has a relationship to game theory
The reason that Boston had success in reducing congestion was due to a particular 2 mile stretch that had 2.1 miles of on ramps before moving in underground. By removing the constant on/ off of traffic flow was improved and congestion reduced especially with better designed exits and on ramps.
I wish Rhode Island would spend money to revamp 95 through Providence. Traffic is horrendous due to the US 6 and RI 146 on/off ramps being so close to each other.
Imagine the US had a good bus and subway system through the country like normal people...
The US has such an intense car culture, and buses are generally seen as 'low class' forms of transportation, on top of many city governments being too cheap to build better infrastructure...I'm afraid the problem will stick around for a while.
in cities, there are good subway services and good amtrak service, even in rural areas. many americans dont consider public transportation because they think cars are better and faster when a lot of the time its the opposite
@@kevinolevino3190 we indonesian are all using motorcycles because its faster easier to drive it dont take so much space
Sadly the American belief that we have a superior way of thinking and a way of life is so ingrained into many Americans that they’ll dismiss ideas simply on the basis that it’s foreign and we need a “American solution”, if they even believe we need a solution at all.
I doubt that would work. America is too big of country for subways and bus networks. Freeways are needed in areas of low population density .
Solution: MAKE EVERYTHING A *ROUNDABOUT*
Americans say no.
Cause we all agree that traffic lights are fair and balanced except when it’s 5am and there’s no one at an intersection with the light is red but you can see the cop in the shadows lurking waiting to pounce on the one to run it
Northern italy is switching to roundabouts, they started a while back
@@Big007Boss Most of Europe have gone over to roundabouts. They help with some issues when it comes to traffic flow. So is not odd that they are popular. And generally is more the flow then the capacity then help with. But one should not underestimate how much flow matter.
Roundabouts don’t work for highways, it’s only something for smaller roads that intersect without bridges etc.
The best way to reduce traffic is improve the public transport and just build a train
Yes, make more people stop driving and use public transport instead. Soon we will get to the point that even the rich would use take buses, trains and taxis.
I'd take the bus to work if the total trip time wasn't 1 hour and 30 minutes. Driving to work from home takes me 20 minutes.
Better reduce population
That is the problem with the US. The government made it a breeding ground for driving and made public/ alternative commutes impractical or impossible.
Have most people needs be local and have public transportation for when they're visiting someone or are going to work
Cities: Skylines players: "I'm somewhat of a civil engineer myself."
Can you tell the name of the game?
@@nandi7772 cities skylines
me
@@nandi7772 bruh
@@otisbodna3316 what happened? I am real civil engineer but I was unaware about the game.
I wish my country (Indonesia) realised this. There are always highway constructions going on everywhere. Meanwhile, public transport construction takes a backseat.
hi neighbor , I am not sure Malaysia the same or not, but they are building a highway through Sarawak & Sabah ,but tbh we need it as we only have small crumbling road before. My city of Kuching was planing to build a MRT but it was cancelled,traffic here is very very bad, atleast they are investing on bicycle lanes and free busses
Highway isn't inherently bad, and I think the induced demand is more of an American thing since every single person uses car.
@@brandonchan4537 I think your country's capital city, Kuala Lumpur, is without the shadow of a doubt a contestant for the most kilometers of highway per capita. In Google Earth when you turn on the Road option, the tangle of orange lanes (that means highway haha) looks a lot more of a spaghetti than most Spaghetti Junctions in the world.
Building highways are not bad. Just like other things, too much is inherently bad.
Sekarang di sini transportasi publik sudah mulai digencarkan. Di Jawa udah enak ada KRL, di Denpasar sebelum Covid macet melulu pas jam sibuk karena gak ada pilihan lain selain lewat jalan raya.
@@govinlock8568 Kapan ya Bali punya kereta api sampe di seluruh bagian pulau ada
Um, Boston didn’t remove a highway. Ever heard of the Big Dig? They moved it underground and added a fourth lane.
Thanks. Wiki also had more info about the so-called reduced congestion. Sigh...
That’s why it’s hard to take these videos at face value anymore 😢 we always have to take it with a grain of salt and do our own digging.
Thanks for the info. Some of the claims made in this video are pretty sus.
It reduced congestion at street level however - despite the fact that Downtown Boston was the destination for the majority of these people. The highway going THROUGH was moved underground, but the accesses (additional 2 lane flyovers, etc) that were dotted along the +1.5 mile stretch sent underground were severely reduced. At certain points, you had 2 and 3 lane access (!) lanes, now there is only a single entrance/exit (spread in different points) along the entire stretch. Additionally, the highway wasn't just the part sent underground - it was also the 8 lane avenue on the surface parallel to the entire length.
The video was made by Vox, so it's bullshat.
Wow! in Milwaukee back in the 70s there was a plan to build lots of freeways within the city. But they never went through with those plans because they went through a lot of culturally important areas of the city and people worried they would be cut off from outside travelers. And now those areas are still some of the nicest areas of the city.
5:25 Umm. All Boston did was put the highway underground. Kind of an important point to leave out on that one.
Not only that but they ADDED lanes, contrary to the point of this video.
Not ‘all’ they did, but extremely important, and it should’ve been said. A huge benefit of Boston’s plan was separating local traffic from regional traffic. A boulevard is better land use and can make the city tax revenue. Same thing happened with Seattle’s Viaduct.
Turning a highway in a city into a tunnel is a good solution in car-centric America. But it costs a lot.
San Francisco is case of a city only replacing the highway with a boulevard
That's vox for you. Any video here remotely related to politics is questionable at best
I laughed at that pretty hard. The idea that they just replaced the road with a tree-lined boulevard and everything just solved itself is pretty childish.
@@chrisf247 They're not wrong, they just picked a terrible example. The Embarcadero in San Fran is a real-world example of exactly what you cite.
At street level in Boston, elevated 93 was removed and replaced with a lovely boulevard. But 93 was simply buried under downtown, not actually removed.
The Big Deception is what it was honey
We should put are traffic underground
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 Are you kidding?? That's a terrible idea. What we should do is get rid of cars, ESPECIALLY in the big cities. There are a large number of ways to do that and to do that well.
@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 This isn't bad idea, but it ignores the problem for commuters. Alternative commuting methods are the better option, rather than hiding the problem in tunnels.
I'm glad someone said this, Boston didnt fix anything.
as someone who regularly drives on the katy highway, i can say with full confidence that you are completely and utterly right. it's always so congested... and for what
As a physics enthusiast, I appreciate it when people simplify things to spheres and cylinders!
Analogies 😉.
This video doesn’t discuss that the reluctance of Americans to live in more dense housing is a huge issue that plays into this as well.
Mostly anyone west of East Coast, actually. More younger people are in favour of urban life today than our previous generation, so that is something.
I don't believe this is an issue of Americans being reluctant to *live* in more dense housing, it's a reluctance of entrenched residents to allow such housing to be built. Most US cities currently ban even duplexes on the vast majority of their residential land area.
@@degnaw At current housing market, those entrenched residents are more likely at least baby boomers' age, or very wealthy.
Failure to provide infrastructure and opportunity with that density also plays a role. Density much include "living" spaces such as parks, gardens, workshops...the kinds of things suburban and rural residents often have access to in their own homes, but that might be shareable and managed in cities. Of course, improved quality of life leads to the other deterrent to dense housing...cost.
America: Separate the cities into residential and commercial areas
Place them far apart
Do not provide mass transportation options
People have to use cars and there is traffic
America: Surprised pikachu face
Oil companies: happy face.
I've spent at least half my life on the Katy freeway.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot. Nothing is going to get better, it's not.
Never thought to get to work on a different way? Or move.
..... because some liberal opposed the improvements that would have helped speed it up.
@@jankees4037 1:55 listen
@@someotherdude really it's a liberals fault? In texas? Okay guy. Liberals aren't in power there.
It's also not just induced demand; it's also the Braess's paradox. This can be observed not only in car traffic, but also in things like the electric grid. The *only* way to solve our traffic problem in the long run is described by the Downs-Thomson paradox, which, in the most simple terms, states that the travel time of one mode can only be as fast as its fastest alternative. In the end, why take the train when you can drive there faster? Why drive when you can bike there quicker? That, combined with induced demand, is why our traffic problem is so chaotic.
There are great success stories around the world, but one great example is Amsterdam. It used to be heavily congested with cars like our cities just a few decades ago, and yet, now it's known as the cycling paradise with an amazing public transit system. In addition, driving in Amsterdam is no longer a nightmare due to the fact that cars have different roads to take that are indirect but designed for them. A UA-cam channel called "Not Just Bikes" have made some great videos on this and I highly recommend folks who might be interested in this.
Cost is another factor. Right now I have the option of using the local rail vs driving. I drive cause gas is cheaper.
@@uptorest True, but you also have to factor in the external costs...the car, maintenance, insurance, etc...Once accounted for, I suspect transit is more comparable than you think.
Americans: “Houston traffic is the worst”
Brazilians: “hold my beer”
As a texan, it is the worst
Hong Kongers: “Hold my curry fishballs”
@@CaptainM792 Ask an Indonesian who lives in Jakarta, s/he would tell you that a normal traffic jam would last for 2 hours.
Haha yes
Im an indonesian and i can sure that youre right
Learn from Cities Skylines - reduce jams by removing all traffic lights.
Sadly you can predict code but you can't predict people who drive the wrong way down a one-way road!!!! Like seriously how do people manage to do that!!!??
@@Ryan_Rail But one thing Cities have correct: Best way to reduce traffic jams is not to build more lanes per se, but to build more dedicated roads and alternative routes to get from point A to B. But that is not feasible in real life, because that would cost too much and also take up too much valuable real estate and/or industry space.
@@Wistbacka there are many causes and solutions to traffic jams, there is no silver bullet. But I think planning the zoning and flow of the city is by far one of the most important aspects when starting a new city, something that is difficult to do in existing metropolitans
Honestly and unfortunately, this is the typical "civil engineer" solution and it won't work. If you think about this, highway is like you get rid of all signal lights on a road but we still see congestion coming (like the ones shown in the video)
i have built the perfect indian utopia with no traffic lights and called it Mumbai. so this gave me a chuckle. it would work if cars could collide with eacher without crashing.
As a Texan, When they say everything is “Bigger” in Texas, THEY MEAN IT.
America in general, but even the two way streets are wide as 💩. I've seen two way streets in japan that are what americans would call the shoulder of a road. Then again, Asia tends not to have monster trucks driving on all the roads.
i shouldn't laugh here, but i heard your electricity fallouts are also quite big
Edit: SHOULDNT NOT SHOULD! 8 months and nobody told me, ahhhhh
except their power grid.
Traffic jams are indeed bigger. The brains in the counsel certainly aren't bigger.....
@@hopseshopsidis Yessir, and proud of it! Tell me of another grid that suffered as much of a catastrophic outage as us. Bet you can't name one!
People out of America be like "just dump the automobile culture"
The way cities are built in the US, makes it difficult to dump the automobile culture.
@@champanzee6486 public transport...
Honestly having grown up in a small town in the UK with good public transport links everywhere, On my travels around the world I've always lowkey felt sorry for cities/areas that really aren't easily navigable by foot or easy public transport beyond busses. I get many parts are rural, But big built up cities & metropolitan areas have little excuses. The thought of spending hours driving from a suburb to a city or something along those lines has always terrified me, I know its not avoidable for everyone even some parts of the UK, But forever grateful that most of us at least have a choice with a wide reaching rail network/inner city trams/tubes.
@@champanzee6486 this exact sentiment is the very reason why US won't get any change. "Yeah we have been built that way", but the sunk cost of automobile culture is a more important factor now
Public transport will solve the US cities, sadly the US never invested in anything serious ever so far. So it all has to be done now. Maybe take an example on how China is solving this. They built a superior road and train network the last decades.
Really wish the US would embrace improve public transportation, but that won't happen for as long as big oil investors like the Koch Brothers continue to lobby for more and more personal vehicles, as opposed to better trains, buses, subways, and pedestrian mobility.
We need more subways
I agree with your main point, but just to correct an incorrect part, big oil investors are actually pro buses and were actually one of their biggest advocates when they were first being invented. Since big car manufacturers are still the ones who make them, they are awarded massive government contracts to make a bunch of them, they use up significantly more fuel than a standard car, and typically they facilitate even more lobbying opportunities in the form of dedicated bus lanes. Big auto and oil companies actually killed wider adoption of public train networks by proposing buses since they would use the existing highways that they were also lobbying for, so big auto and oil companies are not anti-public transport, they are anti-public transport methods that don't net them any money, so they aren't actually against buses.
Not only because of the lobbyists but because the average american has grown too used to the comfort of a car. No matter how much you argue you have to admit that a car is way more comfortable than public transport. The biggest being you don't have to stick to a time table and can leave whenever you want.
@@waffle2434 this is complicated. I would still say they’re not pro public transit, they just realize they have to do something. Both of their efforts to support buses have ulterior motives, so I don’t know if you can call that a pure support for public transit. As you said in the 40s 50s and 60s, it was about getting rid of the street cars of other cars could move more freely and that the buses would use their oil. And today their efforts to support buses and bus lanes are so the developing countries don’t build subways and that these countries keep using their oil and cars.
@@anwitmondal6417 This really depends on where you live, in a big city absolutely not, as someone who lives in a big city with a highly developed train and subway network, I would attest that trains and subways (if done right) are significantly more comfortable than cars, because I never have to deal with traffic, trains, where I live, are never delayed, they come by every five minutes, and are significantly faster than any car I have ever been in. I can get from my job to my apartment in under 10 minutes during peak traffic because of trains, the same trip in a car would take at least 30 minutes because the roads are so congested during morning rush hour, I could walk to my job faster than driving there. On top of this, I do not have to worry about the hassles of driving, so I can actually be productive on my commute, and the yearly membership pass I pay to board the train every day is significantly cheaper than any car insurance or car payments I have ever seen. Don't get me wrong, I still think cars are indispensable and really the only means of transport in rural areas since there really is not an economical way to maintain public transport in low-density areas, but in big cities, there really is not a point to owning a car.
Houston: I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that
I live in vancouver and this pain feels so real. The biggest issue with our highways is the bottlenecks, but every time they fix one a new one forms further down the line. We're currently debating replacing an aging tunnel with a massive 10 lane bridge but the bigger problem will be that the bridge is followed by a bottleneck further down the highway. We could spend 10 billion dollars just to push the bottle neck further down the road or we could just build a more functional city by utilizing mass transit and more "city within a city" models. Neighborhoods where we have towers with grocery stores and shops on the lower level so you dont even need to commute to pick up groceries. Thankfully this city has a decent public transit system or else things would be 10 times worse.
Also, something this video neglects to discuss it the physical point of bottlenecks. Even if you add 24 lanes on a highway, when all trafic leaves that highway on 1 or 2 lanes, it is going to bottleneck one way or another. More roads is never a good option, even from a "flow" perspective.
Bingo. I don't see this cited nearly often enough. All infrastructure built around private vehicles is inherently too low-capacity to handle travel in and around cities. There's a reason public transit used to be called "mass transit." It is able to move much larger numbers of people much faster than private vehicles can, as long as it's built right.
It is indeed make enough connecting roads as well. Finally any highway wider than like 2x5 roads is effective as the traffic on the left lanes have to cross so many lanes on the right to exit. Or for example a 2x4 divides into 2 times a 2x2 road that works alright.
so you’re saying, if we get rid of highways, there won’t be any traffic!!
That is basically the total reverse of highway expansion argument. Like all extremes, that is very negative.
You are saying this ironically but you are actually right. Amsterdam get rid of of several highways and future projects that american city planners wanted to implement in their city. Nowaways Amsterdam is famous for being the city of bicyclists and the traffic there is one of the best in the world.
Well may not help people get to their job initially but would encourage people to find another way to work that doesn't involve using their vehicles.
Can't have traffic if you don't have roads lol
It's like the "legalize all drugs" argument, both riddles with errors. You might as well make this a "roll safe" meme.
Its not the highways, its the lack of Efficient Public transport and the US culture of owning a car to commute.
Government should encourage people to use the Public Transportations and invest more on public transports.
Boston built a tunnel to relocate the highway, they did NOT remove it.
I love it. You can walk around downtown Boston now and small businesses and restaurants have flourished. I commuted into Boston for years and never had to go through downtown. And then on weekends I would take the rail in and walk around. Downtown is like a a park now.
@GNR Forever Boston is a great city, you should definitely go to visit one day. I used to live in Lowell, MA but ironically ended up moving to Houston. It's hard to tell which has worse traffic.
Hong Kong is a golden example of good transport network.
For dense areas
I lived in Taipei, the place also has the good public transportations.
But I moved to U.S., because I love driving and hate tiny roads in Taipei.
its easy when you have a small population and not that much land to manage
Paris or Amsterdam are pretty good as well.
@@Alaois we are talking about cities in the us too not the whole country
"But, the risk for going into Kate Freeway is that the traffic congestion may still occur during rush hour, so if you want faster route and less congestion then we suggest that you go into Pickle Parkway, the highway that impose the 85-mph speed limit."
The highway “removed” in Boston was actually turned into a tunnel, part of an enormous network of highway tunnels built over 20 years at great cost and remaining stubbornly congested.
Not the best comparison for this video unfortunately.
Shhhh... that doesn't fit the narrative!
Yeah, this is a horribly researched video.
Also...the Katy Freeway remains heavily congested at peak hours, but overall, it's not *as* slow along the entire corridor as it was before it became one of the world's widest freeways. That, despite the corridor carrying a good 70,000-90,000 extra vehicles per day along any given point compared to a decade ago. Plus, weekend traffic congestion is most definitely lower than before it was reconstructed.
I can actually list a lot of examples of reduced levels of congestion, after a corridor was widened. US 50 in the Sacramento foothills is a good example, where despite continued growth, the freeway still operates at faster speeds nearly two decades after HOV and truck climbing lanes were added.
For them to miss such a glaring distinction is incredibly disappointing. Boston has some of the worst traffic in the nation despite all the work we've done to try and fix things. Don't get me wrong, the Big Dig helped a lot but to say we got rid of our highways is just completely false. This is why I never trust Vox videos unless I double check the information myself.
If you're reading this you have potential to create great things. Yes. You.
Who?
@@pugh.joseph not us
@@snxw69420 lol 😂
Actually, Improving public transportantion and gentrification is the solution.
Exactly. I think more North American cities would benefit from having more public rail networks, connecting downtown to the edge of surburbs, at least.
@@patrickkotowski5780
Im not saying making roads bigger is wrong or unnecessary.
But gentrification of cities and improving public transport is the real solution.
Of course, that would mean ending suburbanization and its rac*st origin
That is the thing i HATE about when im in Texas. (I split my life like half the year in DFW/Houston, the other half in Mexico City) and the reliance on highways and cars is such a necessary mean of transportation even for the simplest things. But when im in mexico, Walking, Bus, the lovely Metro, Kombis. Taxis on the rare occasion. That is one of the HUGE ➕'s to living in 🇲🇽
This reminded me how friggin awesome it is that we made home office the new normal
It's back to traffic congestion in my city. Home work was short lived.
If there is no road there is no traffic congestion, big brains move
The reason is the lack of lane mathematics
Even economics if you think about it 🤔
Math does eventually show that adding more lanes would relieve highway congestion, it just takes quite a few more. City populations are NOT infinite and eventually equilibrium would be reached.
@biffa plays inde games
Somone is a Biffa fan
Just realized Katy Freeway is the World's Widest Highway. Wow, everything really is BIGGER in Texas.
Go big or go home!
(did not occur to me at all) do admit. .. it's awesome to drive on that highway in the morning(late night) at 80mph, clear traffic. //Granted it forced me to get over my highest fears moving down to Houston where ppl drive 50mph even on the small small roads.
The Katy Freeway is nothing compared to the 401 through Mississauga. The 401 have lesser lanes than the Katy Freeway. The 401 through Mississauga have the widest point of 22 lanes.
Bigger and dumber, we've all seen Idiocracy
As a Houstonian, I ain’t even surprised That the first image seen in this video was Katy freeway
Same LoL!
Cities Skylines players: *takes notes*
hahahaa.. same. I was thinking about the same thing.
Lul
Cities Skylines traffic doesn't really work the same way. 99% of cars on the road are citizen-owned, and whether citizens drive depends on distance, speed limits, and whether they own a car. Plus, people in Cities Skylines cannot work from home! They must get to work somehow.
The second I saw the title. I just knew Texas was going to be involved
And I knew it would be Houston. Those on ramps are like 80ft high!
Everything’s bigger in Texas!
Widening a highway is like upgrading your computer's processor while still using a magnet disc hard drive.
0:32 Next time you're stuck in traffic remember that all those people in their cars could fit in one train....
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot. Nothing is going to get better, it's not.
Clearly you've never commuted in London. It turns out, you can't all fit in one train.
@Joe Marley Corona is a temporary crisis. The conclusions of the studies are general and are not applicable during these extrordinary times.
@@roryhanlon927 Of course you can't. You need to either build more underground lines or invest in other modes of transport (i.e. bikes). But it still takes people off the streets. London is already a mess despite all its public transport and probably is always going to be like that due to its old, narrow, historical roads. But, imagine if each one of those people took their cars instead of the underground.... It would be quicker to walk from Croydon to Westminster than drive...
car is still more comfortable.
Gps in Houston be like: stay in the left four lanes...as opposed to the right four...
Very interesting 👍
Hi
Hi
I must say i'm a big fan
Very ;)
Can you fix my city mate because we’ve got an entire freeway going right thru it
The last line: 'If you build it, they will come' is a Field of Dreams (1989) reference :)
America really needs to focus on mass transport. Like trains for example.
Very hard to do in america since america grew during the era of the automobile.
@@braytenr2185 of course America is broken either way. Even if they expanded their train network stations wouldn't be built in the city centre like European cities. They would be put in the edge of the city sometimes an hour by car from the centre.
@@braytenr2185 start with the central parts of large cities and get frequent buses in a grid network and work out from there. Would be unrealistic for my gargantuan city’s land area to immediately provide service everywhere, but the core township has more density, less cars per household, tighter/more walkable street grid. Very possible to build a nice transit base in American cities and then fan out from there
@@eriklakeland3857 very unrealistic, considering large cotoes would have to be re-done from the ground up.
@@braytenr2185 not really it’s making better use of the what we already have not starting over: gigantic ROWs mean ample space for bus lanes, oversupply of surface parking lots ripe for investment, horrible land use planning increases average trip length and drains city coffers - not to become manhattan everywhere, but commercial nodes within walking distance of residential areas and more diversity in the housing types offered.
I'm from Houston and I can say that without remote work opportunities it's only going to continue to get worse regardless of new roads or less roads. Salaries are not scaling with inflation so more people are having to work that may not have worked in the past. Plus the population is growing. The jobs get concentrated in certain areas so people drive.
US: Endless Traffic!
China: Laughed
Well Beijing was infamous for that... So as Shanghai... Even both cities have a robust public transport system... (Their problem is: their metro don't have express trains which skip stations. The city got so big it makes more sense if you drive to other side of the city instead...)
China is having growing pains, I wouldn't count them out just yet
China messed up by copying America's city planning model and incentivizing urban sprawl, wide open spaces, and parking lots everywhere, instead of following the example of Japan and South Korea. Their cities have huge populations that would benefit from mixed-use zoning and transit-oriented development but they decided that being able to drive long commutes from suburban homes to the city center was somehow a first-world privilege.
Those lanes will eventually free up as China's population begins to shrink at an enormous rate in the next 30 years. Talk about overbuilding infrastructure.
Removing highways is also not a solution. Provide more public transportation interlinking and routes. Even the red category drivers would love that.
"Yep, Interstate 10 in Texas tends to have faster car speed, more lanes and longer travel distance than other highways!"
More importantly, induced demand also works for public transport and bike infrastructure, i.e. if you improve the thing you want commuters to use even though nobody uses it right now, people will start using it once it's built
Boston did not get rid of their highways, they dug them underground.
The coronavirus has made a lot of people work from home. If they get to continue that, it may keep some of our urban highways from clogging again.
So that's why my bridges fail in Poly bridge...
Long term solution to any traffic congestion is always an efficient public transport
Yes, but walking and cycling as well. Any alternative you give people will release pressure on the roads, and fortunately pretty much every option (with the possible exception of private helicopters) is also more environmentally friendly than using a car to commute.
@@rjfaber1991 I dont think walking and cycling is practical to commute for work. Virtually all people live quite a distance from the work place
@@random-np3gn Depends how you build your cities. The US infamously has a lot of urban sprawl, which does indeed disincentivise walking or cycling, but most cities in the world are dense enough for it to be perfectly possible.
@@rjfaber1991 im going to say the some thing
Remember when “waze” came out and legit had the best alternative routes until everyone else caught on aha!
Is that what it was? I didn't know a servi....aaaaah. you mean congestion. I got all excited thinking there was an app that told you how to avoid driving
As an everyday user of Katy fwy over the last ten years I have a few comments that invalidate many of the points made in this video: 1) there is a big reason why authors show the statistics only up to 2014, as in 2018 the expansion plan was finally finished with solving the biggest bottleneck of i10 which is the i10, 290 and 610 (all are at least 6 lines big) intersection at uptown. Once that was done the 290 became a light speed tunnel with no traffic anytime (thanks to increase from 3 to 6 lines of traffic in each direction and HOV lines), i10 received additional lines to exit to 610 not blocked by 290 traffic, drivers now have a flexibility in selection of morning and evening commute routes depending on the traffic conditions at one of the highway options. 2) HOV lines provide fast way to drive in and out downtown in times of worst rush hours - it is also friendly to the modern trends as you need just one passenger on board with you to enjoy it for free, 3) westpark can back you up at any time. Also just as a honorable mention - 290 expansion turned its traffic situation from one of the worst in Houston to the most reliable highway at any time during the day or night
Hope Texas High-Speed Rail becomes a reality soon.
Can’t wait to see it happen. I’m sure many of the Californians moving there now will appreciate it.
But that'll only connect Dallas and Houston. Inside Houston...gonna take longer.
Still, it's no doubt a step in the right direction, and the fact that Texas is getting it done before Cali(even though Cali started wayyy earlier) is very much a positive.
@@TheSeniorTaco Infrastructure stimulates economic and population growth and improves site conditions for companies. So we'd all profit, if a railway existed.
Climate change is the next problem our generation faces. If trains are not profitable, we have to make them profitable to combat climate change.
The truth is, cars and planes are so profitable because too many of the costs, that exist when using a them, are externalized. The high cost of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are not reflected in a car, in gas or in a ticket price. Who pays in the end? Society. Right now it's hungry Texans suffering from severe weather, having to pay all the damages out of their own pocket. That's climate change.
Anywhere else, someone has to see the doctor because of health issues created by local pollution. There goes money to the doctors appointment and an unnecessary health complication.
Somewhere someone is going to pay with money. The question is, do we want that to be the person, who has nothing to do with the creation of these damages or do we want it to be the person, who profited off creating the damage.
It's unfortunate some people are paying with their homes, their health and even their lives. Those costs can be avoided and they should.
Anyways, wasn't HSR a private project? It definitely should be subsidized.
Btw. how many people use the fire department or call 911? That's probably 2% of the people. The entire point of collecting taxes is to fund institutions that are necessary but wouldn't be profitable because so few people use them. Climate change makes rail necessary.
@@rafizsadique4299 It helps when you have less mountains in the way. Makes the process a lot easier.
Notably, roads for cars are by far the least-efficient way to provide for travel capacity, in terms of cost and land area per traveler, compared to any form of public transit or bicycle or pedestrian infrastructure. Once you have a single lane of transit or other non-car infrastructure, its capacity can expand to be greater than most freeways without needing any further expansion. Even if you did need to expand a transit line’s capacity to two lines, or a bikeway or sidewalk to extra lanes, it’s still taking up less space than a freeway. Bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit commuters can easily pack into far less space than the same number of people each surrounded and separated by their own individual automobile can.
Wouldn't it be better for the US to build railways anyway?
Yes it probably would. But it is the US they don't like smart things
In the long-term it is better to invest in autonomous driving, because traffic jams practically always happen because of small human behaviours on the road which AI driven cars won't mimic. CGP Grey has a good video on that.
@@jinjunliu2401 AVs are unproven technology that still requires 4000lb metal boxes to drive quickly in the same space as pedestrians and cyclists, and it still takes space to park those vehicles. All of that space for parking has forced the US to build things so far apart that you have to drive places. Removing cars means things can be built much closer together and cars are then no longer needed to go everywhere.
@@jinjunliu2401 No matter how clever your cars become, they still take up (including the gaps between cars) about fifteen square metres, and most likely will still carry only one or two people. Buses, trams, trains and bicycles are all far more space-efficient.
USA already had a vast railway. They just need to expand it to include passengers.