Induced demand. Apparently Texas hasn’t heard of that yet, but that’s the reason 3 or even fewer lanes work fine everywhere else where there’s also good alternative transportation.
Keep adding lanes, traffic quietens down, people see the roads are quiet and decide to drive, road gets busy, rinse and repeat.
Highways are a ridiculously terrible way to move lots of people.
A single 12-car Thameslink train can transport about as many people as a fully saturated highway lane can in 1 hour.
If a set of tracks has only 3 trains go down it each way per hour, it has the equivalent capacity of a three lane highway. If a pair of tracks in downtown London has a train going over it every 5 minutes, that single pair of tracks can transport as many people as a 24 lane highway.
Edit: every 5 minutes each way. Every 5 min is 12 trains/hour, every 5 minutes in both directions is 24 trains/hour.
That’s quite an epiphany. This is chiefly how millions of people go to and from Central London every day.
Nicely put. There’s many trains going in and out of London every hour. Just from our town, in rush hour there’s a train into London every 10-15 mins or so.
![[meme] Katy Freeway](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dceaae48-351c-48f8-ae2f-daa7c4d331a3.png){kind=link}
Wtf Texas? Even the busiest highways I’ve driven on are 3 or 4 lanes each way, near and around London.
What sorts of urban/commuter populations are we dealing with here?
Induced demand. Apparently Texas hasn’t heard of that yet, but that’s the reason 3 or even fewer lanes work fine everywhere else where there’s also good alternative transportation.
Keep adding lanes, traffic quietens down, people see the roads are quiet and decide to drive, road gets busy, rinse and repeat.
Also just poor zoning with people needing to commute for miles to get to anything.
Yes.
Highways are a ridiculously terrible way to move lots of people.
A single 12-car Thameslink train can transport about as many people as a fully saturated highway lane can in 1 hour.
If a set of tracks has only 3 trains go down it each way per hour, it has the equivalent capacity of a three lane highway. If a pair of tracks in downtown London has a train going over it every 5 minutes, that single pair of tracks can transport as many people as a 24 lane highway.
Edit: every 5 minutes each way. Every 5 min is 12 trains/hour, every 5 minutes in both directions is 24 trains/hour.
That’s quite an epiphany. This is chiefly how millions of people go to and from Central London every day.
Nicely put. There’s many trains going in and out of London every hour. Just from our town, in rush hour there’s a train into London every 10-15 mins or so.