Ex houstonian here, university of houston and everything. Decently fun city, interesting history, cool people. The road and traffic situation is nightmarish.

Ex houstonian here, university of houston and everything. Decently fun city, interesting history, cool people. The road and traffic situation is nightmarish. I slowly came to this realization in college when I went abroad a couple of times. I found out that didn't have to be How Things Are. The university of houston has a problem where students aren't attending classes because parking isn't available. Stories of trying to find a parking space for 40 minutes abound. There's lines of cars offering an air conditioned ride to parking spaces outside of classrooms, in return for their parking spot. If you miss an exit near the i45/i10 merge, you've added 20 minutes to your drive, minimum, as the next local exit will be a good five miles away, and then after that the next on ramp for your give freeway could well be on the other side of downtown. For some reason they built a light rail that criss crosses main street. For a great form of entertainment, search youtube for "Houston light rail accident." They're rarely really bad, more just stupid looking, some giant pick-up truck failing to see the train and getting booped. There's no zoning (kinda) so the industrial zones are mixed right in with residential, budding up against UH. So about 1/10 of the time I bicycled to school, I would be blocked by a mile long train that decided to simply park and block every road crossing I could take to the university. I made a habit of throwing my bike between the nonmoving cars and clambering over until my dad sent me a video of someone getting cut in half doing that. Growing up in the suburbs you'd have balls of steel to bicycle to a friend's house. Pickup trucks make a sport of fucking with bicyclists. Better to just wait for your parents to get home from work so they can drive you. Lord forbid you have a friend in the woodlands or something. Thought it was obnoxious to visit your friends in San Jose when you live in the bay area? The woodlands is like a trip to Sacramento, but only because of traffic and a 610 loop as wide as a continent. Public transit, lol. That's for poor people. I remember hosting a luncheon for our engineers (was a recruiter) and this old fart was talking about his 50 minute one way commute. It was a point of pride for these o&g engineers for some reason to measure their commutes. Then this engineer we brought in from mexico was like "oh, I live in that same neighborhood, why not take the bus? It gets on the HOV and gets me here in 30m." Old fart was flabbergasted. He didn't even know there was a bus. I don't blame him, they pick up at these huge ride share parking lots and it's not easy to figure out their schedule, or even how to pay. Anyway Houston traffic sucks and my conspiracy theory is it's because Shell and Chevron have downtown offices and the CEOs sit at the top of the tower where they can see a clogged i45, i10, 610, and 59, and cackle maniacally at the hordes of people trying to justify their 1 hour one way commutes to eachother and the choking fog of smog clouding around the city.