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> 37 bridges and more than 700 columns are crammed into this one spot to keep the roughly half a million vehicles flowing in every direction each day Truly pit

• mschuster91 2y ago
  And now imagine that these 500k people would be served by a decent network of trains or even buses. That would immediately reduce the demand for infrastructure, simply because how much more efficient even a single decker bus is in passengers/m² of occupied road space.
  • criddell 2y ago
    > more efficient Depends on what you are optimizing for. I can drive to work in 15 minutes, door-to-door. I used to ride the bus and sometimes I would be waiting that long just for the bus to appear. The other factor is weather. Not many of the bus shelters around me (I’m in Austin) are air conditioned. Right now it’s 103F / 39C with a feels-like temperature of 107 / 42. Depending on your health, just walking around can be dangerous.
    • sroussey 2y ago
      I don’t live in a place where just walking around can be dangerous to my health.
      • dylan604 2y ago
        well, aren't you special then. what's the point of this comment?
    • estebank 2y ago
      You need to compare not against what you currently have, but rather what you'd have if there was political will and budgets comparable to what was spent on the existing car infrastructure. Otherwise is saying that no-one wants a bridge to cross a river because no-one swims across.
      • criddell 2y ago
        Well that's a problem. I'm not willing to pay anywhere near as much for public transportation as I am for a private vehicle and everything that goes with that. But I do think you are on the right track. I think public transportation in the form of buses doesn't make a lot of sense. But if Musk had been able to deliver on his promise of self-driving cars, then a giant city operated (or at least funded) fleet of small autonomous vehicles offering door-to-door service and route flexibility could change everything.
        • oblio 2y ago
          Self driving cars don't solve high traffic volumes. Cars just can't move enough people per hour, I think the average lane can move about 1800 cars per hour and most people don't share rides unless forced to. So that means about 1800-2500 people per hour per lane. A decent subway moves about 20 000 people per hour per line, I think. Cars are low to medium density transport, at best.
          • bsder 2y ago
            > most people don't share rides unless forced to. That wasn't true in the past. My father used to carpool with other teachers for 20+ years. I remember a lot of carpooling through the 1980s and into the mid 1990s where it fizzled out. I would suggest, however, that self-driving cars would be fine for carpooling. Most people would have no problem carpooling with a self-driving car if it always picked up the same bunch of people every day. If I can commute in 35 minutes or take a self-driving carpool for 45 because it stopped to pick up 3 other people from my department along the way, that would be fine.
            • deleted 2y ago
              [deleted]
            • vel0city 2y ago
              People got into carpooling because of the oil crises. Then the oil glut happened, things got cheap again, those carpool groups broke up, and it became uncommon again.
    • yongjik 2y ago
      Sounds like you experienced car vs. bus in a car-optimized city and liked the former, which is pretty understandable. In a bus-optimized city, you'd be saying something like "Sure I can drive to work in 15 minutes, but it takes 5 minutes to park, costs $20 a day, and it's ten minutes walking from the parking lot to the office. Much better to take a bus that stops right across the street."
      • hombre_fatal 2y ago
        Also, very few US cities have the balls to give buses their own lane. So any time you take the bus, you sit in the same traffic as everyone who took their car instead of zooming past traffic like you should be doing.
    • Gud 2y ago
      Have you been to a city(and country) with a good public transport system? I live in Zürich(not from here) and it blows my mind how convenient it is to walk 25 meters to the nearest tram stop and easily get to anywhere in the city. I used to think like you, that having car was a necessity, even freedom. Now I see it for what it is, a ball and chain.
      • j-bos 2y ago
        - The municipality of Zurich has an area of 91.88km² - The Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, urban area (excluding huge swaths of land where people live and presumably need commute from) has an area of 4,524.44km² Numbers taken from wikipedia.
        • weissbier 2y ago
          I think it's difficult for Europeans to grasp the size of the US. Texas alone is twice the size of Germany - which is really crazy.
          • Gud 2y ago
            Why would that be difficult?
            • devilbunny 2y ago
              An intuitive grasp of the size of the US eludes a lot of Americans, let alone a lot of Europeans. When an American says, "that is a three-day drive", they don't mean it will take three days of six hours a day with breaks every hour or two. They mean it will take three days of driving 12+ hours a day with 10-minute breaks every three or four hours. NY to LA is around 41 hours of actual driving per Google. So three consecutive 14-hour days just in the car, not counting getting a hotel room along the way, eating, using the bathroom, showering...
              • Gud 2y ago
                It was said specifically while in this discussion, directed at me. I travel world wide for work, 350 days a year. I know exactly how big the globe is. That I would drive across a continent is ludicrous. That many American cities are these monstrosities where car travel is the only way to navigate is because of poor design not out of necessity. The American car industry managed to halt the installation of public transport to a more effective degree than their European counterparts in the 50-60s. This is not because Los Angeles is bigger than Zürich, or that it takes twice as long to cross the US compared to Europe by car. In Zürich and Switzerland, they have highly effective trains. The US could do the same, but choose not to.
  • pixl97 2y ago
    Hello, texan here. No busses would do nothing for these people... pretty much the entire DFW area is surrounded by huge areas of low density suburbs. The busineses and locations these people are going to covers hundreds of square miles. Car culture builds car cities. Once you have a car city it's nearly impossible to fix it... it's too big and expensive and low density to fix.
    • morsch 2y ago
      Park + ride
      • pixl97 2y ago
        Vel0city's reply kind of covers why this doesn't work, but I'll expound on it. Where does the bus go? If you have dense city cores with business, commercial, and shopping it makes sense. Living near Austin, I could take a bus to a place like the domain and have shaded walkways where I could walk to most shops without dying of heat stroke. If I'm not going to the domain, I'm looking at businesses with huge parking lots strung along stroads. Walking from the bus drop off to a store might just kill you on a day like yesterday where it was 108F, and parking lot temps are closer to 130F. Also getting to where you want to go over the huge spread out cities may involve waiting for 5 or 6 different busses. And then hopefully your park and ride is being watched and you're windows aren't broken out.
        • morsch 2y ago
          Admittedly, P+R is only a (kind of) solution for people of suburbia commuting into the office towers etc of the city. Pretty common scenario around the globe, but maybe not in Texas. Escooters are nice to cover the last mile.
    • oblio 2y ago
      Well, there are solutions but then you get into even uglier politics. Allow higher density housing to be built without opposition (for example up zoning 1 level should be automatically approved: single family home can be torn down to build a duplex, etc). Then reduce and remove parking requirements. Once that's done density will just go up on its own and... cars don't scale. Traffic will absolutely murder everyone and they'll start demanding public transit. However this whole path is killed via NIMBY.
  • dylan604 2y ago
    Now imagine you've designed said trains or buses lines. Where did you put them? How much money did it cost? How many people use them now that they are built? Please, enlighten us with how much better you are than those that are currently in place that have tried and failed.
  • db48x 2y ago
    That’s 500k vehicles, not people. It includes freight.
• stetrain 2y ago
  And in the video the quote about keeping traffic flowing is laid over footage where the traffic is nearly stopped and creeping through the interchange.
  • pixl97 2y ago
    Before this exchange 635 was just stopped around 5pm. That is part of the problem is you fix one spot and it move the pinch point down to the next exit.
• kuschku 2y ago
  Assuming the 500k people all commute between 6am-9am and 3pm-8pm, that means this interchange moves 160k people per hour. That's 1½-2½ commuter rail lines or about 3-4 subway lines. Such interchanges are truly a monument to stupidity.
  • pixl97 2y ago
    You mean hundreds if commuter rail lines because the population isn't centered around dense points that make rail useful. We're in a catch 22 trap that will cost trillions and likely a century to get out of.
    • kuschku 2y ago
      What I'd do is identify existing locations of denser development. That can be old downtown areas, universities, airports, old business parks, etc. Even Texas has those. We've actually had similar issues in many post-war suburbs in Germany when trying to convert them to transit in recent years. The solution isn't to remove all driving, just driving in areas with too much traffic. So park & ride concepts were created. You build train stations at major hubs and at locations at the edge of town and connect them. e.g. my mum's commute changed from "drive for 45min in traffic" to "drive 5min to the neighborhood train station that shares its parking lot with the hypermarket next door, wait 10min, ride the train for 5min, arrive at the train station next to her office". Her commute was cut in half, the business can collect revenue from their mostly unused parking lot during the week (it's sized for saturday shopping traffic), the train station doesn't have to build their own parking lot (the operator pays a few cents per train ticket to the business), and every person using this line is one less car on the road. This model is already profitable (!), but you can expand further. You can set up bus or tram routes that offer cross-connections between train stations to further connect schools, university dorms, malls, etc. You can then improve connectivity within of suburbs. Introduce cross-connections between cul-de-sacs for pedestrians and cyclists, connecting suburbs, apartment complexes, local businesses and train stations. The density won't be high enough to make walking to the train station viable, but cycling to the station certainly will be. That's not a solution for everyone, but it increases freedom of movement for teenagers and retirees. So far, all of this is possible in the US today. But we can dream beyond that: You'd really want to change the zoning around these hubs over time. Ideally you'd want to build 5-over-1s with an underground parking garage, shops and stores on the bottom floor, and apartments on the higher floors. For businesses that need more space you can give the bottom floor a larger footprint and add a green roof which provides something of a community backyard for the occupants of the apartments. Bonus points if you build it as a courtyard in the middle with balconies facing the courtyard. You'd really want to avoid high rises to ensure you get a growing circle of mid-density development around these hubs, somewhat reminescent of what main streets used to look like (or Disney's Main Street USA with two more floors ontop). A few cities in the US have actually gotten this far already! European cities, which suffered more destruction from post-war car-centric city planners than from the war itself, have been using these steps to slowly recover. These steps are also how cities around the world grew during the industrialization, and how the US got the main streets of old in the first place. Getting this far will take a whole generation, but where do we go from here? While this would be the end for solving local commuters, it'd only be the beginning for inter-city journeys. HSR is 2×-3× faster than cars and can be faster than flying for journeys below 1500-2000km, but it only works if you've already got local hubs with a dense transit network connecting them to the rest of the city.