Never in the history of humanity has a nation built such a great project as the American highway system.
Let's start with a Dallas night tour (and yes this thread is not for greens)
Let's move to Hueston
One of very many LA approach highways
Much more to come.
I always wondered why some American cars had those...thank you.
I-280 from San Jose to San Francisco is a very nice, scenic drive, up in the hills over Silicon Valley.
https://tinyurl.com/mrds52xw
I thought that the speed limit in America was 55?
Autobahns are certainly good. Rail system is a wash. Good for passengers, but no other country can touch the American rail network when it comes to freight.
That said, there's some seriously impressive road-building in the US. Interstate 80 through the Sierra Nevadas was a common route of mine. I get to drive San Antonio to El Paso next weekend, it's just set the cruise control to about 85, turn on the radio, and watch nothing but desert go by for the next 500 miles. Very pleasant.
You've obviously got a major agenda to "drive home" the fact that US highways are the best in the world (even though most of them are crumbling and falling apart) and looking at your posts on other threads it seems you want Ireland to import the same level of road infrastructure. This delusional thinking is laughable on your part. You do realise that the states is a continent in terms of size/scale and that we're nearly as small as their smallest state? Please stop embarrassing yourself with these moronic posts and engage your brain before posting.
Fwiw I think the Autobahns in Germany are the best plus they have a cracking modern train infrastructure to go with it.
One Friday evening on I-35 in Austin, TX it took me 70 minutes to travel 8 miles. "Yeah, that is a little worse than usual" was all the sympathy I got.
In the States, the traffic doesn't stop as frequently as here, but it can get really slow. Most people drive automatics, so you end up in a mass of cars, creeping at 5-10mph or so. It's only when you check the time that you realise how bad the traffic really is.
I’ve done a lot of driving in the US and I’ve rarely encountered the chronic traffic levels of lore. Traffic in Ireland is much worse in my experience.
Thats not saying the American way is the correct one. Most cities there are just parking lot after parking lot.
Yes. When you finally get out of your car and walk around, most of Dallas is a horrible place - all asphalt, parking lots and flyovers. Basically, those roads are a hugely expensive monument to the failure of the private car as a method of mass transportation, and the traffic is still awful, day in, day out.
In fairness, the city government knows this, and has changed its planning rules to encourage the creation of proper walkable neighbourhoods. Some of the newer developments in Downtown Dallas wouldn't be out of place in Dublin: street-side parking, closely-spaced blocks of three floors over retail/cafes on ground. Dallas also has the best public transport in Texas - I know that's not saying much, but it does have a multi-line commuter rail service (called DART - theirs opened a year before Dublin's)
Highways to hell.
It's kind of like saying nuclear bombs - let's build more.
Or plastic, we need more plastic.
Or industrial meat farming, what an incredible achievement by humanity.
It's Houston.
That Dallas video was done very late at night, because those roads are notoriously congested at peak times (the video is also 13 years old - ). A former job involved several of those roads, and you're lucky to see 30 mph on the non-tolled lanes of these highways morning and evening. Daytime is a bit better, but it's what we'd call "busy" traffic.
Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston are the finest examples of how induced demand makes it impossible to build your way out of urban traffic congestion. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington has another, more pressing issue with traffic than just delays - because these cities sit in a large natural hollow in a hot climate, the whole area has appalling air quality. Cars are the number one contributor to this, and the days of new highways are well and truly over. Dallas's current long-term plan is to re-densify its urban centre, reduce parking, increase public transport investment, incentivise higher vehicle occupancy (you pay half price on many toll lanes if you've got someone else in the car) and basically do all the stuff that European cities do. Road User Pricing is also being considered for highways without toll lanes.
(Another example of the same "bowl of bad air" is Los Angeles)
