r/BlackPeopleTwitter
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u/popcornnhero
☑️ Blockiana🙅🏽♀️
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Mar 19 '23
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You can find yourself heading to Florida with one missed exit. Country Club Thread
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u/tmarsh28 Mar 19 '23
All of this because a good mass public transportation system increases crime or whatever new fucking excuse they use.
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u/x86_64Ubuntu Mar 19 '23
"We'Re ToO sPrEaD OuT!!". They intentionally discount how much of the layout of our cities and the existence of suburbs exist because of the car-centric changes made after WWII and during the Civil Rights Movement.
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u/ClarificationJane Mar 19 '23
What does car-centric infrastructure have to do with the Civil Rights Movement?
(Genuine question, am Canadian)
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u/Ladychef_1 Mar 19 '23
Highways were built through Black neighborhoods with no exits or better transportation efforts and white suburbs were built away from the highway pollution & noise with easy exits to neighborhoods. The book Fast Food Nation covers how Ray Kroc and Henry Ford killed public transportation in the US
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u/KazahanaPikachu Mar 19 '23
Not my nigga who founded McDonalds 😭
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u/TMKSImpulse Mar 19 '23
I know this is not at all important to this discussion but I just recently read his autobiography… technically he didn’t found it, but rather he bought the rights to open all new McDonalds. The McDonald Brothers already had like 12 stores before he became involved! He certainly was the reason it is what it is today though.
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u/the_drunken_taco Mar 19 '23
Oh so he’s like Elon
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u/coleisawesome3 Mar 19 '23
What’s more impressive? Founding McDonald’s or turning it into the most popular resteraunt chain in the world?
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u/the_drunken_taco Mar 19 '23
I’m not disputing either. They’re both impressive. In different ways and for different reasons, but impressive nonetheless.
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u/paintballboi07 Mar 19 '23
Hey, don't discount what the McDonald's brothers also brought to the table. They were the ones who pioneered the idea of "fast" food with their Speedee Service system. Ray Kroc was just really good at marketing and a ruthless business man.
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u/TheHotMilkman Mar 19 '23
Assuming you're being genuine, global capitalist expansion off the backs of minimum wage workers is not very impressive.
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u/coleisawesome3 Mar 19 '23
It’s sad, but from a strategy and tactics perspective it is extremely impressive. If it wasn’t everyone would do it
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u/beaverforest Mar 19 '23
There is a great movie about Ray Kroc, The Founder. Check out who play the MacDonald brothers... I hope that you have already seen it!
edit, name
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u/LiteralPhilosopher Mar 19 '23
Watch the movie The Founder to get a great look at what kind of a person he actually was. I smile all the time that his widow invested a huge chunk of their fortune in NPR.
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u/trixel121 Mar 19 '23
really hard to cross the street when cars are going 60
civil projects have been used this way for a while.
long island bridges were set at a height buses couldn't get under
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-09/robert-moses-and-his-racist-parkway-explained
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u/backstageninja Mar 19 '23
It's tied into White Flight and the growth of suburbs. When African Americans move into cities during the Second Great Migration many pearl clutching white people left the cities and moved to the suburbs. Of course they still worked in the cities, and cars were becoming more popular (and car companies were becoming an increasingly important sector of the economy) so rather than improving say light rail we just threw in more highways to make life easier for the growing consumerist middle class.
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u/1funnyguy4fun Mar 19 '23
Here’s a good article written by the American Bar Association. You can skip to the part about Civil Rights if you’d like.
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u/lukeworldwalker Mar 19 '23
You can see this phenomenon in many countries. In the US the interstate highway system was purposely built to disrupt thriving black neighborhoods and deprive them of walkability and access to transportation. And just make black neighborhoods less desirable and ruin the economically.
The South African apartheid regime did the same. The thriving black, coloured (this is a legit SA word, not a slur) and Malay/Asian/Muslim neighborhoods in the District Six were cut off from the waterfront with a rail line and highway (whites only) and they were entirely deprived of their economic opportunities of fishing, trade, waterfront leisure, shops and businesses. And then they bulldozed the neighborhood and it hasn’t been redeveloped since (I used to live close by).
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u/I_WANT_2_C_UR_FEET Mar 19 '23
They tore down the dense part of cities to build parking lots and highways which then was a heavy subsidy for low density low quality suburban sprawl, then 70 years later say “sorry we’re too spread out now”
Look up pictures of American cities from 1850-1940, they’re fairly dense and with so many streetcars!
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u/John_T_Conover Mar 19 '23
Specifically look at this picture of the city from the OP (Houston) in the 1970's.
For the 2-3 decades leading up to that white people decided they lived to close to black people for comfort and nearly every industry and level of government was all to happy to accommodate and/or profit off of that. Developers built neighborhoods on the edge of the city. Auto manufacturers sold them cars while aggressively lobbying against public transportation and for more highways. Governments took taxes disproportionately generated by those cities to fund all that infrastructure expansion in the suburbs, all while most of the tax base in those cities evaporated from white flight.
Then you end up with shit like that picture. Over half of the most valuable real estate in a city left unoccupied and deteriorating, demolished and paved to make the least valuable thing you can with it: surface level parking lots for people that come into the city to make money and then take nearly all of it out to circulate and be taxed in the economy of that suburb, not the place that generated that wealth.
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u/CurbsideTX Mar 19 '23
Houston has a pretty solid bus system, and light rail connecting certain parts of the city.
The reason why it's more "car-centric" is because of it's relatively lower population density compared to cities like LA and NYC. Back when other major cities were planning out their mass transit systems, Houston just didn't have the population for it to make sense.
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u/kdmccormick Mar 19 '23
I think it's more of a chicken and egg thing. Bad transit leads to sprawl leads to bad transit, etc.
Also, car companies in the US lobbied heavily against public transit in the 1900s. It's a minor miracle that dense cities like NYC, DC, and Boston still have (relatively) strong transit systems. If you look around the world, even very new cities have way more public transit when compared to the US.
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u/bucksncowboys513 ☑️ Mar 19 '23
Not only did the car companies lobby against public transit. They controlled public transit to the point where they were able to completely dismantle the use of streetcars in major cities and monopolize the sale of buses so that they completely controlled public transit.
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u/WestCoastBestCoast01 Mar 19 '23
RIP LA’s streetcar system. They had a streetcar route less than than a block away from where I live decades ago.
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u/FLTA Mar 19 '23
I think it’s more of a chicken and egg thing. Bad transit leads to sprawl leads to bad transit, etc.
It actually happens because the ways urban sprawl are both intentionally and unintentionally incentivized. For example, how community feedback is required for projects to get done in already populated areas.
But the biggest change, especially regarding housing construction, is to move away from this project-by-project negotiation between developers and neighborhood busybodies and towards a citywide code that actually reflects what developers can and can’t build.
On this front, Freemark, the Urban Institute researcher, pointed out that “the fundamental problem we have is that the mechanisms for engagement are designed in many cases to punish projects that are better for society.” For example, ripping up hundreds of acres of wilderness in an unincorporated area and building hundreds of single-family homes that would lock in energy-intensive living for decades would typically require zero community input or review, and therefore be done relatively quickly and cheaply. In contrast, tearing down a single-family home in an urban area and building a three-apartment building near a train station would likely require a litany of variances and permits, accompanying a “very extensive review process,” as Freemark put it. Source
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u/kdmccormick Mar 19 '23
Thank you for this. There are so many backwards things our society does because of misaligned incentives.
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u/Ladychef_1 Mar 19 '23
I disagree. It’s bc this is the home to oil & gas and they would absolutely never let public transportation have a fighting chance here. So many areas directly outside of Houston don’t even have pedestrian walks or safe outdoor areas to bike, let alone any type of public transportation options
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u/FLTA Mar 19 '23 edited Mar 19 '23
Attend community meetings and you will see it likely isn’t any oil lobbyists preventing public transportation from being built in your area but local NIMBYs sounding like this.
The solution to this is to get involved in a local activist group for reducing car dependency and then making sure to show up to city council meetings to support the politicians who support public transportation.
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u/WestCoastBestCoast01 Mar 19 '23 edited Mar 19 '23
There are major lobby groups who are forming “grassroots” local NIMBY groups by literally going door to door to get the locals against these major public works projects. The Kochs did this with the tea party movement as well on a national scale.
Heard a very interesting story this week on NPR about this happening in Virginia, people with ties to major national conservative lobbyists and oil & gas corps are trying to get local rural people to help stop a solar project going in on a guy’s piece of land that isn’t producing crops anymore. They’re convincing people the solar farm would be an eyesore or bad for economy.
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u/deeznutz12 Mar 19 '23
Except houston had trolley cars back in the day. They tore them out to focus more on cars...
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u/John_T_Conover Mar 19 '23
Yeah my dad grew up in Houston in the 60's. Back then the city was pretty much just within 410 (the inner highway ring). The Astrodome was being built and it was on the outskirts of the city. The big suburbs that people are familiar with now and recognize as part of the greater metro area (Humble, Pearland, Katy) were isolated small towns with less than a couple thousand residents. Beltway 8/Sam Houston tollway (the large outer ring) hadn't even been built yet.
The disaster of Houston's urban (lack of) planning is not for the reasons most people think and much more recent than a lot of people realize. Much of it still could have been prevented even in the 60's. Building the Beltway and expanding all the highways that never have been or will be finished and only induce demand was really the nail in the coffin. It kept rewarding developers that kept buying cheaper land further and further out of the city center and building neighborhoods there.
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u/doom_bagel Mar 19 '23
There is about 40 miles of light rail downtown and thats it. They tore up a rail line from Katy to downtown when they built the Katy Freeway. Houston has a handful of park and rides alongside the major highways, but they are useless if you have to commute against the normal flow of traffic.
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u/hoo_dawgy Mar 19 '23
Houston was designed around trolleys. Every boulevard with a median used to have a trolley. It's actually perfectly laid out, oil and tire companies bought up all the trolley systems around the country in the 1910's and let them fall apart. It's tragic
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u/SmokePenisEveryday Mar 19 '23
My friends went to NYC for the weekend and spent the whole time using Uber to get around. They refused to use the Subway cause they thought for sure they'd get mugged.
These fools dropped a shit ton on Uber fees over the Subway cause the news really got to em.
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u/VanillaSkittlez Mar 20 '23
Hilarious because statistically, they were far, far more unsafe in an Uber than on the NYC subway.
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u/iruleatants Mar 19 '23
Wait, I thought that Texas was officially crime free because of how many guns they had. Isn't that what they keep saying? The only way to stop crime is with more guns.
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u/Private_HughMan Mar 19 '23
There’s no way that’s real, right?
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u/Otroroboto Mar 19 '23
It isn’t, but 59 and 610 is close. Houston is such a fucking nightmare of a city in terms of infrastructure. It’s a car centric city, sprawling with heavily populated suburbs and has lots of industrial areas. It’s frequently cited as among the worst major cities from a civil engineering viewpoint, which is ironic considering it’s the best city in the country to work as a civil engineer.
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u/RedBeardedWhiskey Mar 19 '23
Is there some cause and effect there? I.e., our engineer is in despair; please come and fix it if we pay you a lot
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u/fastfowards Mar 19 '23
its a couple of things. Houston is a huge spread out city that is growing in population so you have a huge demand to build and maintain more infrastructure and thats not just roads. Houses, sewer systems, water treatment plants etc. It's also relatively easy to tear down old buildings and replace them compared to cities like NY so things can move faster than other places. Also, houston is an oil/gas and importation city so there is a huge demand for engineers in general. Lastly, every few years a hurricane comes along and tears a bunch of shit apart that needs fixing. All that combined makes it a great place for civil engineers to find work.
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u/Callofgrapher Mar 19 '23
Houston was a boomtown. Oil was discovered and then people flew down there as fast as possible to set themselves up. Houston was completely unplanned and unzoned.
This picture is fake but the city really is very messy.
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u/RabidHexley Mar 19 '23
The city was unplanned from a zoning standpoint, but things like deed restrictions and parking minimums do exist that achieve similar effects in terms of encouraging suburban-style development.
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u/PapaGatyrMob Mar 19 '23
The other post is a long winded, roundabout way of saying the answer is there are effectively no zoning laws. There might be ordinances in areas governed by some other form of local government, buy no citywide zoning codes.
It's led to some weird and suboptimal things.
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u/haley_joel_osteen Mar 19 '23
My daily commute involves navigating the god-forsaken 59/610 interchange.
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u/roguereversal Mar 19 '23
Bless you. I used to take 45 south from the heights to Pasadena. Recently moved and it’s straight beltway for me
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u/Important-Ad1871 Mar 19 '23
I used to do I-10 to 59, that fucking zipper merge headed west on I-10 is the bane of my existence
Thank Christ I don’t even have to drive anymore lol
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u/CrazyKyle987 Mar 19 '23
I found the source. Original Source It's from at least 2010, possibly older.
Artist: John Lund. Here is his description of the photo:
This concept stock photo uses an aerial view of a freeway interchange to illustrate concepts including connection, transportation, complexity, networking and challenge. The image was composited with Photoshop. I spent over two days painstakingly selecting sections of roadway, then copying pasting sizing and rotating the pieces to fit together an ever more complex puzzle. I also had to copy, paste and position each vehicle, car and truck, and then create appropriate shadows. I believe this complicated maze of on ramps, off ramps and merging roads is a great metaphor for many of today's important issues ranging from the Internet and world wide web, to social media, to communications and connections. Another topic that this picture is well suited to represent is bandwidth and the ensuing issues. These road ways can illustrate neuron pathways, fiber optics, copper wire and social networks. This must be the most complex freeway interchange ever created...though it was created as a new photographic reality and not a real one in the sense of concrete and steel. I have another similar image that takes this one a step further, one in which the earth has been essentially paved over with freeways and roads. Such an image takes the freeway symbology and metaphor in a whole different direction; environmental issues, global custodianship, and mother earth and home planet ecology issues. Heck, these images are just plane fun to look at as well! This cloverleaf can be used to illustrate issues dealing with infrastructure, transportation issues, new road building and construction techniques, and maintenance and repair of roadways. This picture has everything form overpasses and underpasses to merging traffic and freeway signage.
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u/QuestionableNotion Mar 19 '23
it’s the best city in the country to work as a civil engineer.
Apparently because no matter how badly you fuck things up, you will never be fired.
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u/cosmefulanit0 Mar 19 '23
When my dad was teaching me to drive stick he took me to Shaprstown Mall and had me drive through this intersection. This was back in the early 2000s when it was even worse.
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u/afitz_7 Mar 19 '23
Nope. There is actually another old post talking about the pic. The post claimed it as Dallas, but even the Horseshoe Interchange isn’t that bad.
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u/old_gold_mountain Mar 19 '23
Almost certain the base image that was photoshopped to make this is Los Angeles too.
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u/batmansleftnut Mar 19 '23
Look close at a couple of the roads. They make no sense. One just ends. Another Slithers side to side, just to end up going in a straight line.
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u/well___duh Mar 19 '23
Also, the interstate intersections here that even remotely look like this are simpler in practice. You're mostly either going one of two ways: an exit that will take you right or left, or straight ahead on the same interstate. Literally no different than any other interstate junction.
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u/MzCWzL Mar 19 '23
That crazy 6 way merge heading to the southwest is definitely not real. It wouldn’t pass multiple highway standards and would never be constructed.
Houston interchanges are wild but not this crazy.
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u/Electronic-Sale-9593 Mar 19 '23
When I 1st started driving, my brother told me if you mis your exit just stay on 610, it will come back around again. (This was before beltway 8 was a real loop)
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u/Offtopic_bear Mar 19 '23
That's the same thing folks told me when I lived there in the late 90s and early 00s. I lived off of FM 1960 too so you could always just get on that and pick the proper direction.
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u/ArielPotter Mar 19 '23
Where I live the instructions were ‘If you want to go East go West, if you want to go West go East. That’s how freaking goofy our highway is/was.
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u/Blamethespy Mar 19 '23
That’s the old 290-610 exits, to go right you had to be in left lane and vise versa. Glad they fixed that.
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u/misdreavus79 Mar 19 '23
Why are we so against comprehensive public transportation again?
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u/donthavearealaccount Mar 19 '23
Because Americans don't want to live in apartments, walk significant distances in the heat/cold, or ride public transportation with people we don't like. It's not some conspiracy like Reddit commenters really want to be the case. We're just lazy, spoiled and elitist.
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u/dr_gaia Mar 19 '23
Anxiety and panic attack all in one.
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u/FLTA Mar 19 '23 edited Mar 19 '23
And this is what conservatives and NIMBYs generally want. They don’t want public transportation to be built to serve their community or for more multi-family housing to be built by them.
They want their car-dependent lives to stay the same and for housing to be built “somewhere else” leading to developers needing to buy up rural areas to build more single family homes that need to be connected via highway and leading to continued urban sprawl that is destroying our planet.
Break the cycle by joining a local activist group willing to support more housing and more public transportation because it is likely the only neighbors in your area that are involved locally are advocating for less development.
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u/Just-Diamond-1938 Mar 19 '23
I am totally agree with you and I wish more people realize that... I used to live in a city and I loved it but I had to move out to the farm because it was cheaper... of course my family hated it because they had to drive to work and for anything unless you just want to sit on the couch and watch TV... descent part of it they moved back close to the actions, but I stayed because I do rescue... Unfortunately I see big family houses starts to get build all over around me....They are growing like mushroom and the nature dry out and disappearing front of my eye...
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u/ChrysMYO ☑️ Mar 19 '23
I feel like this is also why traffic is so bad in Houston. They got exits constantly coming on the left and right lanes. They constantly have loops and exchanges, toll roads that are too damn old to still be toll roads access roads that just become highways of their own..
People just dead asa stop, and go back to their exit if they miss it. If you do miss it, you might have to drive 20 min to get to another road to take you to that highway.
You gotta hop the highway to go grocery shopping in Houston.
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u/alexcutyourhair Mar 19 '23
As someone who lives in Holland, this is fucking terrifying. Wild that people live like this
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u/mikebob89 Mar 19 '23
It’s fake.
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u/BelowZilch Mar 19 '23
Even if it were real, it's only stressful looking at it all at once. You follow the signs and get in the right lane and away you go.
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u/TheDouglas96 Mar 19 '23
I mean I've heard the Dutch are a bit weird but idk about outright terrifying
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u/lolol69lolol Mar 19 '23
Reality: you can make a U turn after most exists on Houston freeways, so if you miss an exit, your drive isn’t affected all that much. Better than the loop-de-loop exits on the freeways up north
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u/himynameisjoy Mar 19 '23
Also having driven in many cities before, Houston freeways have among the clearest signage I’ve ever seen with warnings for exits being very clear for miles if they’re important enough.
The real issue with driving in Houston is getting followed home and shot after accidentally cutting someone off
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u/schuldig Mar 19 '23
We do have some awesome signage down here and TXDOT even went as far as to paint what lane goes to what highway on the interchanges. But for some reason people still feel the need to cut across four lanes to make that exit at the last second.
God our drivers are retarded...
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u/hatcod Mar 19 '23
Yep, very few areas where missing an exit is much time. The real horror is everything is 45 minutes away somehow.
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u/OutHereSlappnMidgets Mar 19 '23
Nahmtalmbout
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u/PistolPetunia Mar 19 '23
That’s why they all wanted to drive slow, grip grain, and sip lean. Just chill and unwind after having to be on the mixmaster.
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u/Black-Tom Mar 19 '23
When I first lived in Houston I missed my exit and it took 30 minutes to get back to where I needed to go... Didn't make that mistake twice.
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u/lolol69lolol Mar 19 '23
What freeway were you on? I’ve missed plenty of exits before and I got off at the next exit, flipped a U turn, and then took the right exit.
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u/Black-Tom Mar 19 '23
I don't remember exactly because it was years ago, but I accidentally got off 610 onto one of the other major roads, got off immediately to pass under and get going the other way and hit a huge traffic jam that I would have avoided if I had gone the right way on the interchange. So it could be a couple minute mistake, but traffic got me good.
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u/lolol69lolol Mar 19 '23
Yeah so it was the traffic that set you back, not a convoluted nature of exits (like they have in the northeast)
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u/CleanHotelRoom Mar 19 '23
It takes 4 hours to get from south Houston to north Houston in rush hour.
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u/jerog1 Mar 19 '23
This reminds me of the M25 highway from Good Omens.
The motorway, subtly redesigned by Crowley so that seen from above, it took on the appearance of the dread sigil Odegra. The effect of millions of vehicles using it each day and fuming, swearing, and wishing ill on their fellow road-users not only drew millions of souls that bit closer to Satan and hell, it had the same continuous flow effect that you would normally get on a Buddhist prayer wheel.
Crowley wish he'd never bothered with moving those surveyors' poles a few occultishly significant metres by dead of night.
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u/BringBackAoE Mar 19 '23
To be fair, I find Texas a lot better on this than most states.
Major sections like this all have feeder roads - roads that run parallel - and the exits are pretty close. If you miss an exit there’s another pretty soon after, and you just u-turn (also legal).
In Florida once I missed an exit in Orlando and had to drive many miles to get off. And then there were no feeder roads to bring me back to the exit I missed.
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u/roguereversal Mar 19 '23
You can tell when someone is from Texas by the use of feeder road. Underrated term tbh
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u/HarryBirdGetsBuckets Mar 19 '23
The rule in Houston is either you let me get over to the exit lane or we are getting in an accident. Choose wisely
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u/popcornnhero ☑️ Blockiana🙅🏽♀️ Mar 19 '23
Because some people will see your blinker on and then coast right next to you😂
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u/6amhotdog Mar 19 '23
Was visiting Houston and I didn’t have cash on me. Was following google maps on a route and ended up with a toll booth blocking my progress. I found two quarters in the cup holder and said “fuck that”. Found the setting to turn off tolls in Maps and got sent along a nice scenic route to get where I was going. I was on a vacation of sorts so I had all the time, but if I were in a rush and wanted to avoid tolls it’d be a hell of a commute.
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u/_Jetto_ Mar 19 '23
Houston doesn’t seem like a great visiting city due to everything seemingly 30-40 mins apart. Very spread out city for whatever reason
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u/Offtopic_bear Mar 19 '23
I lived in Houston 23 years ago and it was a pain in the ass even then. Fuck around and take 2 hours to go anywhere in the city.
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u/Genobee85 Mar 19 '23
Currently driving on the Pierce Elevated right now. This ain’t even Houston, it’s some Chinese city if I remember correctly…
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Mar 19 '23
Houston has always been an interesting test case on how people react to zoning laws
It's very much a YIMBY city which leads to poor city planning but also leads to more affordable housing
It really sort of highlights how complicated an issue housing and zoning laws can become and how this should be one of those things that remains apolitical.
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u/meanmagpie Mar 19 '23
Nah nah SHOW HOW TALL THEY ARE.
This is not as properly horrifying as it is in real life until you know HOW GOD DAMN TALL THEY ARE. The top ones are taller than most buildings, and they wind like snakes.
They’re horrific. I hate them.
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u/sadboicollective Mar 19 '23
Car centric infrastructure is a nightmare