Houston is Unto Hell

I just got back from around 24 hours in Houston, and let me tell you, Dante has his work cut out. He's helped them see their way through two circles of hell, and they're working on a third, but that's still six to go.

Houston has two ring-roads, each of which are at least six lanes, and (this is the really crazy part) each of which is flanked by another six lanes of surface roads. Yep, 12 lane ring-roads, with ramps all over mixing between the surface roads and the freeways (many of which were toll, rather than free). Of course, this just encourages sprawl, which itself requires scads of large surface roads surrounded by strip malls, so Houston had those in spades, too. I mean miles and miles of 8 lane surface roads separated by a curb with periodic turn-outs and constant strip malls.

Strangely, the city has tons of trees, I assume filling in all of the empty space afforded by the massive sprawl. If they could replace all of those roads with light rail, maybe it would be a cool place to live, but as it is... Wow. Unbelievable.

The ring-roads were so bad that I saw something I'd never seen before (and is difficult to describe): Most of the exits off of the highway had a sharp left turn available that basically did a U-turn onto the surface road going the opposite direction. This U-turn was completely enclosed with curbs, so you could only get onto that lane from the surface road going the opposite direction (normally after having just exited the freeway).

shudder

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 | Tags: travel, hell, roads, dante