Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Wait, when we're saying 16 lanes, are we talking one way or both ways? Because if it's one-way, that's insane. 32 lanes of traffic is complete insanity.
Most urban freeways worldwide are 2 lanes one way. Even the pre-1950 U.S. parkways are mostly 2 lanes, though some were widened to 3.
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8 lanes each way, 16 total. Then 3-4 lanes on each side of the highway for the service roads, plus a bunch more for merge lanes, auxillary lanes, etc.
This stretch of the Katy has 25 "lanes" for example, but of that, "only" 16 lanes are through lanes which run continuously on the freeway portion of the road.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ho...!4d-95.3698028
The widest highway in terms of through lanes in North America, and likely the world, is the 401 in Toronto, with 18 through lanes (9 in each direction).
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6649.../data=!3m1!1e3
Houston is planning to rebuild it's downtown freeway network though, which is the subject of this thread, which would involve constructing a 22 through lane highway, beating the 401.
Brooklyn didn't have to build much more infrastructure to absorb the growth because it was returning to historic population peaks. Brooklyn peaked at 2.738 million in 1950 - and was still below that in 2020 at 2.736 million.
NYC is going to start seeing increasing infrastructure pressures now that population has largely returned to mid-century peaks, existing infrastructure is running out of slack. Most new infrastructure will likely be transit to respond to the denser nature of the city, and is something Houston needs more of too as it continues to get denser in it's core areas, but the car is king in Texas and Houston would be shooting itself in the foot if it cancelled all freeway projects in some futile attempt to convert the absolutely sprawling city into riding relatively slow-moving LRTs around. It just won't work, it's kind of stuck with the transportation patterns it's built itself around.
And regarding the 401, the 18-lane portion of the highway is largely uncongested for most of the day, despite being widened to that width more than 30 years ago. The part that experiences the most congestion is the 10-lane part, the narrowest part of the highway, followed by the 14 lane part which is also substantially busier than the 18-lane part and hasn't substantial revisions to it's capacity since the late 1960's.