She soon realized her nonprofit salary wouldn’t get her very far. “It was horrific because the days went by so slowly.”īefore she moved, Lafleur had been renting an apartment less than 10 minutes from her office, but she wanted to own a home in the city where she grew up. “I was told that to heal, I needed to sit in a quiet room and let the time go by,” she says. The concussion she suffered kept her out of work for more than three months. David’s South Austin Medical Center-nurses had cut her clothes off her body to take a CT scan. When she woke up, she was in a hospital gown at St. As she merged onto the frontage road, a car stopped abruptly in front of her. She doesn’t remember much about what happened next. It was a Friday and she had happy hour plans with friends after work, so she was wearing one of her favorite outfits-maroon jeggings and a new mauve sweater with matching boots. She finally felt settled in her new home, which she’d bought less than a year before in Cedar Park, a suburb northwest of Austin. It was a cold, cloudy morning but Lafleur was in a good mood. The days of super-wide highway projects like Houston's might be numbered.On January 19, 2018, shortly before 10 a.m., Robin Lafleur exited Texas Highway 290 at South First Street, as she did every morning on her way to work at Austin Habitat for Humanity. After the widening of the Katy Freeway, morning and evening travel times along the route actually increased by 30 and 55 percent, respectively.
#TEXAS FREEWAY EXPRESS LANE SHUT DOWN FREE#
This is the economic phenomenon called "induced demand:" providing more of a free resource (in this case, freeway lanes) will inspire more demand to fill it. Like a gas, traffic expands to fill the space provided.Ĭivil engineers have known for decades that the fundamental rule of road congestion is this: adding capacity doesn't reduce traffic in the long term. (Until someone adds a nineteenth lane, with national highway pride on the line). If you count the additional four lanes of connecting ramps, it's wider than the Katy Freeway if you count through lanes only, the two are tied. Near Pearson International Airport, the road is 18 lanes wide. North America's busiest highway is Ontario's King's Highway 401 as it passes through Toronto, carrying almost half a million people per day. Canada has its own eighteen-lane contender. There were indeed 50 lines of cars in the traffic jam, but they were queuing at a toll plaza with a couple dozen booths. 50 lanes?!? Take that, Texas! But the Beijing "record" should probably come with an asterisk as well. So if Texas is fudging its lane counts (for shame!) where is the world's widest highway? In October 2015, many news accounts of an epic traffic jam on China's G4 highway outside Beijing blamed the congestion on a checkpoint where 50 lanes merge down to fewer than 20.
China has a fifty-lane highway, if you believe the clickbait. Those access roads inflate the count by eight lanes. But as Politifact pointed out in 2015, the mayor's count includes the freeway's frontage roads as well, which doesn't seem quite fair. contenders, like I-75 through Atlanta (up to 15 lanes) and I-405 in Los Angeles (14 lanes in parts). The $2.8 billion expansion of I-10 west of Houston, known as the Katy Freeway, took it up to 26 lanes, according to its local boosters. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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