How are all these rapidly growing metro areas doing on public infrastructure?

17 comments

1. I’d bet terribly.

2. Car-based urban planning still reigns

3. I-35 in Austin is supposed to be expanded, so that’s not good.

   Orlando is getting private HSR at least, but only to the airport.

4. Haha, they are not.

   The metros want public infrastructure, but not willing to pay for it; they get around public pressures by doing environmental studies that go nowhere. Rinse and repeat every few years.

5. The only one I have experience with is Nashville.

   Nashville has just exploded in popularity. If you visited 3-4 years ago, you’ve been gone too long. The skyline has probably changed and there’s more people, more business, more events. Its just crazy how much it has grown.

   At the same time it seems like they aren’t really building for the population within 5-10 years and are struggling to keep up with the people already there. A couple years back they voted down a public transit referendum that would’ve had a major rail component, and it doesn’t seem like there’s the support to try again even with a more modest referendum.

6. Orlando is always under construction.

   What are they building? Nobody knows, but they’ve been building it for decades.

   The only thing we know is that the ancient texts say that when Orlando is finished, *all* will be finished.

7. Probably not well.

8. Terribly.

9. Living here I’d say Orlando is doing fine. I don’t use any of it except highways mainly but:

   – you’ve got good tolls and with I4 “complete” a viable interstate again

   – been busses
   – great Uber and lyft market

   – Amtrak and sun rail
   – building bright line soon

   – 3 airports that are within reason and then the outcast 3 I can think of

   – lot of apartment growth and housing market is bustling

   Idk I’m not an economist

10. I live in Houston so I can say: mixed bag. On the one hand, the city is getting more dense which is good, they have gotten rid of ludicrous parking minimums in some areas, townhomes are going up, they’re expanding bike trails into a network that is actually usable for getting around and not just for exercise/sightseeing (at least inside the 610 loop, less so further out). These are all good things. On the other hand, they’re still expanding highways and inviting mostly car-centric growth. Hopefully all this concrete doesn’t fuck over the drainage even further next time a hurricane comes in!!!

11. Those are all in red states, so if you’re talking about public transit, I’d say poorly.

12. The US is too car-centric with too many car-centric zoning restrictions that make designing a city from the ground up to be walkable and usable for public transit completely impossible. Not Just Bikes on YouTube explains this pretty well comparing Amsterdam versus Canada/USA and explaining how the “walkshed” system of transit works from the ground up to make a near-carless society work.

13. Raleigh is improving slowly, but the congestion can still get pretty harsh. I’m very glad I’m not on I40 west at Rush hour any more. That was a miserable experience pre-covid

14. I lived in Raleigh from 2007-2020. Transit there is a joke but slowly improving to becoming barely useful. There are so many different interest groups and governments that it’s impossible to get anywhere with anything. A light rail system that had millions invested into it was nuked because Duke University didn’t want it.

    You’d have better luck looking for conversation in each local subreddit for detailed information about each city.

15. Covid set back Raleigh transit; several bus lines were shut down because they went from almost zero to actual zero use. My dad used to take the bus but no longer can. That said, RTP traffic is only bad (and even then, it’s not “LA bad”) in a handful of areas and “rush hour” isn’t all day.

    People can complain about the lack of public transportation all they want, but even with traffic, driving is faster than taking the bus in such a spread-out metro area. I’ve taken the bus a few times (usually dropping my car off to get worked on then taking a bus to where I’m borrowing a car), and it takes 2-3x as long to get anywhere. Whenever the topic comes up and I look at the commute time to *anywhere* I’ve ever worked, the bus schedule turns a 30m or less commute into 2 hours… which usually makes it straight up impossible due to the first bus being too late to make it on time.

    Due to living at the NE edge of Durham and commuting to N Raleigh (only a 20m drive with light traffic), I’d currently have a *3* hour commute due to having to transit through both city centers. However, even at my old apartment in S Raleigh, which has a damn near straight line on the google maps bus route, turns a 30m drive (still under an hour with traffic) into an hour and a half.

    It’s gonna be hard to convince people that spending millions of dollars improving a system that already suffers low usage will at some point suddenly become good if they just throw more money at it. The flexibility also isn’t there; a car makes changing jobs much easier because you don’t have to worry about how bad the bus route is going to be, and you can work more flexible hours. And once you *have* a car, the marginal cost of just driving everywhere instead of using public transit just makes sense.

    All the other infrastructure is fine to good. Power issues are very rare (basically only during inclement weather), internet speeds are good and fiber is being slowly rolled out, I’ve never had a cell coverage issue, water is clean and tastes good.

16. As someone who lives in Raleigh, not well.

17. Raleigh: we’re struggling to deal with the fact that many of our roads are single-lane rural roads with houses very close to them that have suddenly transformed into major arteries for tens of thousands of people (looking at you 54)

    It’s a bit chaotic and things can get clogged up