It seems like the beltway would be the ideal scenario for how far an interstate should go into a town. Would be nice if they would just eliminate the actual interstate in the city.
You have to consider the history though. If you build a major road like an interstate up to the outer district of a city, then a few decades later the city has grown around it. Eventually you reach a point there a major through route is passing through a major city center that wasn't always there, causing general chaos due to all the crossings and turn-offs needed. Then the government decides that a bypass is in order. Or a ring.
Living near Utrecht in the netherlands i hard disagree on ringroads being a bad idea. However, you're then supposed to tear down the highways through the city and make the high speed traffic use the ringroad.
Totally agree, one of the things that always annoys me when trying to pass through Nijmegen by car is the fact that it doesn't have a proper ringroad. Cities with ringroads are usually much easier to traverse.
I also gotta agree, ring roads aren't bad things, it's just that the US executes them horribly by also having highways and stroads go through the city.
I would have been interested in hearing more about the shortcomings of ring roads - details on why exactly they don't work "as intended" and why planning offices so often seemingly ignore these issues (even if the reasons are usually ideological/political pressures).
Yeah he only really touches on it a little bit, but essentially, it's the fact that these freeways attract car based development to them. They funnel a lot of traffic sure, but then you will see development that relies on a lot of traffic form around them. Suburban sprawl single family homes, big box business parks, satellite malls, etc. This increases the demand for vehicle traffic in the area, and just causes even more reliance on cars, and congestion overall. You'll see the increase in traffic not only along the beltway itself, but in and out of the city to the beltways, or, more accurately, to the new suburban developments these beltways attract. Ultimately, instead of creating a system that drains the traffic out of the city, it instead, over time, ultimately INCREASES the traffic in and out by incentivizing more suburban sprawl.
The problem isn't the ring itself - it's what's inside that ring: Driving though the city must be slower than driving around it, even without congestion. Very bike friendly cities even often have a second ring: There the city center also has a larger road (often multi lane), while everything within this ring is some degree of hostile to cars.
INDUCED DEMAND More traffic means more lanes, which means more traffic, which means more lanes, etc. The Katy Freeway in Texas has 26 lanes! Increased population density and alternative transportation options are the answer. Walk = short distance Bicycle = moderate/longer distance Buss/Tram/Subway = longer distance High Speed Train = up to 500mls (800km) Airplane = over 1-1/2hrs (consider a train) Car = only when needed (consider renting)
I would have liked to see an example of a via alternative. Some place where it’s done “right”. Also keep in mind that ring roads are often bypasses for traffic that transits the region. Richmond, VA, isn’t a big city, but it is sandwiched between megalopolises on the nation’s busiest interstate.
He shows 2 examples. Paris and Amsterdam, which use a ringroad to prevent throughtraffic going into the city. The secret is demolishing the highways on the inside of the ring road
I've always been overwhelmed by Chicago's "crescent shaped" roads, rippling out from Lake Michigan. Living in the city and going to the suburbs at times, there are seemingly endless layers of highways connecting essentially identical suburbs.
Route 83 is a monster road, manheim also. Not to mention also the diagonal roads they intersect, like ogden(which is route 66) or nw highway, or sw highway, north ave which runs all the way from downtown to the cornfields, western ave which was the longest continous street in the us before colfax, and then our most famous street, lake shore dr and Michigan ave
The traffic so bad at rush hr i think its neccessary to make a few ring roads or expressways, and follow up with cta lines that run the same path. These days ppl go from suburbs to suburbs
Well traffic is disastrous because the roads are all underbuilt, I'd say the unironically most well built freeway in the area is 355, and even that's sketchy at times. But yes, the north-south arterials are really disasters, they all end up being mini-beltways. From lagrange/mannheim, to 83, to 53, to 59 all the way west, and even out to smaller arterials like 31 and Randall road. Further, northern beltway type roads like Belvidere road and grand avenue, palatine road, lake cook road, it's crazy how many beltway type roads there are
I wish the Prairie Parkway That was supposed to go west of Route 47 didn't get scrapped. A lot of warehouses were built along Interstate 55 south of Joliet. And for all the truck traffic trying to come in from the Northwest to get down to Joliet have to Traverse a lot of congested two-lane roads such as Route 47 and Route 30. And then the Prairie Parkway was going to be extended up to the Jane Addams Tollway which is Route 90. Unfortunately the property owners in the community's didn't want all of the urban sprawl that would come with it. But then again a lot of smaller roads are congested with semi trucks.
@@JeremysJourneys1 Absolutely, I agree. In fact, a most of Illinois freeways is underbuilt and riddled with potholes, particularly I94 on the south side. I remember driving on I-74 from Indiana, where the road was smooth and decently maintained. However, as soon as I crossed the Illinois border near Danville, IL, the road became all torn up, plagued with potholes and craters larger than my prospects for the future. Despite on-going construction on that road for years, it seems like nothing has been done just like alot of chicago freeways. Despite Illinois being wealthier per capita and overall than Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, it ironically has far worse road conditions than these states. It's embarrassing. However, this is not a surprise as the governor of Illinois is always caught misallocating hundreds of millions of taxpayer fundsfor other gains rather than using them for the public's benefit.
Hey! Big fan! Thanks for actually hearing me out in my video on ring roads. It works in game as vehicles are drawn to roads with higher speed limits, and I think bypasses are important for real life cities as well! If we don’t want cars in spaces for people we should allow them a way around :)
Interestingly, ring roads are so engrained in the geography of big Chinese cities that the location of apartments is described by what ring they're in.
@@Zalis116 - not being used like that ( possibly used for basic income in the future). A 100km green/belt way in Chengdu ... th-cam.com/video/kGueNwBJP3Y/w-d-xo.html (greenway) and th-cam.com/video/u3CQArOw9Iw/w-d-xo.html ( roadway with LNG/battery bus lanes )
@@wyvern5438yes. The one closest to the city centre (the Imperial palace museum) are the oldest and most expensive. As you go further from it, it gets progressively cheaper. And yes, there are entire neighborhood (self contained with malls and many diff services available) within the area.
You mentioned Moscow's loop line on its subway system as though it is something bad. When I thought that loops lines on metro systems were very useful. Most notably Tokyo's Yamanote line is a loop and is the busiest line in their transit network. The links it creates between other train and metro lines increases the route options exponentially for transit users.
They are, the primary benefit of a loop line crossing multiple radials is that it lets travelers who want to change travel direction (enter northbound exit eastbound) do so without entering the core on a purely radial system. This keeps the thru travel away from the core freeing up core capacity and reducing total travel distance/time for that "turning thru traffic". All loop likes are essentially travel magnets, so highway beltways are traffic magnets by design. The problem with this is the throughput curve of a highway ends in a parkinglot and the throughput curve of a train ends in a plateau. Loops are a powerful tool, but like any tool its all about how you use them. (Converging multiple highways with high demand onto a single loop with lots of exits for local traffic is a recipe for an over capacity highway/parkinglot)
Well said, Chicago could really use a ring El line and not be so loop-centric. There is occasional talk about the crosstown freeway which would be perfect for this in lieu of a highway.
Yes, I was going to comment about this. Crosstown bus routes and ring subway lines are great. Transit systems that have everything go radially out from downtown are very frustrating to use. I'm visiting Chicago right now and it's pretty extreme in extending so far out but only to take people downtown. I also am not opposed to ring-shaped roads in general - they help people get between non-downtown neighborhoods and let freight bypass downtown roads. Plenty of great (in the sense of walkable) European and Asian cities have circumferential roads. It's far-flung highways of any sort that are the sprawl-inducing problems. Arguably, linear highways can do it just as much as ring highways. Houston sprawls down I-10 just fine independently of the rings.
I took that as one of the instances of dry humour on here - not that having a circle line on a train is a problem, but just that the ring roads are such a known part of Moscow's geography that they made it an _actual circle_ on the map! The Yamanote Line and the Circle Line are both represented by rectangles, for instance. But Moscow breaks those map "rules" for just that one line. Honestly I do find that exception to the rules for Moscow's subway makes the map look pretty cool, and that's a big part of why I interpreted it as dry humour instead of a serious criticism haha. (Also because I haven't looked-up whether the subway's circular line actually corresponds to either one of the ring roads... I'm lowkey assuming it does because a lot of older subways built their lines along the rights-of-way for streets, but I haven't actually checked so I don't want to say anything authoritative.)
Yeah, loops work pretty much the same whether it's public transit or roads. The difference is that we want induced demand to kick in on the former, but not on the latter.
I am from Houston and we don’t call the one around downtown anything. The next one, we call the loop, the third one is called the beltway, and the fourth one is called the Grand Parkway.
I personally refer to the one around downtown as the "downtown loop" if I'm not talking about any specific part of it, and most people understand what I'm talking about, even if it isn't officially or culturally accepted terminology. For instance, I could be anywhere in downtown, such as Minute Maid Park, the Theater District, or even by the Bayou, and tell somebody to "going northwest, take the downtown loop to 10, 610, then up 290" and they'll know. Don't have to know or care what specific freeway we are near.
I'm from Edmonton and I have a kind of love/hate relationship with our ring road, called Anthony Henday Drive which is about 10-13 kilometers from the city center. I like how it diverts through-traffic around the city, improving things within the ring. However, being a year-round cyclist who tries to bike whenever possible (household of 3 people with 1 car that we use only about once a week), I find the ring road quite restrictive when I want to cycle beyond its bounds. I often have to divert my route dozens of blocks in order to use a bike friendly road or bike path to cross the Henday. More footbridges over the Henday (and/or adding bike paths beside existing roads) would go a long way towards solving this issue. Also, I think that the construction of the Henday has created some induced demand, where residential construction seems to have increased near it. This construction may have happened regardless though, so that is a bit subjective...
That's a really good point! Instead of defining a boundary for construction or development, the sprawl happens on both sides of a now bisected area, a whole region that is only accessible by safely ensconcing yourself in a bubble of steel and glass. If you are inside, escape is no longer simple or quick on pedals or as a pedestrian, and if you are outside, the amenities within are likewise harder to access.
Same kind of deal here in Calgary. There's a couple of abandoned attempts at ring roads pre-Stoney -- you can *see* where Sarcee was supposed to connect through over the Bow for example, but the Bowness folks stopped it -- but Stoney Trail (which is still only 3/4s complete) took a huge amount of pressure off 16th and Deerfoot. But the problems outlined w.r.t. sprawl inducement and the isolation of the inside/outside areas are very real too; it's a very large wide corridor and takes quite a while to cross, where crossing is even possible.
I’m from Indianapolis and we have similar issues crossing the ring road by bike. It’s easier to the north and east, but almost impossible to the southwest because of the airport.
I hope there is a long German word for the twisted pleasure experienced when urban planners publicly shame your hometown for doing things all wrong. Whatever that word is, I'm totally into it.
I was sitting there waiting and waiting because I was shocked that he didn't say anything about Atlanta. I was ready to be up in arms in the comments. LOL.
I live in Houston, and yes, it takes about 2 hours to drive from one side to the other. What's considered an average drive is 30 minutes. When I worked downtown, I drove an hour to work 6 days a week.
Same. My work used to have an office just on the outside of 610 on 290. I live in Jersey Village. Before the expansion of 290 it used to take me an actual hour to get down 290 to work. This is only a 10 mile drive. After they expanded 290, this trip cut down to about 10 minutes. Then I went full remote and they closed the office, so I don't have to drive in anymore. However, when I am out and about, the traffic along 290, while still a lot, is still smooth and fast moving. I'm so glad they expanded that road and relieved all that gnarly traffic. I also am very glad they built out 99. Between 99 and 8, these beltways really make travelling from Jersey Village to Katy, Cinco Ranch, and IAH much smoother and faster. The beltways also give us the option to bypass downtown when travelling to the bay area or Galveston. I personally like the larger roads and the beltways, since I like to live in the suburbs.
I'd love to see you cover the Rochester inner loop at some point, which is currently halfway demolished and is looking at being fully demolished in the near future. Maybe on a video on freeway removals of some sort.
@@LNSLateNightSaturday It used to be a lot worse. If you want to give yourself a headache, google up the original form of the 490/590 interchange (locally known as the 'can of worms'), before it was reworked in the 1980s.
DFW (and most other Texas metro areas) fits nearly any/all criteria for bad: downtown interstates, stroads, ring roads, sprawling car-centric suburbs stretching forever…
I know one thing...I avoid the Atlanta Perimeter at all costs and at all times. You made we wait till the end to finally acknowledge the horrendous mess that is the Perimeter!
Absolutely. Lots of people commute between Smyrna/Cumberland, Sandy Springs/Dunwoody, and Doraville/Norcross. Of course, it should absolutely need to connect to the red line, making so many new trips possible on rail. Honestly, an express service with only 3 stops would be incredible.
My city only got a ring road a few years ago. Calgary is only over 1 million. I am happy they did. Because prior to this, hiway 1, with All hiway traffic coming through Center of city on way to the main tourist attractions beyond our city. Much better on street that used to be the hiway through town (16th Ave.).
As someone who live in Charlotte, I485 complete loop is generally newer. I lived in the last section of the interstate to be complete. It really reduced traffic by huge amount. Stuff that took a half hour now takes five minutes. It also help, because the only two Interstates that travel through the city I-77 and I-85 are both North-South and now they had connections that ran East-West.
I don't think that would work, unless the road in question is a very straight highway. Trains require much wider curves than road vehicles, so turning a road into a railway would require a lot of changes to the alignment. At that point, it's probably a lot cheaper and easier to just build an all new right-of-way for the rails.
Lincoln NE resident here. I believe the south beltway is actually not that bad of a compromise between the city and the state. NE 2 went straight through the city and has a lot of semis and other traffic coming into the city, or using it to get to I-80. With NE 2 moved to this south bypass, the state gave the city the road back, now named "Nebraska Parkway" and I believe the city is planning on changing up the road a lot to make it more friendly. I just hope they don't complete the loop with the east beltway (also been planning since the 60s), as this is where all the suburban spawl is rapidly expanding, just more fuel to the fire. I do think the idea of a full beltway loop is not needed and all the interstate highways should just go around the city in the first place.
Yeah, despite the size, Lincoln has a wildly out of proportion share of long haul truck traffic since it's the route used by nearly all traffic going between the Pacific Northwest and the southeast USA. A bypass makes sense, though a full beltway? Probably not.
@@EllieODaire Currently, it is a bypass. It bypasses the city and back onto a 4-lane divided highway towards Kansas City. They didn't put stoplights on the new road like Nebraska Parkway has. Trucks continue south on US 77 to a small interchange to continue on new NE Highway 2. It is definitely needed in Lincoln.
What've you heard about future plans for Nebraska Parkway? In my experience, it's not even that bad of a "stroad" -- it is a 4-lane high-speed road with stoplights, but it has some walking/cycling trails alongside it, and doesn't have a bunch of business driveways to create traffic hazards. From what I've heard, through a "friend of a relative" that happens to hold an elected position in Lancaster County, the East Beltway is unlikely to be built. Imo, it wouldn't serve that much travel purpose other than allowing southeast Lincoln residents to save a few minutes to get to I-80/Omaha vs. driving up 84th St.
@@Zalis116 the east beltway is definitely still considered part of the project though you’re right, it is unlikely to be built. It would be great if they turned 98th or even 112th into a boulevard to help move traffic more efficiently for southeast Lincoln residents to access I-80. An actual highway wouldn’t see enough traffic to warrant it. What would be great is if it, the south beltway, wilderness park, and the northern stretch of I-80 functioned as an urban growth boundary to help quell sprawl. The city wants 25% of growth between now and 2050 to occur within existing city limits but there’s so much potential for infill and transit development- so I think they should even increase their efforts. Otherwise traffic congestion and car centric planning will never decrease.
I think I've missed the point why beltways are bad. On the surface, they're a good idea: they divert traffic from the city centre and let you go smooth around the city. I understand why highways are bad on general, like an extra lane only worsens it. But wouldn't it be worse without ring roads that unload the city?
Yeah he forgot to really mention it in this video. Derp. But in general it is because this guy hates sprawl and suburbs, and hates that people are able to live where _they_ want instead of where _he_ wants them to. Beltways connect different suburbs, making it more convenient for the people who choose to live out there to actually live out there, thus allowing suburbs to grow and the city to sprawl.
I grew up in Lincoln and then moved to Houston so this video was really funny to me. Not to defend beltways but I will say the Lincoln Beltway to the general public at least was always about diverting Semi trucks from driving through the highway 2 which went directly through the suburbs there. From what Ive heard from my family that still lives there it had so far mostly done its job now that it's finished.
In Prague we are building a belt way (the northern and eastern part is yet to be finished) it did promote a little bit of suburban sprawl, however, Pragues planning comittee has done its best to create public transport options. To get to the point, the ring road isnt to shift trafic but mainly heavy traffic which used to go through the center. Already it has helped prague a lot and eliminating it completely by at least finishing the eastern part will be great help.
Houston resident here. I actually live off of 99 in the northern part of the metro area. It’s convenient even as a tollway. But it still gets congestion in places and there are already plans to expand part of it where I live to increase capacity lol. We know how well that works. BTW, once 99 is completed it will be almost 190 miles long which is greater than the distance between Houston and Austin and almost equal to Houston to San Antonio. Keep up the great content!
@@danielkelly2210 Cool strawman. I never claimed it would. I said "it'd make perfect sense to have another". But I will claim that this _would_ in fact improve traffic. Without the beltways connecting the suburbs, traffic would be relegated to the surface streets, clogging them up and making traffic worse. Alternatively without a beltway to connect suburbs, people choosing to use the freeways would have to travel toward downtown on one freeway, they away from downtown on another freeway just to get to a different area. Connecting these suburbs directly reduces the number of miles people must travel to move between suburbs, as well as reduces the amount of time they're on the road doing the same. For fun, I just now checked routes on maps grom Cypress TX to Spring TX using freeways, with and without utilizing the beltways. At midnight with no traffic, with the beltways, it is 25 miles and takes 29 minutes. Same time but without beltways, this is a 48 miles and 47 minutes. That is a considerable difference that beltways make. Beltways make fort much less time vehicles are clogging roads, less time they're creating pollution, and less time wasted travelling. Beltways don't solve traffic. I'm not sure I've ever heard anybody make that claim. What they actually do is reduce traffic and allow smoother and easier travel between the suburbs that they are made to connect. This is good for the economy _and_ the environment.
So, about Moscow ring road. The one built in the 90s. It is interesting case of induced demand - but not with just cars. At this turbulent times in russia there was like a huge exodus of people from rural areas to Moscow. Like it is always the case but at that time magnitude was huge. New housing blocks were built here and there en masse . Public transport was underfunded while new road projects was greenlit, so car usage skyrocketed. Then they decided to build this ring rode to divert traffic from city. So, what happened then - if you need a place to live you can choose a place inside the city proper that will cost you more, you will be stuck in traffic jams or will have to deal with overcrowded dilapidated public transport and so on. Or there are those places near the junctions of this fast ring road. So, like 10 years after, this road intended to divert traffic from the city, became just another stroad inside the city, as this road just happened to be a catalyst for city growth in this particular manner. Later Moscow's government shifted its focus to public transit mut now they have to spend more as they have to cover those districts all around ring road, and also to this day they upgrade junctioins from simple clover ones that just cant handle all those citizens that commute by car from all those new districts. I also must mention that those districts are not like american suburbias. Those are build with huge 20+ floors blocks. Approximately 150-200k ppl in one of those district. Problem is - there are only housing blocks and shops. No business, no factories. People who live there just have to commute every day. And usually they still have no alternative to cars. Exactly the same is happening in St Petersburg now. Built ring road, huge high density housing district growing all around this ring road. Underfunded public transport (especially metro) while ppl are just forced to use cars if they live in those new districts.
Id say at this point, if you live inside the ring road, you could quite easily get around without having a car. The public transportation has been incredible lately
In my country the purpose of those circular freeways around cities is mainly to make the long range traffic between city A and city C skip the densely populated area of city B that is on the way. I guess it also gives an option to enter a city from many spots on that freeway, lowering the choke-spot traffic that a freeway going straight into the city would cause.
Its the same reason in America too, this guy is just one of those anti-personal-vehicle and anti-suburbs guys that thinks everybody should be forced to live packed into tiny little apartments and forced to take public transportation everywhere, regardless of what they want. You know, one of those "everybody should have the same desires as me, or you're stupid" type of guys.
I'm 2/3 through the video and I still haven't heard any definition or argument against. You mention that the point of a ringway is to keep traffic outside of the city, which to me sounds like a good idea. You just gotta make sure you don't allow traffic through the centre. Also, beltways need to have strictly controlled access points. The entire point is that it is a road only meant for traffic that isn't going to or coming from a local destination. It is not a street, it shouldn't have destinations on it. The only traffic that should go inside the circle is the traffic that actually needs to be inside the circle. So all lines inside should be dead ends or at the very least incredibly impractical compared to the beltway. The Paris and Amsterdam examples are good ones: There is no point in going downtown with your car if you don't want to be downtown, you're much better off staying on the beltway on your trip from Belgium to Spain (for example). This means less cars downtown, which means a more liveable downtown, increased happiness, increased local revenue, reduced road maintenance, and less air and noise pollution.
As a former Atlanta resident, you got me good with the Beltline bait-and-switch at the end! Was definitely prepping a "You mean the perimeter! The beltline is an awesome thing that should be encouraged!" type comment... It's interesting hearing about the models used for traffic engineering though. I'd love a deep dive video on the models transportation engineers use, what their assumptions are, and what the impacts of those (often faulty) assumptions are. I'd love to see what changes could be made to bring a more holistic view on how engineers can think about transportation and not just traffic.
YES! SECOND THIS! Models are powerful tools when used correctly. When they are too complex, then you still can't see the forest for the trees, but if they are really too simple (like the 85% rule for speed limits) then this would help equip anyone advocating for change with the language needed to make their voices heard!
Speaking as a former Edmontonian who grew up on the outside of the Anthony Henday, that ring road was basically a fortress wall that blocked off the city. It is a completely impassible dead zone for anyone not in a car.
As someone who has driven all over the US for 30 years, I have found that traffic flows better in most (large) beltway cities compared to those without.
Paris has 3 more beltways beyond the périphérique, though the outermost is made up of non-freeway roads, so I guess it doesn't really count (it's also so far out it connects other cities, rather than Parisian suburbs). Other French cities have them to avoid freeways coming in, too.
Growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, we would almost exclusively use the ringways to get around, and i never recall there being much traffic on them. I think that's what makes it more functional: its just for the people in the counties to get across their communities faster, and it keeps our little inner-city ring much clearer. Now that I live inside the city, I rarely get on 295/288, and the traffic is only ever congested at peak rush hour.
Start attending the Planning Commission meetings in your local city and providing comments. If you can't stay the entire session, pick a few items and provide your comments on those. It does make a difference. A lot more than you think. If people do provide comments, it's usually against projects that aim to build dense mixed-use housing. Add your comments on these and against new subdivisions.
Oh how I wish that was how it worked here. We lost our attempt to get the planning commission to deny a special use permit for a Taco Bell in a SCHOOL ZONE. (The elementary school driveway is on the property line.) We discovered that each side (for or against) gets five minutes. *Not per speaker, but per side.* There were four people signed up to speak. The planning commission staff wouldn't tell me who the other speakers were. Three of us knew each other and worked together. The other person opposed used up three of our five minutes. I begged for more time and got it, but it was purely chance.
Wondered when Atlanta would come up. My brother lived in Marietta. He died 30 some odd years ago. He would complain about his commute to the south side of Hotlanta. 30 YEARS AGO!
I was born in Calgary Alberta, Canada. I don’t live there anymore, but people we’re so excited when the ring road “Stoney Trail” was completed. But perpetuating car centric suburbia is not so exciting.
About Paris, you forgot to mention the Boulevard Maréchaux and the A86. Maréchaux is a ring road inside of the city running along the T3a and T3b tram lines, and the A86 delimits what we call the "Petite Couronne" which is the dense urban area outside of Paris municipality. The Boulevard Maréchaux generates quite some traffic, and the A86 really is a car sewer which might hopefully be supplanted by the Paris Express metro lines in the future.
So, the overarching theme of this channel is: interstate highways are bad and cars are bad and suburbs are bad. Did I get that right or is there some nuance that I'm missing?
Atlanta shows exurban sprawl happens even without beltways. NIMBYs stopped a second beltway from being built in the northern metro but that didn't stop the sprawl. Now, you have a network of suboptimal beltway stroads (State Routes 20, 92, 120, and 140) that make it a nightmare to commute in that area. I don't know the cause and effect relationship betwen beltways and sprawl, but I think cheap gas and low wages causing people to seek out cheap housing are the bigger culprits.
Signalized highways are improvable with driveway consolidation, lane diets, and better intersections that reduce left-turn problems: roundabouts; jug handles; etc
Regarding Norfolk and its neighboring cities, I think we are back to calling ourselves Hampton Roads. There was an effort to rebrand our area as Tidewater, but there are regions of other states that are trying to claim that name. A regional planning group hired a consultant that proposed calling our area The 757, but I think most people realized that area codes are fleeting. We used to be part of 804, and now we have 948 as an overlay.
@@safuu202 If you want to get technical, the Metropolitan Statistical Area includes ten Virginia cities, six Virginia counties, and three North Carolina counties. - City of Chesapeake, VA - City of Franklin, VA - City of Hampton, VA - City of Newport News, VA - City of Norfolk, VA - City of Poquoson, VA - City of Portsmouth, VA - City of Suffolk, VA - City of Virginia Beach, VA - City of Williamsburg,VA - Gloucester County, VA - Isle of Wight County, VA - James City County, VA - Mathews County, VA - Southampton County, VA - York County, VA - Camden County, NC - Currituck County, NC - Gates County, NC
I think one obvious issue with beltways are the added interchanges when adding a beltway. Major highway intersections are huge sources of traffic backup, and adding beltways by definition increases that, plus beltways intersect so many highways they are very slow and always jammed.
ปีที่แล้ว +11
Ring roads are a marginal improvement over leading a highway across the city proper, but that's about the only positive thing that can be said about them. They are theoretically built for agglomeration and some intra-city traffic, but thanks to the way highway networks are built, cross-country and even international traffic (especially freight) is also piped onto them with predictably horrific results. I'd also like to nominate the Antwerpen ring into your Hall of Shame, it should rank pretty high. It's basically a single bottleneck for road traffic between the Netherlands and most of Belgium, the Paris region of France, and even the UK which turns it into a horror show 24/7. (There's also a ~95% chance of a collision on it blocking 2-3 lanes in the rush hour, making it even worse.)
Here in Berlin we love rings... We have Europes longest beltway, the A10 going around the City, then there is a second Autobahn doing 3/4th of a circle in the city it self and many orbital stroads. In addition we also have an outer and an inner railway loop
I'm surprised by this video. Those are actually a good thing, at least where I live. Here in Poland, we have a lot of rail trafic, you can basically get anywhere by train and lots of stuff gets moved around by cargo trains. However, we still have trucks, and lots of them. A city I used to live in was terribly loud and dangerous before a ring road was built around it and the trans-national traffic was removed from the city limits. Everyone loves it, pedestrians even more than drivers.
You missed out London in your international survey; the plan back in the 60s was to have four beltways or ringways, but they ended up really only building bits of them and the third and fourth got combined into the M25, which is the focus of whole videos by British road geeks. Bits of it just took over existing roads, such as around the south-east corner (junction 5) where you have to turn off to stay on (or TOTSO). The M25 does make it a lot quicker to get across London and make deliveries from the far south-east to the Midlands in a day possible. I recall car journeys in London in the 1980s always taking ages and everyone knowing a back road route to get anywhere, as the main roads were clogged up with through traffic which would now use the M25. You'd travel up the road from Croydon into central London and all of a sudden you'd see signs for Oxford; this was for the through traffic that most likely hadn't come from within London. All the plans for cross-town highways in London, including the two inner ringways, were dropped and most main roads in London are single carriageway.
They are only good within the core of huge cities. Outside of cities, they would be horrible as a railroad does best when it connects places directly, not in a circuitous route.
@@linuxman7777 A ring route can be the baseline for many service connecting regional centers though. As in services that connect the outskirts without having to go through the center. It all depends on geography and transit demand.
Calgary completed its ring road this year 2023. It used to take an hour and 20 minutes to cross Calgary in 2012. Now with 400,000 more people can get anywhere in the city in 32 minutes. It is fantastic. Takes the pressure off the main highway - Deerfoot Trail. Especially traffic bypassing the city core. Edmonton's ring road is also great.
From my anecdotal experience, 270 in Columbus does a pretty good job as a belt road. It's far enough outside of the city to not impede urban growth. The one gripe of course is the increased urban sprawl it encourages. A lot of people I know specifically look for houses or rentals "outside of the loop". The implication is cheaper houses which I can't really blame, but also less traffic which is completely backwards. Living outside the loop forces you into traffic when you need inevitably need to drive into the city. I've got one friend who constantly warned me that I was going to hate my life from traffic by living in a central part of the city. For one I can walk to a lot of places, and when I do drive it's never really that bad. The funniest part is the worst traffic congestion I experience is when I'm driving to his apartment complex in Hilliard.
Talk about survivorship bias. All he sees is the traffic on the way in and out, so he assumes everyone has to fight that the way he does. But if you can walk, that takes the frustration of stop and go, parking, and all the rest out of the equation. Your worst traffic is his every day traffic, and you only see it on your way out to him, while he sees it every day when he gets inside the ring on the "arterial" road. So he associates all the traffic with being inside the ring, while you associate it (correctly) with all the cars trying to go the same way at the same time, but with just enough conflicts to cause traffic wave effects that wreck everyone's day.
fr. i used to live outside 270 (west of pataskala), now near OSU. it was 15-20 minutes to get anywhere. 270, reynoldsburg, pickerington, gahanna, all 15-20 mins. more in rush hour. moved into town honestly the traffic isn’t that bad. some bad pockets but it’s pretty manageable and you don’t have to drive everywhere if it is that bad
Here's the thing: not everybody needs to drive into the city. Many people who live in a suburb either work in that suburb or commute to another suburb. So living in the suburbs makes more sense for people. Living near downtown only makes sense if you work...downtown, or nearby.
San Antonio local here, it's a common misconception that loop 1604 (our outer loop) is just a road, but it is also a mystical barrier that prevents storms from entering the city. The loop protects!
And also it looked said to me when I saw the photo of 2010 Houston with certain areas of beautiful trees and grass and then just turned 10 years or so later turned into just freeways and parking lots and warehouses. And that was it more than just one area. Of course, it’s normal for a city to grow some but I don’t think they’re even using what land they have in a good way.
The DC beltway is the bane of existence. I worked as a firefighter in the Capital region and would rather take my chances in a ripping house fire then operate on that roadway. Traffic is terrible, people drive like its the Indy 500, and the lack of driver skill/attention is astounding.
I guess, but the region would be unable to function without it. Remember that many more people live outside the Beltway than inside it. Plus there are very few Potomac River crossings, a situation that is unlikely to change in my lifetime.
You forgot one more ring road here in Houston. Hwy 6 which is between Bltwy 8 and Hwy 99. It's not a complete ring around the metro area, but it does cover a complete portion of the west and south side of the metro area.
@@PradedaCech I can understand that. It gets dull pretty fast though, and is interesting only in just how car-dependent and lacking in character it is. 2 days is probably the maximum you'd need to devote to a visit.
Phoenix just completed the 202 South Mountain freeway a few years ago and marketed it as a way for trucks to bypass the city. In theory, a truck driving from San Pedro and going to Tucson or beyond on I-10 can take the 202 to avoid the city center. This obviously hasn't solved traffic, but there were noticeably fewer trucks in the downtown loop after that. As a bonus, the undeveloped land it runs through cannot be developed as its sandwiched between a mountain you can't build on and a reservation that won't let the city expand into it.
I'm from Sherbrooke. My city does have 3/4 of a beltway, which is quite a bit for a city of 150,000. Those highways do not enter the center of the city and remain mostly on the edges. The upshot is that the buildup of highway 610 and 410 has allowed us to urbanise a stretch of national road that went through the city center. Because of those highways, all trucks going east are now able to simply bypass the city rather than clog the streets. Its probably one of those rare exemples were building a highway actually improved quality of life for those living in the city. Sherbrooke is now pushing to get a passager service to Montreal. It can probably be done for a hundred million which is rather cheap when compared to a potential widening of highway 10 and 55.
Hey salut! I live in Estrie as well! You make a good point. I wish that Rue King Ouest and Portland could be fixed somehow so they weren't such big stroads. Downtown is nice though, by Wellington. It's also crazy to think that in Europe there are cities the size of Sherbrooke that have trams, wouldn't that be cool?
Yeah. Ottawa could also use some kind of deviation around the downtown, because currently all the inter-city trucks going over the Ottawa River, between Quebec and Ontario, run right through downtown, to connect up with Ontario Highway 417. But the downside would be it inevitably contributing to further sprawl on the edges.
My city doesn't have a true Ring Road and it really sucks, because the thru-traffic has to go through the city I see so many out of state licence plates near the city where I shouldn't see them. People who are just passing through the Pittsburgh Area to get between the Midwest and East Coast don't make it difficult for the rest of us. I would much rather us have a beltway around our city, than the current highways through the city, as it really sucks to have clogged freeways in the city instead of outside of the city where thru traffic belongs.
Beltways mostly used to accomodate traffic from satellite towns and cities. And they had their use at war. A mechanized brigade stuck in congestion made by panickly population is not a thing you want to deal with. Also it is somewhat easy place to set a cordon between outskirts and strategically more important bigger city that can be semi-decently shot at even with artillery due to the sheer size of the road and less risk of hitting buildings.
I'm from Brazil and here in our country we have a few bad examples of Ring Roads and Bypasses, such as the Guanabara Bypass, around the city of Rio de Janeiro, wich its construction was plagued by corruption and project falings. There are now a bypass being built here on the metro area where i live (Florianopolis), to remove truck and long distance traffic out of the main stretch of the BR-101.
@@scpatl4now They had plans to build one, but the demand is very low as there are few long distance trips that pass trough Brasília. To the south and the west, the area around the city is very populated, but to the north and specially east, its mostly empty.
You should do a video about ring STROADS too. Stadium / Maple / Washtenaw blvd in Ann Arbor, MI is a great / terrible example in what is a relatively bike friendly (for North America) city. Just like a ringroad, it cut through existing neighborhoods, the traffic is terrible, and it's a huge blight on the landscape. Most of the ring stroad has an absolutely terrible bike gutter on it too 😬
stroads are what you get when you allow businesses to front onto a bypass. a town near me built a bypass - it has NO facilities for anything but cars, and it has NO entrances or exits other than the beginning and the end of it. if they can hold to that, it will never be a stroad - and the town, which no longer has a stroad through it, will always be walkable, bikeable, and livable. it is a proper use of induced demand. the bypass shifts the people just passing through to the bypass, and leaves the town for the people who want to be there.
I was thinking about Ann Arbor, too, because it's clearly got a ring road with US-23/M-14/I-94, which I actually like (as opposed to demolishing downtown to run a freeway through it like they did to Detroit). But of course MDOT made up for that by clogging up everything on the inside with stroads.
Love the calling out of Houston. I was all set to defend how my work travels have actually gotten better with the TX-99 loop and I no longer have to go through central Houston to get from Katy to Conroe... But then you laid out all the other impacts and I have to agree you are correct. 😂 Bravo!
I feel like this is a very North American idea. Roads that allow to bypass a city are definitely useful….as long as you don’t just use them to perpetuate car centric sprawl
@@notstarboardwhat would the alternative be then? Having all highways terminate on surface streets? Beltways are undoubtedly more urbanist than having freeways in the city though, and the beltways in much of Europe are fairly tame and don’t go very close to the city center
IIRC The inner ring road (downtown loop) in Houston is being partially demolished. They are removing one of the thirds and rerouting that on the other two thirds. And it's TX so of course they're widening the remaining two parts, so probably same amount of lane miles but at least a little less destruction?
Houston actually goes all out with the naming of its loop roads. 610 is called “the loop”, beltway 8 is called “the beltway”, and SH 99 is the Grand Parkway-all of these have some more intricacies depending on which part of the city you’re in and whether or not you’re on the feeders. The book “Houston Freeways: A Historical and Visual Journey” (2003) by Erik Slotboom has an excellent chapter on the topic of the loops detailing how each one has brought additional development further from the city and even goes into the “downtown loop” that was originally just that. The Grand Parkway even has an interesting history that was intended to act like a Greenbelt a la London that would have stopped the sprawl and been a nature preserve/flood prevention system for the Katy Prairie (hence “Parkway”). Definitely something worth reading to get a deeper understanding of the history and the issues associated with it.
@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 no. It was determined to be too much money and the plan was still 30 years out from even breaking ground. Different interests and land development groups eventually got the state/local government to get rid of the park and greenbelt portion and so it was. Now it’s just another loop with undeveloped land surrounding it and developers buying up that land to build more mega-suburbs.
@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 as of today, there’s only a few portions that are actually built out along 99 and those are where it has been completed (Cinco Ranch/Katy, Spring, and Baytown). Cypress to the northwest is building out Bridgeland, the greater northeast/Eastex is also experiencing rapid growth. Richmond/sugar land/Alvin are also growing more than normal due to low cost and will likely get their portion of 99 in the next decade as well. Luckily, 99 is one of the few examples in Houston of a highway without feeders along most of it, which makes it significantly harder for people being interested in building directly alongside it, but that hasn’t stopped the explosive growth unfortunately. I still think it would be in the best interest of the city/county to buy up land to rebirth the Greenbelt portion and to curb development lest we have to build another loop even further out in the next 50 years.
Normally I follow your arguments well, but I'm confused about this one. What is a proposed alternative to beltways? I get that they can cause sprawl, but what else is there?
I agree, but sometimes you can get stuck in a situation and have to suck it up for a bit. Would a comparable train or bus ride be acceptable if it was available?
Ring roads are helpful as it should be designed to keep traffic away from the city core. The ring road isn't the problem; it's the road leading into downtown. US cities without ring roads (like LA, Chicago, NYC) have horrible traffic that pushes the traffic to the center cores. Yes, Atlanta and DC have traffic issues, but that's mostly due to 75/85 and 395/295 cutting through respectively.
Can you make a video about urban "Rails to Trails"? They seem to be exclusively recreational in my experience, but I am curious if there are cities that have successfully converted disused rail infrastructure into viable bike/pedestrian commuting options. Thanks!
Pittsburgh is a good example. I would use the example of the Eliza furnace trail (fast, good visibility, between highways) with the south side trail (twists and turns, lots of trees and dog parks) that both essentially go the same places just on opposite sides of the monongahela river. When I’m biking to work I use the Eliza furnace trail to get there sooner and when I’m biking home and want to enjoy myself I slow down and go on the south side trail
At least one example exists in northern Virginia with the W&OD Trail. I use it daily to commute to my work and to drop my kids off at school with a cargo bike.
The Railtown Park trail in Edmonton is another example, stretching from the River valley to MacEwan University, following the High Level Streetcar on the old Canadian Pacific right-of-way. Also connects to the downtown bike network, is within walking distance of multiple LRT stations, and has easy access to crossing the river to the University of Alberta.
I live in Melbourne Australia, and we have a tonne of examples! Everything from regional evening routes to the “city path” which turned the old inner circle line into basically a bike highway
you should do a bigger study on beijing or some other chinese megacity. they're kinda unique since they've got great transit, HSR, and a lot of walkable design, but still have to have monumental road infrastructure because of the sheer number of people
I find Chinese city designs to be quite interesting. Most of them aren't built in grids, but a bunch of walkable neighborhoods separated by arterial roads leading towards the city center and surrounded by ring roads. The general traffic pattern seems to that people use the arterial roads to move from ring to ring, and then use the rings to go to particular sections of the city. They also use a similar design for their subways, where its often a bunch of mostly linear lines all linked together by a circle line. Generally, my experience has been that Chinese traffic is much better than Canadian traffic for cities of similar size. Though I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this is due to the road design or something else.
@@yuan-pinglee6630 I think it has a lot to do with the socioeconomic history of China, being born & raised there. Like many other Asian cities (HK, SG, Tokyo, Seoul, etc.) but even more so, China used to be very poor, and thus traveling by private cars (and flying for that matter as well) have been long considered a luxury for a few, during the same time that those are considered 'middle class lifestyle' in most developed western countries. And thus there was a need to build walkable sections of large cities. However Chinese economy was also quickly booming at the same time, and thus privately owned cars became well thought after in major cities like Shanghai & Beijing, as a status symbol. And so came the 'car friendly' infrastructure, especially in the 'newer' sections. However, the A.M. fact that most people don't commute or travel by driving or flying, China had a better (compared to the 'new world' at least) foundation to eventually build out its modern transit & HSR systems. My memory of growing up in Shanghai, China during the turn of the century is that: we mostly used buses (and maybe trolleys/trams) to get around the city. And trains, occasionally accompanied by intercity coach buses, were THE way to travel out of town. Eventually cars and planes became much more popular, with my own family owning a car and driving to other cities all the time. But soon we also got a really nice metro network and eventually HSR network. There is an argument that since the subways and HSRs in China needs to mostly drive riders from conventional intercity rails, buses, trolleys, it had a much better time gaining popularity compared to the American counterparts who has to compete with driving and flying. And from my experience it's definitely true.
I'd say it's also sometimes less due to the amount of people and more due to some truly awful infrastructure that I think they adopted from the USSR. Stuff like Changan Jie is needlessly wide (10 lanes!) mostly just for symbolic reasons, there's no real infrastructural reason for why its designed that way, as far as I understand at least.
A ring road catching and connecting the different highways going to a city, keeping them from actually reaching into the city and managing traffic which wants to pass the city to go around instead of through the city sound like a perfect solution to me. Also urban ring roads within a city can perfectly serve the purpose to move masses of (partly necessary) traffic around the city without that traffic clogging up every single main road north to south and east to west. It focuses that traffic on the ring road, taking some traffic off the other main roads You can perfectly see that in the Bavarian state capital city of Munich: a downtown ring road circles the oldtown area; The middle ring road circles the downtown area in some distance and is the busiest one in the entire city. It focuses both traffic form the downtown are and outer boroughs. That's also the furthest some of the highways go into the city, none goes any further downtown. And then there's the highway ring road which goes around the entire city ... well apart from that it circles the city only to maybe 75 or 80%, leaving a gap in the south-west and that's exactly where traffic on the middle ring road is the worst, because no-one want's go go the long 75% way around the entire city just because of the 25% missing gap in the highway ring road.
the middle ring road in Munich connects many major desitnations across the city: apart from a few important train stations two waste-to-energency-plants, fresh food central market for businesses, several large hospitals, breweries, plant divisions from BMW, stadiums, bus and tram depots, office and business developments etc are right at or very close to the middle ring road. All that generates lots of traffic which is well organized on the ring road, better than on any other type of inner city road
Well, in my view it isn't just extra capacity but also makes a somewhat intuitive way to shift where the traffic is in an ideal case. But, after seeing how having a beltway too far-out subsidies car dependent sprawl that makes a little bit of sense. But the point that the models are only modeling traffic and not accounting for the impact on land-use and such makes sense. Part of me thinks that maybe making a 4 lane ring-road and keeping it small might mitigate some of the sprawl factor rather than making 6-9 lane ones. You also mentioned that one pretty close to the city center that acts as a hub for spoke highways to connect into makes sense.
There is an equally wonderful one around Calgary, Alberta too, as well as the one around Edmonton, AB is a place I lived and used the ring road everyday and it did seem to make going longer distances easier than going through the city.
used to live in San Antonio Texas a long time ago, in the Outerloop called 1604, which we call loops in Texas used to just have farmland on either side when they first built it and which I believe had two lanes each direction now I think it’s twice that and has subdivisions a few on each side, and now they propagated, dozens of subdivisions and more plus San Antonio has grown into small towns that used to be separate from the city. !!!
Please talk about the A-118 beltway, a 142 km (88 mile) orbital freeway encircling Saint Petersburg, Russia. That is the fourth-most populous city in Europe and is on the Baltic Sea. Yet, Saint Petersburg has an impressive ring road with the western side built over water on bridges.
Folks seem hellbent on trying to put in another beltway or partial beltway in Northern Virginia (not sure if they want it to go into Maryland). Last thing this car-choked region needs.
7100 in Virginia and 200 in Maryland are "arc roads" that already kind of function as second beltways. "The Techway" is the plan to connect them to make them more like half a second beltway.
What makes the Atlanta Perimeter even worse is that by law, any 18 wheeler that is not stopping in the city has to use the Perimeter as a by-pass. That makes the traffic and accident numbers way worse.
It’s probably good that there’s a law that any 18 wheeler not stopping in the city has to used the parameters of bypass since if it didn’t and had an accident there could be toxic chemicals released in the city for one reason or another reason is more congestion on Flores StreetS.
Atlanta's MARTA system at least reaches the ring road, but it basically follows the interstates into the city which removes the train's advantages. If MARTA had an interior ring inside of 285, it would address many of its connectivity problems.
Jay Foreman has an excellent video - part of his Unfinished London series - about the plans made in the 1960s to encircle London with four "ringways". Fortunately the plans were mostly abandoned, and the only complete ring that was built was the M25 Motorway. However you can still see vestiges and partially built sections of the ringway scheme.
If you make them bus routes it might fix things I did in Cities Skylines for each district and connected them to the metro and basically fixes traffic (plus paths and bike paths)
My first job out of university in the 1970’s was Environmental Coordinator for the Texas Highway Department. The beltways there were built for one reason only, and that was for developers to profit. Not a single mile was built for transportation purposes.
@@szurketaltos2693it wouldn’t be better it would only be worse, beltways are meant for people that don’t want/need to go through the city center, don’t have too, so if you removed them they wouldn’t have a choice but to go trough the center
@@user-sy6ky6ed2e the relevant principle is induced demand, if you have less supply then fewer people would have based their housing and commute on the availability of the beltway.
Ring roads = a mixed blessing at best. They might keep freeways away from a downtown when planned right, but that's it and shouldn't be a replacement for good public transit and bike trails. I'm instantly reminded of your past comment about Chicago, they have a downtown ring road, but it's solely used by (elevated) trains. 😊
75/85 in Atlanta going through downtown is often bumper to bumper and we have a perimeter as well. It doesn't do much to help traffic downtown. It only fosters more development which in turn clogs up that freeway.
One good thing about beltways-as shown at the end-cities tend to build bike trails that parallel them. I am a child of the Kansas City beltway, lived in the unfinished portion of the Denver beltway for 2 decades (which remains the nicest part of the city, but has developed a lot of sprawl thanks to the promise of a new link), and now live in the shadow of the almost finished 215 beltway project. People will always want to live where it’s most convenient to get to other parts of the city. Beltways make that more possible than stoplights, turns, etc, which are slower and more dangerous than low-access freeways.
One of my favorite lines about Houston's sprawling metropolis -- "Anywhere in Houston is an hour and a half from Houston"
I always say if I start in West Houston and drive an hour in any direction, I'll end up all the way in West Houston.
Same way with Phoenix!
Everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes!
@@ChristopherKhorey try 40.
As someone who lives in Houston, I can confirm this is accurate.
It seems like the beltway would be the ideal scenario for how far an interstate should go into a town. Would be nice if they would just eliminate the actual interstate in the city.
You have to consider the history though. If you build a major road like an interstate up to the outer district of a city, then a few decades later the city has grown around it.
Eventually you reach a point there a major through route is passing through a major city center that wasn't always there, causing general chaos due to all the crossings and turn-offs needed. Then the government decides that a bypass is in order. Or a ring.
I agree, and have all the big trucks use the Outerbelt ways to go around instead of through the city
@@vylbird8014 No problem as long as you do not displace people, or allow people to live next to freeways
That only works with an “island” philosophy, not a “frontier” one.
@@vylbird8014 you do realize that ring roads were made in response to people not being able to cross their town right?
Living near Utrecht in the netherlands i hard disagree on ringroads being a bad idea. However, you're then supposed to tear down the highways through the city and make the high speed traffic use the ringroad.
Examples in this very video of Amsterdam and Paris show how that looks on a map afterwards
100% - the problem is the freeways through the city, not the ring road. This is a very bad take.
I live in Amsterdam and have to agree with you, I also see no better alternatives
Totally agree, one of the things that always annoys me when trying to pass through Nijmegen by car is the fact that it doesn't have a proper ringroad. Cities with ringroads are usually much easier to traverse.
I also gotta agree, ring roads aren't bad things, it's just that the US executes them horribly by also having highways and stroads go through the city.
I would have been interested in hearing more about the shortcomings of ring roads - details on why exactly they don't work "as intended" and why planning offices so often seemingly ignore these issues (even if the reasons are usually ideological/political pressures).
Yeah he only really touches on it a little bit, but essentially, it's the fact that these freeways attract car based development to them. They funnel a lot of traffic sure, but then you will see development that relies on a lot of traffic form around them. Suburban sprawl single family homes, big box business parks, satellite malls, etc.
This increases the demand for vehicle traffic in the area, and just causes even more reliance on cars, and congestion overall. You'll see the increase in traffic not only along the beltway itself, but in and out of the city to the beltways, or, more accurately, to the new suburban developments these beltways attract.
Ultimately, instead of creating a system that drains the traffic out of the city, it instead, over time, ultimately INCREASES the traffic in and out by incentivizing more suburban sprawl.
@@Th0rvidTheViking This is the bit I wanted connected to the rest of the points in the video!
The problem isn't the ring itself - it's what's inside that ring: Driving though the city must be slower than driving around it, even without congestion.
Very bike friendly cities even often have a second ring: There the city center also has a larger road (often multi lane), while everything within this ring is some degree of hostile to cars.
@@Th0rvidTheViking That's not a problem with beltways specifically, that's true of any new roadway development.
INDUCED DEMAND
More traffic means more lanes, which means more traffic, which means more lanes, etc.
The Katy Freeway in Texas has 26 lanes!
Increased population density and alternative transportation options are the answer.
Walk = short distance
Bicycle = moderate/longer distance
Buss/Tram/Subway = longer distance
High Speed Train = up to 500mls (800km)
Airplane = over 1-1/2hrs (consider a train)
Car = only when needed (consider renting)
I wish you spent more time explaining what's wrong with beltways, rather than saying "look! BELTWAYS!!!" over and over for several minutes.
Yes!! I just didn't understand what's wrong with them🤷
I would have liked to see an example of a via alternative. Some place where it’s done “right”.
Also keep in mind that ring roads are often bypasses for traffic that transits the region. Richmond, VA, isn’t a big city, but it is sandwiched between megalopolises on the nation’s busiest interstate.
That would work if zero exits are provided.
He shows 2 examples. Paris and Amsterdam, which use a ringroad to prevent throughtraffic going into the city. The secret is demolishing the highways on the inside of the ring road
I agree. What is the solution if ring roads are bad and highways through cities are also bad? Where does the highway go/start/stop?
There is such a thing as right. People need to stop putting it in scare quotes.
@An Obscure Tenet there's more than one way to skin a cat but there is only one BEST way.
I've always been overwhelmed by Chicago's "crescent shaped" roads, rippling out from Lake Michigan. Living in the city and going to the suburbs at times, there are seemingly endless layers of highways connecting essentially identical suburbs.
Route 83 is a monster road, manheim also. Not to mention also the diagonal roads they intersect, like ogden(which is route 66) or nw highway, or sw highway, north ave which runs all the way from downtown to the cornfields, western ave which was the longest continous street in the us before colfax, and then our most famous street, lake shore dr and Michigan ave
The traffic so bad at rush hr i think its neccessary to make a few ring roads or expressways, and follow up with cta lines that run the same path. These days ppl go from suburbs to suburbs
Well traffic is disastrous because the roads are all underbuilt, I'd say the unironically most well built freeway in the area is 355, and even that's sketchy at times. But yes, the north-south arterials are really disasters, they all end up being mini-beltways. From lagrange/mannheim, to 83, to 53, to 59 all the way west, and even out to smaller arterials like 31 and Randall road. Further, northern beltway type roads like Belvidere road and grand avenue, palatine road, lake cook road, it's crazy how many beltway type roads there are
I wish the Prairie Parkway That was supposed to go west of Route 47 didn't get scrapped. A lot of warehouses were built along Interstate 55 south of Joliet. And for all the truck traffic trying to come in from the Northwest to get down to Joliet have to Traverse a lot of congested two-lane roads such as Route 47 and Route 30. And then the Prairie Parkway was going to be extended up to the Jane Addams Tollway which is Route 90. Unfortunately the property owners in the community's didn't want all of the urban sprawl that would come with it. But then again a lot of smaller roads are congested with semi trucks.
@@JeremysJourneys1 Absolutely, I agree. In fact, a most of Illinois freeways is underbuilt and riddled with potholes, particularly I94 on the south side. I remember driving on I-74 from Indiana, where the road was smooth and decently maintained. However, as soon as I crossed the Illinois border near Danville, IL, the road became all torn up, plagued with potholes and craters larger than my prospects for the future. Despite on-going construction on that road for years, it seems like nothing has been done just like alot of chicago freeways. Despite Illinois being wealthier per capita and overall than Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, it ironically has far worse road conditions than these states. It's embarrassing. However, this is not a surprise as the governor of Illinois is always caught misallocating hundreds of millions of taxpayer fundsfor other gains rather than using them for the public's benefit.
Hey! Big fan! Thanks for actually hearing me out in my video on ring roads. It works in game as vehicles are drawn to roads with higher speed limits, and I think bypasses are important for real life cities as well! If we don’t want cars in spaces for people we should allow them a way around :)
Interestingly, ring roads are so engrained in the geography of big Chinese cities that the location of apartments is described by what ring they're in.
Interesting! How does that work? Are there neighborhoods or boroughs in each ring?
Better social credit score = more access to housing within a lower ring number?
@@Zalis116 - not being used like that ( possibly used for basic income in the future). A 100km green/belt way in Chengdu ... th-cam.com/video/kGueNwBJP3Y/w-d-xo.html (greenway) and th-cam.com/video/u3CQArOw9Iw/w-d-xo.html ( roadway with LNG/battery bus lanes )
@@Zalis116that is not how Chinese social credit system works. They work like the American credit system.
@@wyvern5438yes. The one closest to the city centre (the Imperial palace museum) are the oldest and most expensive. As you go further from it, it gets progressively cheaper. And yes, there are entire neighborhood (self contained with malls and many diff services available) within the area.
You mentioned Moscow's loop line on its subway system as though it is something bad. When I thought that loops lines on metro systems were very useful. Most notably Tokyo's Yamanote line is a loop and is the busiest line in their transit network. The links it creates between other train and metro lines increases the route options exponentially for transit users.
They are, the primary benefit of a loop line crossing multiple radials is that it lets travelers who want to change travel direction (enter northbound exit eastbound) do so without entering the core on a purely radial system. This keeps the thru travel away from the core freeing up core capacity and reducing total travel distance/time for that "turning thru traffic".
All loop likes are essentially travel magnets, so highway beltways are traffic magnets by design. The problem with this is the throughput curve of a highway ends in a parkinglot and the throughput curve of a train ends in a plateau.
Loops are a powerful tool, but like any tool its all about how you use them. (Converging multiple highways with high demand onto a single loop with lots of exits for local traffic is a recipe for an over capacity highway/parkinglot)
Well said, Chicago could really use a ring El line and not be so loop-centric. There is occasional talk about the crosstown freeway which would be perfect for this in lieu of a highway.
Yes, I was going to comment about this. Crosstown bus routes and ring subway lines are great. Transit systems that have everything go radially out from downtown are very frustrating to use. I'm visiting Chicago right now and it's pretty extreme in extending so far out but only to take people downtown. I also am not opposed to ring-shaped roads in general - they help people get between non-downtown neighborhoods and let freight bypass downtown roads. Plenty of great (in the sense of walkable) European and Asian cities have circumferential roads. It's far-flung highways of any sort that are the sprawl-inducing problems. Arguably, linear highways can do it just as much as ring highways. Houston sprawls down I-10 just fine independently of the rings.
I took that as one of the instances of dry humour on here - not that having a circle line on a train is a problem, but just that the ring roads are such a known part of Moscow's geography that they made it an _actual circle_ on the map!
The Yamanote Line and the Circle Line are both represented by rectangles, for instance. But Moscow breaks those map "rules" for just that one line.
Honestly I do find that exception to the rules for Moscow's subway makes the map look pretty cool, and that's a big part of why I interpreted it as dry humour instead of a serious criticism haha.
(Also because I haven't looked-up whether the subway's circular line actually corresponds to either one of the ring roads... I'm lowkey assuming it does because a lot of older subways built their lines along the rights-of-way for streets, but I haven't actually checked so I don't want to say anything authoritative.)
Yeah, loops work pretty much the same whether it's public transit or roads. The difference is that we want induced demand to kick in on the former, but not on the latter.
I am from Houston and we don’t call the one around downtown anything. The next one, we call the loop, the third one is called the beltway, and the fourth one is called the Grand Parkway.
I personally refer to the one around downtown as the "downtown loop" if I'm not talking about any specific part of it, and most people understand what I'm talking about, even if it isn't officially or culturally accepted terminology.
For instance, I could be anywhere in downtown, such as Minute Maid Park, the Theater District, or even by the Bayou, and tell somebody to "going northwest, take the downtown loop to 10, 610, then up 290" and they'll know. Don't have to know or care what specific freeway we are near.
I'm from Edmonton and I have a kind of love/hate relationship with our ring road, called Anthony Henday Drive which is about 10-13 kilometers from the city center. I like how it diverts through-traffic around the city, improving things within the ring. However, being a year-round cyclist who tries to bike whenever possible (household of 3 people with 1 car that we use only about once a week), I find the ring road quite restrictive when I want to cycle beyond its bounds. I often have to divert my route dozens of blocks in order to use a bike friendly road or bike path to cross the Henday. More footbridges over the Henday (and/or adding bike paths beside existing roads) would go a long way towards solving this issue. Also, I think that the construction of the Henday has created some induced demand, where residential construction seems to have increased near it. This construction may have happened regardless though, so that is a bit subjective...
That's a really good point! Instead of defining a boundary for construction or development, the sprawl happens on both sides of a now bisected area, a whole region that is only accessible by safely ensconcing yourself in a bubble of steel and glass. If you are inside, escape is no longer simple or quick on pedals or as a pedestrian, and if you are outside, the amenities within are likewise harder to access.
Also it seems that our new sister city Indianapolis has an airport right on its ring road, and ours is almost 20km south of it :/
Same kind of deal here in Calgary. There's a couple of abandoned attempts at ring roads pre-Stoney -- you can *see* where Sarcee was supposed to connect through over the Bow for example, but the Bowness folks stopped it -- but Stoney Trail (which is still only 3/4s complete) took a huge amount of pressure off 16th and Deerfoot. But the problems outlined w.r.t. sprawl inducement and the isolation of the inside/outside areas are very real too; it's a very large wide corridor and takes quite a while to cross, where crossing is even possible.
Lets go Oilers! Mcdavid ❤❤
I’m from Indianapolis and we have similar issues crossing the ring road by bike. It’s easier to the north and east, but almost impossible to the southwest because of the airport.
When Atlanta didn't appear in the first five minutes, I got so excited! I just knew you were waiting to lay some big shame! You never let us down!!
Love the Beltline shoutout though
I hope there is a long German word for the twisted pleasure experienced when urban planners publicly shame your hometown for doing things all wrong. Whatever that word is, I'm totally into it.
I285 is so infamous it’s even sucked in and trapped Atlanta Braves pitchers
I was sitting there waiting and waiting because I was shocked that he didn't say anything about Atlanta. I was ready to be up in arms in the comments. LOL.
Also Atlanta area residents actually make the distinction between living ITP vs OTP.
I live in Houston, and yes, it takes about 2 hours to drive from one side to the other. What's considered an average drive is 30 minutes. When I worked downtown, I drove an hour to work 6 days a week.
Same. My work used to have an office just on the outside of 610 on 290. I live in Jersey Village. Before the expansion of 290 it used to take me an actual hour to get down 290 to work. This is only a 10 mile drive. After they expanded 290, this trip cut down to about 10 minutes. Then I went full remote and they closed the office, so I don't have to drive in anymore. However, when I am out and about, the traffic along 290, while still a lot, is still smooth and fast moving. I'm so glad they expanded that road and relieved all that gnarly traffic.
I also am very glad they built out 99. Between 99 and 8, these beltways really make travelling from Jersey Village to Katy, Cinco Ranch, and IAH much smoother and faster. The beltways also give us the option to bypass downtown when travelling to the bay area or Galveston.
I personally like the larger roads and the beltways, since I like to live in the suburbs.
I'd love to see you cover the Rochester inner loop at some point, which is currently halfway demolished and is looking at being fully demolished in the near future. Maybe on a video on freeway removals of some sort.
As someone who's recently moved to the Rochester Area, I second this! (The roadways here are bewildering to me...)
he did this already.
Detroit-style shrinkage?
@@LNSLateNightSaturday It used to be a lot worse. If you want to give yourself a headache, google up the original form of the 490/590 interchange (locally known as the 'can of worms'), before it was reworked in the 1980s.
I agree that Rochester NY as an example of city deconstructing a ring road should have been mentioned here.
DFW (and most other Texas metro areas) fits nearly any/all criteria for bad: downtown interstates, stroads, ring roads, sprawling car-centric suburbs stretching forever…
Well, except for central Austin, most of Texas is car-dependent sprawl.
And tolls.
and yet people are moving there, you should ask why.
@@Distress. Plenty of jobs, growing economy, good money, affordable. Love it
@@sm3675 stay there
I know one thing...I avoid the Atlanta Perimeter at all costs and at all times. You made we wait till the end to finally acknowledge the horrendous mess that is the Perimeter!
The northern half of the perimeter is hell on earth. I think the best solution for that section would be a metro line that parallels the perimeter.
Absolutely. Lots of people commute between Smyrna/Cumberland, Sandy Springs/Dunwoody, and Doraville/Norcross. Of course, it should absolutely need to connect to the red line, making so many new trips possible on rail. Honestly, an express service with only 3 stops would be incredible.
The Perimeter fails epically at what it was built for because I always go directly through the city when I’m going to other places
I-285 does keep trucks out of the city unless they have business there. But of course they’re forced to be on 285.
My city only got a ring road a few years ago. Calgary is only over 1 million. I am happy they did. Because prior to this, hiway 1, with All hiway traffic coming through Center of city on way to the main tourist attractions beyond our city. Much better on street that used to be the hiway through town (16th Ave.).
Truth.
As someone who live in Charlotte, I485 complete loop is generally newer. I lived in the last section of the interstate to be complete. It really reduced traffic by huge amount. Stuff that took a half hour now takes five minutes. It also help, because the only two Interstates that travel through the city I-77 and I-85 are both North-South and now they had connections that ran East-West.
How about a video about successfully turning a road into a railroad.
Has such a thing happened?
Do you have a single example?
I don't think that would work, unless the road in question is a very straight highway. Trains require much wider curves than road vehicles, so turning a road into a railway would require a lot of changes to the alignment. At that point, it's probably a lot cheaper and easier to just build an all new right-of-way for the rails.
What would be the point of that? Just build railroad from scratch.
Was literally googling this last night
Lincoln NE resident here. I believe the south beltway is actually not that bad of a compromise between the city and the state. NE 2 went straight through the city and has a lot of semis and other traffic coming into the city, or using it to get to I-80. With NE 2 moved to this south bypass, the state gave the city the road back, now named "Nebraska Parkway" and I believe the city is planning on changing up the road a lot to make it more friendly.
I just hope they don't complete the loop with the east beltway (also been planning since the 60s), as this is where all the suburban spawl is rapidly expanding, just more fuel to the fire. I do think the idea of a full beltway loop is not needed and all the interstate highways should just go around the city in the first place.
Yeah, despite the size, Lincoln has a wildly out of proportion share of long haul truck traffic since it's the route used by nearly all traffic going between the Pacific Northwest and the southeast USA. A bypass makes sense, though a full beltway? Probably not.
@@EllieODaire Currently, it is a bypass. It bypasses the city and back onto a 4-lane divided highway towards Kansas City. They didn't put stoplights on the new road like Nebraska Parkway has. Trucks continue south on US 77 to a small interchange to continue on new NE Highway 2. It is definitely needed in Lincoln.
Thanks Brian
What've you heard about future plans for Nebraska Parkway? In my experience, it's not even that bad of a "stroad" -- it is a 4-lane high-speed road with stoplights, but it has some walking/cycling trails alongside it, and doesn't have a bunch of business driveways to create traffic hazards.
From what I've heard, through a "friend of a relative" that happens to hold an elected position in Lancaster County, the East Beltway is unlikely to be built. Imo, it wouldn't serve that much travel purpose other than allowing southeast Lincoln residents to save a few minutes to get to I-80/Omaha vs. driving up 84th St.
@@Zalis116 the east beltway is definitely still considered part of the project though you’re right, it is unlikely to be built. It would be great if they turned 98th or even 112th into a boulevard to help move traffic more efficiently for southeast Lincoln residents to access I-80. An actual highway wouldn’t see enough traffic to warrant it. What would be great is if it, the south beltway, wilderness park, and the northern stretch of I-80 functioned as an urban growth boundary to help quell sprawl. The city wants 25% of growth between now and 2050 to occur within existing city limits but there’s so much potential for infill and transit development- so I think they should even increase their efforts. Otherwise traffic congestion and car centric planning will never decrease.
I think I've missed the point why beltways are bad. On the surface, they're a good idea: they divert traffic from the city centre and let you go smooth around the city.
I understand why highways are bad on general, like an extra lane only worsens it. But wouldn't it be worse without ring roads that unload the city?
Yeah he forgot to really mention it in this video. Derp. But in general it is because this guy hates sprawl and suburbs, and hates that people are able to live where _they_ want instead of where _he_ wants them to. Beltways connect different suburbs, making it more convenient for the people who choose to live out there to actually live out there, thus allowing suburbs to grow and the city to sprawl.
I grew up in Lincoln and then moved to Houston so this video was really funny to me. Not to defend beltways but I will say the Lincoln Beltway to the general public at least was always about diverting Semi trucks from driving through the highway 2 which went directly through the suburbs there. From what Ive heard from my family that still lives there it had so far mostly done its job now that it's finished.
In Prague we are building a belt way (the northern and eastern part is yet to be finished) it did promote a little bit of suburban sprawl, however, Pragues planning comittee has done its best to create public transport options.
To get to the point, the ring road isnt to shift trafic but mainly heavy traffic which used to go through the center. Already it has helped prague a lot and eliminating it completely by at least finishing the eastern part will be great help.
Houston resident here. I actually live off of 99 in the northern part of the metro area. It’s convenient even as a tollway. But it still gets congestion in places and there are already plans to expand part of it where I live to increase capacity lol. We know how well that works. BTW, once 99 is completed it will be almost 190 miles long which is greater than the distance between Houston and Austin and almost equal to Houston to San Antonio. Keep up the great content!
I'm sure a fourth ring road is in the works. “Just one more Beltway, bro!”
@@danielkelly2210 Beijing China be like
@@danielkelly2210 If the city grows further and we need it to connect new suburbs, then it'd make perfect sense to have another.
@@Locke99GS It’ll finally solve traffic, I’m sure.
@@danielkelly2210 Cool strawman. I never claimed it would. I said "it'd make perfect sense to have another".
But I will claim that this _would_ in fact improve traffic. Without the beltways connecting the suburbs, traffic would be relegated to the surface streets, clogging them up and making traffic worse. Alternatively without a beltway to connect suburbs, people choosing to use the freeways would have to travel toward downtown on one freeway, they away from downtown on another freeway just to get to a different area. Connecting these suburbs directly reduces the number of miles people must travel to move between suburbs, as well as reduces the amount of time they're on the road doing the same.
For fun, I just now checked routes on maps grom Cypress TX to Spring TX using freeways, with and without utilizing the beltways. At midnight with no traffic, with the beltways, it is 25 miles and takes 29 minutes. Same time but without beltways, this is a 48 miles and 47 minutes. That is a considerable difference that beltways make. Beltways make fort much less time vehicles are clogging roads, less time they're creating pollution, and less time wasted travelling.
Beltways don't solve traffic. I'm not sure I've ever heard anybody make that claim. What they actually do is reduce traffic and allow smoother and easier travel between the suburbs that they are made to connect. This is good for the economy _and_ the environment.
So, about Moscow ring road. The one built in the 90s. It is interesting case of induced demand - but not with just cars. At this turbulent times in russia there was like a huge exodus of people from rural areas to Moscow. Like it is always the case but at that time magnitude was huge. New housing blocks were built here and there en masse . Public transport was underfunded while new road projects was greenlit, so car usage skyrocketed. Then they decided to build this ring rode to divert traffic from city.
So, what happened then - if you need a place to live you can choose a place inside the city proper that will cost you more, you will be stuck in traffic jams or will have to deal with overcrowded dilapidated public transport and so on. Or there are those places near the junctions of this fast ring road. So, like 10 years after, this road intended to divert traffic from the city, became just another stroad inside the city, as this road just happened to be a catalyst for city growth in this particular manner. Later Moscow's government shifted its focus to public transit mut now they have to spend more as they have to cover those districts all around ring road, and also to this day they upgrade junctioins from simple clover ones that just cant handle all those citizens that commute by car from all those new districts.
I also must mention that those districts are not like american suburbias. Those are build with huge 20+ floors blocks. Approximately 150-200k ppl in one of those district. Problem is - there are only housing blocks and shops. No business, no factories. People who live there just have to commute every day. And usually they still have no alternative to cars.
Exactly the same is happening in St Petersburg now. Built ring road, huge high density housing district growing all around this ring road. Underfunded public transport (especially metro) while ppl are just forced to use cars if they live in those new districts.
Id say at this point, if you live inside the ring road, you could quite easily get around without having a car. The public transportation has been incredible lately
Without ring roads, how am I going to cosplay NASCAR in my hometown?
go for drag strips instead
@@UserName-ts3sp and not turn left? That's NASCAR sacrelige
In my country the purpose of those circular freeways around cities is mainly to make the long range traffic between city A and city C skip the densely populated area of city B that is on the way.
I guess it also gives an option to enter a city from many spots on that freeway, lowering the choke-spot traffic that a freeway going straight into the city would cause.
Its the same reason in America too, this guy is just one of those anti-personal-vehicle and anti-suburbs guys that thinks everybody should be forced to live packed into tiny little apartments and forced to take public transportation everywhere, regardless of what they want. You know, one of those "everybody should have the same desires as me, or you're stupid" type of guys.
I'm 2/3 through the video and I still haven't heard any definition or argument against. You mention that the point of a ringway is to keep traffic outside of the city, which to me sounds like a good idea. You just gotta make sure you don't allow traffic through the centre. Also, beltways need to have strictly controlled access points. The entire point is that it is a road only meant for traffic that isn't going to or coming from a local destination. It is not a street, it shouldn't have destinations on it. The only traffic that should go inside the circle is the traffic that actually needs to be inside the circle. So all lines inside should be dead ends or at the very least incredibly impractical compared to the beltway.
The Paris and Amsterdam examples are good ones: There is no point in going downtown with your car if you don't want to be downtown, you're much better off staying on the beltway on your trip from Belgium to Spain (for example). This means less cars downtown, which means a more liveable downtown, increased happiness, increased local revenue, reduced road maintenance, and less air and noise pollution.
As a former Atlanta resident, you got me good with the Beltline bait-and-switch at the end! Was definitely prepping a "You mean the perimeter! The beltline is an awesome thing that should be encouraged!" type comment...
It's interesting hearing about the models used for traffic engineering though. I'd love a deep dive video on the models transportation engineers use, what their assumptions are, and what the impacts of those (often faulty) assumptions are. I'd love to see what changes could be made to bring a more holistic view on how engineers can think about transportation and not just traffic.
YES! SECOND THIS! Models are powerful tools when used correctly. When they are too complex, then you still can't see the forest for the trees, but if they are really too simple (like the 85% rule for speed limits) then this would help equip anyone advocating for change with the language needed to make their voices heard!
Speaking as a former Edmontonian who grew up on the outside of the Anthony Henday, that ring road was basically a fortress wall that blocked off the city. It is a completely impassible dead zone for anyone not in a car.
btw, since the ah dr opened, they have been continually adding more lanes, hoping to be like Houston's Katy fwy.
For Houston, you forgot State Highway 6/FM road 1960, although it's not a full beltway (neither is 99 yet) and isn't fully grade-separated.
And isn't a freeway. Unless that isn't necessary? Though I suspect most people would exclude it based solely on that.
As someone who has driven all over the US for 30 years, I have found that traffic flows better in most (large) beltway cities compared to those without.
I don't think the guy in this video cares about that. He just hates that beltways allow people to live where _they_ want, vs where _he_ wants.
Paris has 3 more beltways beyond the périphérique, though the outermost is made up of non-freeway roads, so I guess it doesn't really count (it's also so far out it connects other cities, rather than Parisian suburbs). Other French cities have them to avoid freeways coming in, too.
Lol. As a lifetime Edmontonian I enjoy your Indianapolis comparison. 😂 Always appreciate Edmonton related content.
less auto racing, more ice hockey lol !!!!!
As a long time Edmonton resident, and someone who visited Indy once, honestly a pretty good description!
Growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, we would almost exclusively use the ringways to get around, and i never recall there being much traffic on them. I think that's what makes it more functional: its just for the people in the counties to get across their communities faster, and it keeps our little inner-city ring much clearer. Now that I live inside the city, I rarely get on 295/288, and the traffic is only ever congested at peak rush hour.
Start attending the Planning Commission meetings in your local city and providing comments. If you can't stay the entire session, pick a few items and provide your comments on those. It does make a difference. A lot more than you think. If people do provide comments, it's usually against projects that aim to build dense mixed-use housing. Add your comments on these and against new subdivisions.
Oh how I wish that was how it worked here. We lost our attempt to get the planning commission to deny a special use permit for a Taco Bell in a SCHOOL ZONE. (The elementary school driveway is on the property line.) We discovered that each side (for or against) gets five minutes. *Not per speaker, but per side.*
There were four people signed up to speak. The planning commission staff wouldn't tell me who the other speakers were. Three of us knew each other and worked together. The other person opposed used up three of our five minutes. I begged for more time and got it, but it was purely chance.
We should still allow detached homes
So more nymbyism to solve problems created by nymbyism...
Wondered when Atlanta would come up. My brother lived in Marietta. He died 30 some odd years ago. He would complain about his commute to the south side of Hotlanta. 30 YEARS AGO!
The Périphérique in Paris has had a disastrous effect on the banlieue, cutting them off from the city centre and turning them into inaccessible slums.
Wasn't that one of the rationales behind building the REM (not to mention the Métro extensions)?
@@danielkelly2210 I think they’ve recognised they made some serious errors in how it was built. Quite difficult to undo, though
I was born in Calgary Alberta, Canada. I don’t live there anymore, but people we’re so excited when the ring road “Stoney Trail” was completed. But perpetuating car centric suburbia is not so exciting.
My juvenile mind can't unsee @5:00
same
There's definitely a South Park vibe occurring.
"Ellipse." Sure.
About Paris, you forgot to mention the Boulevard Maréchaux and the A86. Maréchaux is a ring road inside of the city running along the T3a and T3b tram lines, and the A86 delimits what we call the "Petite Couronne" which is the dense urban area outside of Paris municipality. The Boulevard Maréchaux generates quite some traffic, and the A86 really is a car sewer which might hopefully be supplanted by the Paris Express metro lines in the future.
So, the overarching theme of this channel is: interstate highways are bad and cars are bad and suburbs are bad. Did I get that right or is there some nuance that I'm missing?
That’s all urbanists theme
This is great info. I'm getting more and more involved with city, county, and state government in Houston and Texas so this is great information.
Atlanta shows exurban sprawl happens even without beltways. NIMBYs stopped a second beltway from being built in the northern metro but that didn't stop the sprawl. Now, you have a network of suboptimal beltway stroads (State Routes 20, 92, 120, and 140) that make it a nightmare to commute in that area. I don't know the cause and effect relationship betwen beltways and sprawl, but I think cheap gas and low wages causing people to seek out cheap housing are the bigger culprits.
Signalized highways are improvable with driveway consolidation, lane diets, and better intersections that reduce left-turn problems: roundabouts; jug handles; etc
Regarding Norfolk and its neighboring cities, I think we are back to calling ourselves Hampton Roads. There was an effort to rebrand our area as Tidewater, but there are regions of other states that are trying to claim that name. A regional planning group hired a consultant that proposed calling our area The 757, but I think most people realized that area codes are fleeting. We used to be part of 804, and now we have 948 as an overlay.
Also ive heard ppl refer to the region as “Seven Cities”. Could stick alongside Hampton Roads
I always liked Tidewater. I remember way back when I had an 804 area code when I lived in Richmond
Hampton Roads is at least historically famous, even non-Americans who know something about US history know the name
We already call that area VA BEACH all the cities we refer to as Va Beach
@@safuu202 If you want to get technical, the Metropolitan Statistical Area includes ten Virginia cities, six Virginia counties, and three North Carolina counties.
- City of Chesapeake, VA
- City of Franklin, VA
- City of Hampton, VA
- City of Newport News, VA
- City of Norfolk, VA
- City of Poquoson, VA
- City of Portsmouth, VA
- City of Suffolk, VA
- City of Virginia Beach, VA
- City of Williamsburg,VA
- Gloucester County, VA
- Isle of Wight County, VA
- James City County, VA
- Mathews County, VA
- Southampton County, VA
- York County, VA
- Camden County, NC
- Currituck County, NC
- Gates County, NC
I think one obvious issue with beltways are the added interchanges when adding a beltway. Major highway intersections are huge sources of traffic backup, and adding beltways by definition increases that, plus beltways intersect so many highways they are very slow and always jammed.
Ring roads are a marginal improvement over leading a highway across the city proper, but that's about the only positive thing that can be said about them. They are theoretically built for agglomeration and some intra-city traffic, but thanks to the way highway networks are built, cross-country and even international traffic (especially freight) is also piped onto them with predictably horrific results.
I'd also like to nominate the Antwerpen ring into your Hall of Shame, it should rank pretty high. It's basically a single bottleneck for road traffic between the Netherlands and most of Belgium, the Paris region of France, and even the UK which turns it into a horror show 24/7. (There's also a ~95% chance of a collision on it blocking 2-3 lanes in the rush hour, making it even worse.)
Here in Berlin we love rings... We have Europes longest beltway, the A10 going around the City, then there is a second Autobahn doing 3/4th of a circle in the city it self and many orbital stroads. In addition we also have an outer and an inner railway loop
I'm surprised by this video. Those are actually a good thing, at least where I live. Here in Poland, we have a lot of rail trafic, you can basically get anywhere by train and lots of stuff gets moved around by cargo trains. However, we still have trucks, and lots of them. A city I used to live in was terribly loud and dangerous before a ring road was built around it and the trans-national traffic was removed from the city limits. Everyone loves it, pedestrians even more than drivers.
You missed out London in your international survey; the plan back in the 60s was to have four beltways or ringways, but they ended up really only building bits of them and the third and fourth got combined into the M25, which is the focus of whole videos by British road geeks. Bits of it just took over existing roads, such as around the south-east corner (junction 5) where you have to turn off to stay on (or TOTSO). The M25 does make it a lot quicker to get across London and make deliveries from the far south-east to the Midlands in a day possible. I recall car journeys in London in the 1980s always taking ages and everyone knowing a back road route to get anywhere, as the main roads were clogged up with through traffic which would now use the M25. You'd travel up the road from Croydon into central London and all of a sudden you'd see signs for Oxford; this was for the through traffic that most likely hadn't come from within London. All the plans for cross-town highways in London, including the two inner ringways, were dropped and most main roads in London are single carriageway.
Railway circle lines are awesome. There’s a potential video in that.
I believe the TH-cam channel RMTransit has a video on them.
They are only good within the core of huge cities. Outside of cities, they would be horrible as a railroad does best when it connects places directly, not in a circuitous route.
@@linuxman7777 A ring route can be the baseline for many service connecting regional centers though. As in services that connect the outskirts without having to go through the center.
It all depends on geography and transit demand.
Calgary completed its ring road this year 2023. It used to take an hour and 20 minutes to cross Calgary in 2012. Now with 400,000 more people can get anywhere in the city in 32 minutes. It is fantastic. Takes the pressure off the main highway - Deerfoot Trail. Especially traffic bypassing the city core.
Edmonton's ring road is also great.
From my anecdotal experience, 270 in Columbus does a pretty good job as a belt road. It's far enough outside of the city to not impede urban growth. The one gripe of course is the increased urban sprawl it encourages. A lot of people I know specifically look for houses or rentals "outside of the loop". The implication is cheaper houses which I can't really blame, but also less traffic which is completely backwards. Living outside the loop forces you into traffic when you need inevitably need to drive into the city. I've got one friend who constantly warned me that I was going to hate my life from traffic by living in a central part of the city. For one I can walk to a lot of places, and when I do drive it's never really that bad. The funniest part is the worst traffic congestion I experience is when I'm driving to his apartment complex in Hilliard.
Talk about survivorship bias. All he sees is the traffic on the way in and out, so he assumes everyone has to fight that the way he does. But if you can walk, that takes the frustration of stop and go, parking, and all the rest out of the equation. Your worst traffic is his every day traffic, and you only see it on your way out to him, while he sees it every day when he gets inside the ring on the "arterial" road. So he associates all the traffic with being inside the ring, while you associate it (correctly) with all the cars trying to go the same way at the same time, but with just enough conflicts to cause traffic wave effects that wreck everyone's day.
fr. i used to live outside 270 (west of pataskala), now near OSU. it was 15-20 minutes to get anywhere. 270, reynoldsburg, pickerington, gahanna, all 15-20 mins. more in rush hour. moved into town honestly the traffic isn’t that bad. some bad pockets but it’s pretty manageable and you don’t have to drive everywhere if it is that bad
Here's the thing: not everybody needs to drive into the city. Many people who live in a suburb either work in that suburb or commute to another suburb. So living in the suburbs makes more sense for people. Living near downtown only makes sense if you work...downtown, or nearby.
San Antonio local here, it's a common misconception that loop 1604 (our outer loop) is just a road, but it is also a mystical barrier that prevents storms from entering the city. The loop protects!
And also it looked said to me when I saw the photo of 2010 Houston with certain areas of beautiful trees and grass and then just turned 10 years or so later turned into just freeways and parking lots and warehouses.
And that was it more than just
one area. Of course, it’s normal for a city to grow some but I don’t think they’re even using what land they have in a good way.
The DC beltway is the bane of existence. I worked as a firefighter in the Capital region and would rather take my chances in a ripping house fire then operate on that roadway. Traffic is terrible, people drive like its the Indy 500, and the lack of driver skill/attention is astounding.
I guess, but the region would be unable to function without it. Remember that many more people live outside the Beltway than inside it. Plus there are very few Potomac River crossings, a situation that is unlikely to change in my lifetime.
You forgot one more ring road here in Houston. Hwy 6 which is between Bltwy 8 and Hwy 99. It's not a complete ring around the metro area, but it does cover a complete portion of the west and south side of the metro area.
And then it turns into FM1960 along the north side of town. Terrible road. The traffic is always congested.
5:01 yes "ellipse" is definitely the shape I would use to describe that configuration 🤣
The zoom out at 10:07 looks dystopian..
Well, it's Houston, so... dystopian.
@@danielkelly2210 I'd like to see it for myself one day.
@@PradedaCech I can understand that. It gets dull pretty fast though, and is interesting only in just how car-dependent and lacking in character it is. 2 days is probably the maximum you'd need to devote to a visit.
Phoenix just completed the 202 South Mountain freeway a few years ago and marketed it as a way for trucks to bypass the city. In theory, a truck driving from San Pedro and going to Tucson or beyond on I-10 can take the 202 to avoid the city center. This obviously hasn't solved traffic, but there were noticeably fewer trucks in the downtown loop after that.
As a bonus, the undeveloped land it runs through cannot be developed as its sandwiched between a mountain you can't build on and a reservation that won't let the city expand into it.
I'm from Sherbrooke. My city does have 3/4 of a beltway, which is quite a bit for a city of 150,000. Those highways do not enter the center of the city and remain mostly on the edges. The upshot is that the buildup of highway 610 and 410 has allowed us to urbanise a stretch of national road that went through the city center. Because of those highways, all trucks going east are now able to simply bypass the city rather than clog the streets. Its probably one of those rare exemples were building a highway actually improved quality of life for those living in the city. Sherbrooke is now pushing to get a passager service to Montreal. It can probably be done for a hundred million which is rather cheap when compared to a potential widening of highway 10 and 55.
Hey salut! I live in Estrie as well! You make a good point. I wish that Rue King Ouest and Portland could be fixed somehow so they weren't such big stroads. Downtown is nice though, by Wellington. It's also crazy to think that in Europe there are cities the size of Sherbrooke that have trams, wouldn't that be cool?
Yeah. Ottawa could also use some kind of deviation around the downtown, because currently all the inter-city trucks going over the Ottawa River, between Quebec and Ontario, run right through downtown, to connect up with Ontario Highway 417. But the downside would be it inevitably contributing to further sprawl on the edges.
My city doesn't have a true Ring Road and it really sucks, because the thru-traffic has to go through the city I see so many out of state licence plates near the city where I shouldn't see them. People who are just passing through the Pittsburgh Area to get between the Midwest and East Coast don't make it difficult for the rest of us. I would much rather us have a beltway around our city, than the current highways through the city, as it really sucks to have clogged freeways in the city instead of outside of the city where thru traffic belongs.
This video left me a bit clueless - so what is the alternative to a beltway?
Beltways mostly used to accomodate traffic from satellite towns and cities.
And they had their use at war. A mechanized brigade stuck in congestion made by panickly population is not a thing you want to deal with. Also it is somewhat easy place to set a cordon between outskirts and strategically more important bigger city that can be semi-decently shot at even with artillery due to the sheer size of the road and less risk of hitting buildings.
I'm from Brazil and here in our country we have a few bad examples of Ring Roads and Bypasses, such as the Guanabara Bypass, around the city of Rio de Janeiro, wich its construction was plagued by corruption and project falings. There are now a bypass being built here on the metro area where i live (Florianopolis), to remove truck and long distance traffic out of the main stretch of the BR-101.
Doesn't Brasilia have some sort of ring roads too?
@@scpatl4now They had plans to build one, but the demand is very low as there are few long distance trips that pass trough Brasília. To the south and the west, the area around the city is very populated, but to the north and specially east, its mostly empty.
The never ending Rodoanel construction in São Paulo is pretty terrible too
@@fernandofreitas6643 Yeah, all the corruption and mismanagement of the project is terrible, but the project itself is not bad.
Edmonton: Indianapolis with less auto racing and more ice hockey!
You should do a video about ring STROADS too. Stadium / Maple / Washtenaw blvd in Ann Arbor, MI is a great / terrible example in what is a relatively bike friendly (for North America) city. Just like a ringroad, it cut through existing neighborhoods, the traffic is terrible, and it's a huge blight on the landscape.
Most of the ring stroad has an absolutely terrible bike gutter on it too 😬
stroads are what you get when you allow businesses to front onto a bypass. a town near me built a bypass - it has NO facilities for anything but cars, and it has NO entrances or exits other than the beginning and the end of it. if they can hold to that, it will never be a stroad - and the town, which no longer has a stroad through it, will always be walkable, bikeable, and livable. it is a proper use of induced demand. the bypass shifts the people just passing through to the bypass, and leaves the town for the people who want to be there.
I was thinking about Ann Arbor, too, because it's clearly got a ring road with US-23/M-14/I-94, which I actually like (as opposed to demolishing downtown to run a freeway through it like they did to Detroit). But of course MDOT made up for that by clogging up everything on the inside with stroads.
Love the calling out of Houston. I was all set to defend how my work travels have actually gotten better with the TX-99 loop and I no longer have to go through central Houston to get from Katy to Conroe... But then you laid out all the other impacts and I have to agree you are correct. 😂 Bravo!
I feel like this is a very North American idea. Roads that allow to bypass a city are definitely useful….as long as you don’t just use them to perpetuate car centric sprawl
That "as long as" is the entire point, though. They encourage and enable car-centric sprawl.
@@notstarboardwhat would the alternative be then? Having all highways terminate on surface streets? Beltways are undoubtedly more urbanist than having freeways in the city though, and the beltways in much of Europe are fairly tame and don’t go very close to the city center
@@tomgeraci2044 More transit, fewer cars and car infrastructure
IIRC The inner ring road (downtown loop) in Houston is being partially demolished. They are removing one of the thirds and rerouting that on the other two thirds. And it's TX so of course they're widening the remaining two parts, so probably same amount of lane miles but at least a little less destruction?
Got to the end of the video, and I'm not sure why you think beltways are a bad idea. What is the alternative you suggest?
we are just here to hear the deadpan delivery of a grumpy middle aged man.....wish this guy would do audiobooks...
Induced demand. They create more traffic than they solve.
Houston actually goes all out with the naming of its loop roads. 610 is called “the loop”, beltway 8 is called “the beltway”, and SH 99 is the Grand Parkway-all of these have some more intricacies depending on which part of the city you’re in and whether or not you’re on the feeders.
The book “Houston Freeways: A Historical and Visual Journey” (2003) by Erik Slotboom has an excellent chapter on the topic of the loops detailing how each one has brought additional development further from the city and even goes into the “downtown loop” that was originally just that. The Grand Parkway even has an interesting history that was intended to act like a Greenbelt a la London that would have stopped the sprawl and been a nature preserve/flood prevention system for the Katy Prairie (hence “Parkway”). Definitely something worth reading to get a deeper understanding of the history and the issues associated with it.
Thanks from a Houstonian! (I'm from Richmond/Sugarland.)
So I’m guessing that the grand Parkway in Houston didn’t act like it’s intended purpose as a Greenbelt and subdivisions grew past it ??
@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 no. It was determined to be too much money and the plan was still 30 years out from even breaking ground. Different interests and land development groups eventually got the state/local government to get rid of the park and greenbelt portion and so it was. Now it’s just another loop with undeveloped land surrounding it and developers buying up that land to build more mega-suburbs.
@@enjoyslearningandtravel7957 as of today, there’s only a few portions that are actually built out along 99 and those are where it has been completed (Cinco Ranch/Katy, Spring, and Baytown). Cypress to the northwest is building out Bridgeland, the greater northeast/Eastex is also experiencing rapid growth. Richmond/sugar land/Alvin are also growing more than normal due to low cost and will likely get their portion of 99 in the next decade as well.
Luckily, 99 is one of the few examples in Houston of a highway without feeders along most of it, which makes it significantly harder for people being interested in building directly alongside it, but that hasn’t stopped the explosive growth unfortunately. I still think it would be in the best interest of the city/county to buy up land to rebirth the Greenbelt portion and to curb development lest we have to build another loop even further out in the next 50 years.
Normally I follow your arguments well, but I'm confused about this one. What is a proposed alternative to beltways? I get that they can cause sprawl, but what else is there?
If you have to drive to work more than 30 miles a day in both directions combined you have a wrong job or you live in the wrong place.
That gets a bit more complicated when you're dealing with spouses who have jobs in different locations.
I agree, but sometimes you can get stuck in a situation and have to suck it up for a bit. Would a comparable train or bus ride be acceptable if it was available?
@@victorquesada7530 For sure, my point is just that "quit your job or move" is not a very useful approach to solving the problem.
The M25 in London is really hurt you called Paris’s ring road the most well known
Ring roads are helpful as it should be designed to keep traffic away from the city core. The ring road isn't the problem; it's the road leading into downtown. US cities without ring roads (like LA, Chicago, NYC) have horrible traffic that pushes the traffic to the center cores. Yes, Atlanta and DC have traffic issues, but that's mostly due to 75/85 and 395/295 cutting through respectively.
Can you make a video about urban "Rails to Trails"? They seem to be exclusively recreational in my experience, but I am curious if there are cities that have successfully converted disused rail infrastructure into viable bike/pedestrian commuting options. Thanks!
Pittsburgh is a good example. I would use the example of the Eliza furnace trail (fast, good visibility, between highways) with the south side trail (twists and turns, lots of trees and dog parks) that both essentially go the same places just on opposite sides of the monongahela river. When I’m biking to work I use the Eliza furnace trail to get there sooner and when I’m biking home and want to enjoy myself I slow down and go on the south side trail
At least one example exists in northern Virginia with the W&OD Trail. I use it daily to commute to my work and to drop my kids off at school with a cargo bike.
Atlanta Beltline would be a good example of this.
The Railtown Park trail in Edmonton is another example, stretching from the River valley to MacEwan University, following the High Level Streetcar on the old Canadian Pacific right-of-way. Also connects to the downtown bike network, is within walking distance of multiple LRT stations, and has easy access to crossing the river to the University of Alberta.
I live in Melbourne Australia, and we have a tonne of examples! Everything from regional evening routes to the “city path” which turned the old inner circle line into basically a bike highway
The only benefit if beltways is that they can be used to make an argument for the removal of cross-city freeways.
you should do a bigger study on beijing or some other chinese megacity. they're kinda unique since they've got great transit, HSR, and a lot of walkable design, but still have to have monumental road infrastructure because of the sheer number of people
I find Chinese city designs to be quite interesting. Most of them aren't built in grids, but a bunch of walkable neighborhoods separated by arterial roads leading towards the city center and surrounded by ring roads. The general traffic pattern seems to that people use the arterial roads to move from ring to ring, and then use the rings to go to particular sections of the city. They also use a similar design for their subways, where its often a bunch of mostly linear lines all linked together by a circle line.
Generally, my experience has been that Chinese traffic is much better than Canadian traffic for cities of similar size. Though I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if this is due to the road design or something else.
@@yuan-pinglee6630 I think it has a lot to do with the socioeconomic history of China, being born & raised there. Like many other Asian cities (HK, SG, Tokyo, Seoul, etc.) but even more so, China used to be very poor, and thus traveling by private cars (and flying for that matter as well) have been long considered a luxury for a few, during the same time that those are considered 'middle class lifestyle' in most developed western countries. And thus there was a need to build walkable sections of large cities. However Chinese economy was also quickly booming at the same time, and thus privately owned cars became well thought after in major cities like Shanghai & Beijing, as a status symbol. And so came the 'car friendly' infrastructure, especially in the 'newer' sections. However, the A.M. fact that most people don't commute or travel by driving or flying, China had a better (compared to the 'new world' at least) foundation to eventually build out its modern transit & HSR systems. My memory of growing up in Shanghai, China during the turn of the century is that: we mostly used buses (and maybe trolleys/trams) to get around the city. And trains, occasionally accompanied by intercity coach buses, were THE way to travel out of town. Eventually cars and planes became much more popular, with my own family owning a car and driving to other cities all the time. But soon we also got a really nice metro network and eventually HSR network. There is an argument that since the subways and HSRs in China needs to mostly drive riders from conventional intercity rails, buses, trolleys, it had a much better time gaining popularity compared to the American counterparts who has to compete with driving and flying. And from my experience it's definitely true.
I'd say it's also sometimes less due to the amount of people and more due to some truly awful infrastructure that I think they adopted from the USSR. Stuff like Changan Jie is needlessly wide (10 lanes!) mostly just for symbolic reasons, there's no real infrastructural reason for why its designed that way, as far as I understand at least.
A ring road catching and connecting the different highways going to a city, keeping them from actually reaching into the city and managing traffic which wants to pass the city to go around instead of through the city sound like a perfect solution to me. Also urban ring roads within a city can perfectly serve the purpose to move masses of (partly necessary) traffic around the city without that traffic clogging up every single main road north to south and east to west. It focuses that traffic on the ring road, taking some traffic off the other main roads
You can perfectly see that in the Bavarian state capital city of Munich: a downtown ring road circles the oldtown area; The middle ring road circles the downtown area in some distance and is the busiest one in the entire city. It focuses both traffic form the downtown are and outer boroughs. That's also the furthest some of the highways go into the city, none goes any further downtown. And then there's the highway ring road which goes around the entire city ... well apart from that it circles the city only to maybe 75 or 80%, leaving a gap in the south-west and that's exactly where traffic on the middle ring road is the worst, because no-one want's go go the long 75% way around the entire city just because of the 25% missing gap in the highway ring road.
the middle ring road in Munich connects many major desitnations across the city: apart from a few important train stations two waste-to-energency-plants, fresh food central market for businesses, several large hospitals, breweries, plant divisions from BMW, stadiums, bus and tram depots, office and business developments etc are right at or very close to the middle ring road. All that generates lots of traffic which is well organized on the ring road, better than on any other type of inner city road
If I didn't already think that RD was brilliant, his comparison of Edmonton to Indy would have nailed it!
Well, in my view it isn't just extra capacity but also makes a somewhat intuitive way to shift where the traffic is in an ideal case.
But, after seeing how having a beltway too far-out subsidies car dependent sprawl that makes a little bit of sense.
But the point that the models are only modeling traffic and not accounting for the impact on land-use and such makes sense.
Part of me thinks that maybe making a 4 lane ring-road and keeping it small might mitigate some of the sprawl factor rather than making 6-9 lane ones.
You also mentioned that one pretty close to the city center that acts as a hub for spoke highways to connect into makes sense.
There is an equally wonderful one around Calgary, Alberta too, as well as the one around Edmonton, AB is a place I lived and used the ring road everyday and it did seem to make going longer distances easier than going through the city.
Truth.
Orlando's beltway (429 and 417 toll roads) is about to be completed this summer and it's over 100 miles around.
used to live in San Antonio Texas a long time ago, in the Outerloop called 1604, which we call loops in Texas used to just have farmland on either side when they first built it and which I believe had two lanes each direction now I think it’s twice that and has subdivisions a few on each side, and now they propagated, dozens of subdivisions and more plus San Antonio has grown into small towns that used to be separate from the city. !!!
Don't you hate it when homes are built in places people want to live, then people choose to live in those places?
Please talk about the A-118 beltway, a 142 km (88 mile) orbital freeway encircling Saint Petersburg, Russia. That is the fourth-most populous city in Europe and is on the Baltic Sea. Yet, Saint Petersburg has an impressive ring road with the western side built over water on bridges.
Folks seem hellbent on trying to put in another beltway or partial beltway in Northern Virginia (not sure if they want it to go into Maryland). Last thing this car-choked region needs.
Maryland doesn’t want it.
7100 in Virginia and 200 in Maryland are "arc roads" that already kind of function as second beltways. "The Techway" is the plan to connect them to make them more like half a second beltway.
What makes the Atlanta Perimeter even worse is that by law, any 18 wheeler that is not stopping in the city has to use the Perimeter as a by-pass. That makes the traffic and accident numbers way worse.
It’s probably good that there’s a law that any 18 wheeler not stopping in the city has to used the parameters of bypass since if it didn’t and had an accident there could be toxic chemicals released in the city for one reason or another reason is more congestion on Flores StreetS.
I meant to write a slower street not Flores street
Atlanta's MARTA system at least reaches the ring road, but it basically follows the interstates into the city which removes the train's advantages. If MARTA had an interior ring inside of 285, it would address many of its connectivity problems.
That's actually one of the goals of the Beltline project, but best case will take at least a generation to happen
Jay Foreman has an excellent video - part of his Unfinished London series - about the plans made in the 1960s to encircle London with four "ringways". Fortunately the plans were mostly abandoned, and the only complete ring that was built was the M25 Motorway. However you can still see vestiges and partially built sections of the ringway scheme.
If you make them bus routes it might fix things
I did in Cities Skylines for each district and connected them to the metro and basically fixes traffic (plus paths and bike paths)
My first job out of university in the 1970’s was Environmental Coordinator for the Texas Highway Department. The beltways there were built for one reason only, and that was for developers to profit. Not a single mile was built for transportation purposes.
ohh yeah. You know it's Wednesday evening when the snark arrives! Get yourself to Vienna Austria to see some serious public transportation!
I waited patiently through the whole video for the kitty shot at the end . . . thanks! 😻
Without a beltway I couldn’t imagine how bad traffic in and around large metropolitan areas would be
I suspect it would be better during rush hour and worse during the rest of the day
@@szurketaltos2693it wouldn’t be better it would only be worse, beltways are meant for people that don’t want/need to go through the city center, don’t have too, so if you removed them they wouldn’t have a choice but to go trough the center
@@user-sy6ky6ed2e the relevant principle is induced demand, if you have less supply then fewer people would have based their housing and commute on the availability of the beltway.
Jacksonville is building a new one for $1.1 billion: the First Coast Expressway.
Ring roads = a mixed blessing at best. They might keep freeways away from a downtown when planned right, but that's it and shouldn't be a replacement for good public transit and bike trails.
I'm instantly reminded of your past comment about Chicago, they have a downtown ring road, but it's solely used by (elevated) trains. 😊
75/85 in Atlanta going through downtown is often bumper to bumper and we have a perimeter as well. It doesn't do much to help traffic downtown. It only fosters more development which in turn clogs up that freeway.
@@scpatl4now
If the high way through town does not exist.
One good thing about beltways-as shown at the end-cities tend to build bike trails that parallel them. I am a child of the Kansas City beltway, lived in the unfinished portion of the Denver beltway for 2 decades (which remains the nicest part of the city, but has developed a lot of sprawl thanks to the promise of a new link), and now live in the shadow of the almost finished 215 beltway project. People will always want to live where it’s most convenient to get to other parts of the city. Beltways make that more possible than stoplights, turns, etc, which are slower and more dangerous than low-access freeways.
If houston isn't on this list you fail at your job
You can probably post the same comment for many of City Nerd’s videos and you won’t be wrong.😀