Houston Traffic

Traffic was frightful coming in to downtown this morning; there were no less than four accidents on the Eastex alone. Fortunately, my commute isn’t normally that bad, but four accidents will doom you on just about any Houston highway. Inevitably, one accident during rush hour has a cascading effect; traffic backs up in unexpected places, and commuters who haven’t yet had their coffee plow into the vehicles in front of them. I managed to avoid the worst of it this morning, evading a fender bender in a middle lane just after it happened.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that commuter traffic in Houston is bad; despite our wide highways, there is limited public transportation. Unlike a highly concentrated city center like Manhattan or Chicago, Houston is spread all over the place. Traffic is necessarily aggravated by the steep differential in housing prices from inside the loop to the suburbs. We could have paid two or three times as much for a house similar to our inside the loop—cutting my commute in half—but it simply wasn’t worth the money.