Daily Exasperation #7

Just one more lane...

Do we—Americans—accept that other people want to live differently than we do or keep trying to force “correct” culture and assimilation as the American Way?

I learned about spite houses yesterday. They’re on the never-ending list of things I learn daily from just being curious on the Internet—something I encourage you to do as well as you continue your exasperated knowledge journey. The entire idea of a “spite” construction is to irritate a neighboring or otherwise stakeholding landowner by blocking a view or otherwise useful characteristic of an existing structure.

This is the famous Spite Shack in Boston—a man built this thin house to “spite” his brother for using a shared tract of land for himself.

There’s something here that can be just as equally applied to other parts of the built environment, and because of my interests, we’re going to talk about transportation. I’m going to call them spite lanes: do you see them in the image of Texas’ Katy Freeway below?

We know that adding more lanes doesn’t alleviate traffic congestion along this or any highway and in many instances can make traffic worse—whatever that means to you. In any case, the idea of induced demand explains much of the additional traffic: if motorists feel there will be more room for free-flowing traffic with them, they’ll take the most direct route. If everyone thinks like this, over and over again, well, that’s traffic. Congestion will be as muddled and as challenging as it was before TxDOT is proposing to spend another $550 million to widen the Katy again! All while the Texas Central High-Speed Rail project languishes and Project Connect could really use the capital injection. Remember that type of investment would help the wrong people, so, can’t do it.

This is what the Katy usually looks like:

So back to the original question: do you see the spite lanes in that original image? The answer is here:

Every one of those lanes is a spite lane because we keep building them in spite of the environment and every single expert saying no.