car culture in Phoenix and Houston

The flights to Houston went through fine. After a short layover in Denver, I was off to Houston, and on that flight, the middle seat was empty, for which I was very happy since I would have been sitting next to/partially under an obese guy.

Would I take Spirit again? Yeah, probably. As long as you know what you're getting into, its fine. Do you really need a tiny packet of salted peanuts? Is it even worth dealing with flight attendants? Although if the price difference is within 10% of Southwest, I'm taking Southwest.

Dad picked me up in baggage claim. It was about 6:30 by the time we got out of there. "There may be traffic," dad warned me.

I stopped, stunned. "In Houston?! Get out of town!"

Usual awful traffic. It's an interesting comparison to Phoenix. I would imagine that both cities probably have about the same amount of cars on the road, and they both have CBDs and similar rings of suburbs. However, Phoenix was laid out on a grid and every major street is typically 3-4 lanes in each direction with a center turning lane. This is basically an asphalt freeway every half mile. This arrangement is largely responsible for making the valley feel like an endless industrial park.

Houston, on the other hand, has streets which average fewer lanes. The eight-lane arterial surface streets are much more rare, and the streets are more of a spaghetti pattern. This format of the city feels more like a city, it piques interest, it creates all kinds of different moments and eliminates the soul-sucking endless straight lines of Phoenix.

Phoenix, for its sacrifice of livability, interest, and walkability, was rewarded with a city which incredibly easy to drive around and with manageable traffic at rush hours. I've never seen a city which was so easy to cross by car and at that scale. If Hernandez wants to see Jose, and they live 40 miles apart at the extremities of the valley, Hernandez can most of the time get over to Jose's in around half an hour, passing directly through the center of the city.

Houston is perpetually choked with traffic. Rush hour become a river of gridlock.

Have you ever tried to cross the street in Phoenix? It's an awful experience- it feels like walking across a mall parking lot on black friday. The superblocks which make up the city make walking anywhere feel like crossing the Atacama desert. Walking down the street, you spend fifteen minutes passing the Target parking lot and then another thirty minutes walking by a mile-long cinderblock wall of a residential subdivision. When car culture gives way to the idea of walkable cities, Phoenix will simply not be able to accommodate it.

Walking in Houston is really not bad. The smaller streets are easier to cross, the city was built spaced more to the pedestrian pace than the speed of the car.  There is a finer grain to Houston, with more streets and alleys breaking up the blocks.

What do the locals think? Phoenicians and Houstonians both look down on pedestrians (lock the car doors!), but the car culture is a little different. In Phoenix, where the drivers are some of the most spoiled in the world, people look at cars like refrigerators. They pity those with without them, but they are such an integral necessity it is taken for granted. There is far less car fetishization than there is in Houston. Phoenix is a car city with a shrug, Houston is a car city with a cult.