One of my favorite lines about Houston's sprawling metropolis -- "Anywhere in Houston is an hour and a half from Houston"

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!

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 :)

How about a video about successfully turning a road into a railroad.

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...

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…

Beltways are nice if you're planning (or wanting) to remove a freeway in the city center, so there's a route you can reroute through traffic (and in the case of two digit interstates, continue the numbering without a gap) on. Like the existence of I-481 in Syracuse is a reason why I-81 could be removed in downtown, as through traffic and the I-81 designation can be moved onto there. And I know I-35 removal advocates in Austin proposed through traffic using a relatively new SH-130 beltway. Also the high traffic on rings aren't just exclusive to roads. The ring rail lines in the world (think Tokyo Yamanote, Beijing Line 10, Singapore Circle Line) are some of the most used lines in their respective city's rail network as well.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Without ring roads, how am I going to cosplay NASCAR in my hometown?

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.

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.

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.

My juvenile mind can't unsee @5:00

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.

The zoom out at 10:07 looks dystopian..

In Atlanta, most people just call it 285 (the beltway is I-285), but we also have terms like ITP and OTP (Inside the Perimeter and Outside the Perimeter, respectively). I can confirm that the sprawl in those areas is horrendous. The new Braves stadium is on it. That whole complex is actually a great example of the 'simulated urbanism' City Nerd talks about in another video. It's all very nonsensical. But, at the very least, those who live OTP are the butt of lots of jokes here. They are widely considered to be not true ATLiens.

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!

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.

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.

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.)

Railway circle lines are awesome. There’s a potential video in that.

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.

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.

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 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

They build these things as "bypasses" for traffic, but then everyone just builds off of the beltway and so really the beltway just feeds more traffic onto the freeways heading into the city.

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

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.

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.

Her: "Babe come over I'm home alone." Me: "Hold up, Citynerd just dropped a new hall of shame."

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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

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. !!!

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!

If I didn't already think that RD was brilliant, his comparison of Edmonton to Indy would have nailed it!

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.

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.

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.

Orlando's beltway (429 and 417 toll roads) is about to be completed this summer and it's over 100 miles around.

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!

The M25 in London is really hurt you called Paris’s ring road the most well known

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.

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.

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.

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 😬

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 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.

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)

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.

Rochester, NY has buried part of it's beltway, the Inner Loop which is a sunken expressway circling around downtown like a moat.

Our Edmonton made it on a CityNerds.😂😂😂 And I avoid it like a plague. Construction 24/7 and always congested..

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.

Without a beltway I couldn’t imagine how bad traffic in and around large metropolitan areas would be

I LOVE this channel man. Your always smug way of conveying a message which is always very logical.❤

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.

I am a housing first absolutist. While I generally prefer to not have single family sprawl, this kind of exurban development is still better than the no build alternative on the east and west coasts as well as most of Europe. There is a reason metro Houston with a 25% growth rate over 10 years and a 8 million residents has the same absolute amount of homeless as Utrecht with 1/10 the population and half the growth rate. With my personal preference given to shelter as a priority, I have to consider Houston's (ex)urban planning better than Utrecht's (sub)urban planning. So while ring roads do not work as intended, the induced demand of additional housing is a good thing. Many alternatives leading to more homes may be better, but in practice most urban darlings just refuse to (road/transit) sprawl and/or densify and homelessness is a consequence.

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.

I waited patiently through the whole video for the kitty shot at the end . . . thanks! 😻

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.

ohh yeah. You know it's Wednesday evening when the snark arrives! Get yourself to Vienna Austria to see some serious public transportation!

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.

On the subject of the Atlanta beltway, look up the story of "Perimeter" Pascual Perez. The short version is that he's a baseball pitcher who circled the Atlanta beltway three times trying to get to the stadium.

As soon as I saw the video topic I knew most of it would just be dunking on my home town of Houston. Glad I had popcorn on hand

My weekly dose of useful snark.

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.

Truly incredible. Twelve minutes I will never get back.

A few years ago I was looking into relocating to Providence, RI. I was surprised to learn that not only does Providence have a beltway of its own, but it's also on Boston's outermost 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. 😊

If houston isn't on this list you fail at your job

love ur vids. keep it up❤️

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!

Vague topic idea, or perhaps just a rant. There's a parcel of land near the suburban development that I found myself trapped in (pandemic housing hunt was awful) which is zoned for light commercial activity. When development started on the parcel last year, I got excited - maybe a cafe or something? That would be cool! A year later and nope - it's going to be a storage lot for RVs and boats. Absolutely brilliant land use. Anyways, at some point can you talk about the blight on US culture that is the RV?

Would love to see a video on the highway revolts of the 60s and early 70s that led to the cancellation of Boston's inner beltway: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_695_(Massachusetts) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolts_in_the_United_States The cancellation of that beltway led to some modest mass transit improvements, like the Orange Line which now occupies part of the right of way along with Amtrak's North East corridor into Boston.

Love that you highlighted Lincoln, Nebraska's new beltway. I live in downtown Lincoln. Downtown and the surrounding boroughs are great but once you get to south Lincoln its car dependent sprawl. I think the price tag was 352 million for that part of it. All to save 11 minutes of drive time. We're late to the party of growth Ponzi scheme. We'll collapse in 20 years.

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!

WOO HOO! ATLANTA GETTING A POSITIVE (ish) MENTION! BREAK OUT THE CHAMPAIGN!!!!!! Fun fact about Atlanta: whether you're a cool urban living person or a suburban scumbag is typically defined by whether you're inside or outside "the perimeter" (Interstate 285). This is ultimately an arbitrary dividing line since there's a ton of very surburban style development inside the perimeter and some (though not much) fairly decent urban development outside it, but anyone who moves here should remember to never confuse OTP (outside the perimeter) with OTP (one true paring).

05:01 the Dallas and Ft Worth beltways merge to form a....um...well....someone in regional planning had a rather juvenile sense of humor. (Is that an ellipse in your pocket or are you happy to see me?)

I don’t necessarily have a vested interest in what you post, but I do find your content well presented and very helpful in unwinding after some stressful work days. I admittedly played too much Sim City as a kid.

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.