Driving in Houston

[amethyst73]

If you're from out of town, you broadcast the fact by using your turn signal before changing lanes.  Fortunately, as long as you pay attention, the locals indicate they plan to change lanes fairly obviously even without the use of a turn signal.

Entering and exiting I-610 in Houston was its own brand of interesting.  Well-designed?  Passably, but only once you got used to how they worked.  Well-signed?  Nope.

If you want to go to the right on the freeway, you turn onto the access road, and then you get over to the left as far and as fast as possible so that you actually enter the freeway.  If you miss, don't worry; there'll be another freeway entrance in a few short city blocks.  If you want to go left on the freeway, you get over to the left but not far enough left to be forced into making a U-turn.  Then you pass under the freeway, turn left on the access road, and proceed as above.  In either case, once you're on the freeway, you'd better get over to the left pretty quickly because (1) the next exit will be coming up pretty quickly, and (2) they all have exit-only lanes right before.

Getting off the freeway and turning right was almost never a problem, unless there was a wide access road that you traveled on for any distance prior to the first right turn.  One set of directions we were given included the line "Carefully cross all four lanes of traffic and turn right on [whatever the street was]."  I kid you not!  Turning left off the freeway, on the other hand, involved making sure you weren't in the U-turn lane and then making sure you didn't accidentally get back on to the freeway because you were too far over to the left.

The only good thing about the somewhat complicated intersections around freeway entrances and exits (and again, they happened about every three blocks) is that, as far as we could tell, they all worked exactly the same way, so that if you missed your exit or accidentally got back on to the freeway, you knew in advance exactly what it was you had to do to correct your mistake, and all those exit-only lanes actually helped you.  But I'm glad to be back in the land of the Bay Area, where I'm used to how exits and entrances generally work, and most people signal before moving!

Comments

[jab2.livejournal.com]

the only good thing about texas highways is that when you get lost, as you inevitably do, there are dedicated uturn lanes off every exit so you can turn around. just make sure not to try this in the midst of one of the stacks of highways, because you could end up on wrong highway and never get it straightened out!

the worst thing is the short on-ramp, which is why everyone has such ramped up cars. :)

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

That, I can imagine. We had to drive by the intersection of i-610 and 59 a bunch of times (in one case, coming onto 610 just an exit or two beforehand), and getting over that far left that fast was... interesting.