this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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When I was in college at Eastern New Mexico, which is about 45 minutes west of Amarillo Texas, a couple friends, both from New England, had the bright idea of driving down to the gulf over a 4 day weekend.
I cautioned them against the idea, trying to explain Texas was bigger than they could imagine. Three hours into the trip we got a motel room in some hole in the wall town and went back to school the next morning.
What? It takes 24 hours to drive from the Canadian border to Mexico border. Texas is about 770 miles at its widest, that’s a breezy 10-12 hour drive doing the speed limit or just over.
Yeah so nearly half their weekend driving....through Texas. One of the most boring places to drive through.
24 hours out of 96. I’ve done worse.
And it can’t be worse than Saskatchewan.
The only place I've driven for multiple hours that was worse than Texas was Nevada. Even rural Indiana is a huge upgrade and that place stinks from soy bean processing (I think?)
Michigan and California are incredible.
Looking at Saskatchewan....I dunno man, looks really pretty to me!
Compared to the other provinces, it’s just flat farm fields. When the rapeseed (canola) is blooming it can look pretty, but it’s just yellow flowers for HOURS, no variety.
Edit, oh and for six months it’s white with snow, and the highway is dead straight, it’s hard to stay awake for the six hours.
Sounds like huge swaths of the Midwest US. My friend got into a wreck for the same reason you described (thankfully no one was hurt)
Northern Nevada sucks, but southern Nevada near Vegas is fine since it has cool rock structures and whatnot, provided you avoid rush hour.
I hate most of California because traffic is so awful, but north of SF is pretty.
Coming from a place with no desert or “beaches”, the sand is a cool difference from the rest of the drive down from Canada.
Wait, you're driving south through Nevada? Do yourself a favor and go east to I-15 or west to I-5, both are orders of magnitude better than going north/south through Nevada...
The only time I drive through Nevada is either from SLC to Lake Tahoe (northern Nevada) or SLC to Vegas/LA (southern tip of Nevada) because the alternative takes way longer.
You're assuming no traffic in major cities. I've gone from close to the Louisiana border to new Mexico and it took about 16 hours.
Do most cities not have bypasses? In Canada even most small towns have a bypass so you avoid the traffic lights.
It’s mostly for the semi traffic, the stopping and stopping ruins the roads, so they have a highway going around town to avoid that.
Those highways are often very congested too. It can take like 2 hours just to drive through Houston, even using the loops/beltways
I guess, but arguably you would only hit one in the day, and the chances of it being during rush hour is slim, can always plan better around that stuff too. Or take secondary highways. There’s not only a single highway going places.
Even during off-hours?
Nope, in America through-traffic goes right through the city center. Fortunately, many cities have innovated to solve this problem by bulldozing their city centers to build more stroads
That's not true in many parts of the country. It's very much a mixed bag. Look at San Antonio, 410 goes around the city and connects the various highways so you don't need to go through the city center to drive past the city. In Seattle, 405 was intended to do that for Seattle to avoid 15, but then Bellevue got huge. In SLC, we have 215.
Beltroutes are common across the country and are designed to solve exactly this problem.
Stroads are a different problem unconnected to highways going through cities. In fact, they're often the old highways that went through town and became a stroad when the highway was built. We then built more of them because people liked driving cars to their destination instead of walking or taking transit.
The best possible bypass won't solve the stroad problem or congestion in the city center. What we need is a complete redesign of what a city center means, which I think should be:
If we can do that, we can rip out stroads to make room for more density in attractions. Keep some roads for trucks to make deliveries and whatnot, and convert the rest to walkable streets.
Having exits isn't the same as "driving through downtown."
I do agree that we should redo how highways work, and part of that is having fewer exits, but what causes slowdowns isn't the quantity of exits, but the ability to get almost everywhere in a car. In other words, the number of exits are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. The highway infrastructure is in the right place much of the time, the issue is the rest of the infrastructure.
We don't need more bypasses or lanes, we need driving to be less convenient than transit and walking for short trips. I think one simple change would improve things greatly: cut major arteries in the middle to prevent getting from one edge of the city to the other quickly by car. Basically, restrict those areas to delivery trucks, buses, and emergency services, and force the rest of the traffic to filter through side streets. Just that amount of inconvenience would push a bunch of people to use transit instead, and the areas cut off could be converted to a street.
Yeah downtown to me means lights every block, some towns are absolutely like that, but they’re not on any “shipping” or major highways. So if you’re traveling across country, you’re not going to be on those highways anyways.
I guess there are two types of highways:
My understanding is that most people don't refer to the second as a highway, they're just arterial roads most people in the area are familiar with.
I went on a cross Canada car drive in the early 2000s. We left from Sudbury Ontario to make it to the west coast in BC. We took our time, sight seeing and making many stops along the way. Ten days later we made it to Vancouver.
The best part was that on our sixth day, we ran into a friend in Medicine Hat, Alberta. He had left Kapuskasing, Ontario the day before and was expecting to make it to Vancouver in about 60 hours with non stop driving. His eyes were so blood shot and he was literally shaking from all the caffeine drinks, pills and coffee he had been taking. He had some strangers with him that he had picked up as hitch hikers and he said they were keeping him awake.
We worried about him the whole time but he called us two days later to say he made it. We caught up with him three days later.
I live in Arkansas and went on vacation to South Padre Island a few years ago. It's a 16 hour drive one way.
I grew up near Seattle and now live near Salt Lake City. The drive is 14 hours one way and I've done that trip at least a dozen times.
West Texas alone is an 8 hours between Las Cruces and San Antonio, and it's the same damn rock and shrub for the entire 8 hours.
We were headed Portales to Corpus Christi, which according to Apple Maps is about 9 1/2 hours. We did not have Apple Maps then, we had Rand McNally. So at best it would have taken us 11 hours. And yes everything looked the same.