The traffic in Texas is significantly better than SF and LA.
My parents live in a suburb that is 25 miles from the Houston and it takes 45 minutes to get to downtown during commute hours. My girlfriend has an equivalent commute in the Bay which takes around 75-90 minutes during commute hours.
The public transit is terrible in Texas so I expect it will be worse than the Bay in a decade or two if they refuse to build up transit, but for now it's a lot better. Texas has a lot more space so they've addressed traffic issues by building much wider highways and also multiple rings of highways. Obviously that's an unsustainable solution in the long term but for the time being, my Texas friends have way better commutes than what I see my co-workers deal with in the bay.
We shouldn't really be criticizing other states when California is definitely not the model for transit and traffic either. LA is a nightmare and SF is getting close to one as more and more tech companies move away from transit centers and force employees to drive.
In Texas, you are forced to drive because there isn't public transit. In California, you are forced to drive because you have to live far away from transit centers in order to find affordable housing.
Dallas is terribad. At least it was in 1999 when I lived there. I can't believe that there are fewer people on the road and less traffic now than then.
Fun trivia tip: the opening scene of "Office Space" with the old person and walker going faster than traffic was filmed in Las Colinas (where I worked at the time).
It has gotten better in 20 years (that's way too long to retain judgement on transportation). Not a ton better, but since most of these companies aren't moving to Dallas proper, it's moot anyways.
It's going to be funny in 5-10 years when the major Texas cities become the next SF because none of them are planning for any sort of large population growth.
Austin already suffers from horrific traffic and poor infrastructure. City planning here is a joke.
Virtually all city planning is a joke, and even if one can conjure up an example of a currently "well planned" city it may well be a short lived title based on a number of economic and industrial changes in the coming years and decades.
SF is unique in that it is an industrial incubator for the modern tech industry, much as Detroit once was for the auto industry. There's nothing to say that SF couldn't become the next Detroit, save for its significant tourist appeal. In which case it would become more like Venice.
It's not entirely surprising though, and I can say that on intuition alone I've been guilty of just laying the blame at the politicians doorsteps and shaking my fist at the sky while proclaiming "such incompetence!".
The fact is that it's an incredibly difficult thing to get right, is extremely expensive and carries huge risk if one is hoping to get such planning done right in a pro-active manner, than in the reactive manner which we're accustomed to. The potential downsides to getting such an effort wrong are catastrophic.
Austin has been attempting to create a plan for an extensive zoning rewrite for the last several years. It recently restarted after the previous attempt was abandoned in August 2018 (after spending $8.5 million on consultants) because "it became a political lightning rod for preservationists and neighborhood groups who warned the effort would upend longtime neighborhoods."
We still have very loud neighborhood NIMBY groups. But the votes are what matters. I'm hopeful.
As for the grandparent, this doesn't mean suburban traffic will improve. I doubt it ever will, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand -- I recommend relocating to walkable/bikeable/busable parts of town, which are expanding (albeit slowly, because of pushback from drivers).
The public transit is terrible in Texas so I expect it will be worse than the Bay in a decade or two if they refuse to build up transit, but for now it's a lot better. Texas has a lot more space so they've addressed traffic issues by building much wider highways and also multiple rings of highways. Obviously that's an unsustainable solution in the long term but for the time being, my Texas friends have way better commutes than what I see my co-workers deal with in the bay.
We shouldn't really be criticizing other states when California is definitely not the model for transit and traffic either. LA is a nightmare and SF is getting close to one as more and more tech companies move away from transit centers and force employees to drive.