[msandford]

Good thing the streets are all one-way!

Seriously though, in the downtown portion of Houston there are only two directions people want to go in a hurry, northeast and southwest. Those roads have at least double the carrying capacity of the cross-roads and as such it absolutely makes sense to optimize the lights for them.

So what happens is that the "get me out of downtown" roads are very well timed and the cross-streets aren't but that's OK. Most people don't need the cross-streets and if they do, they're fairly lightly traveled because most people don't need them.

[jofer]

As someone who does need to travel on the cross streets fairly often, the downside of this is that the non major streets have lights that are _really_ poorly timed.

I realize why they do it, and it is optimizing for the majority use case, but damn is it annoying when you want to go the other way...

[msandford]

Yeah it's terrible. I do the West End ride sometimes and all down washington it's fine. Then we hit downtown and we get stopped at EVERY light. Once we hit fannin and turn for the med center it's green lights all the way and you see 30-50 cyclists just cruising in an urban environment; it's surreal.