And traffic out the wazoo, and few good alternatives to driving.
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.
The traffic principally affects you if you drive, hence why Texas is often worse even now than SF.
Regardless if you look at commuter data, it's pretty obvious that the Bay Area & LA commuters are significantly higher than Texas metros. We have higher median, average, and extremes in commute times: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/08/22/bay-area-traffic-dela... https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/traffic-trains-or-...
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).
I'd imagine traffic at the mixmaster and various loops are still terrible.
I had a reverse commute (Lower McKinney to Las Colinas), and I'd see gridlock the entire way there (other direction).
Austin already suffers from horrific traffic and poor infrastructure. City planning here is a joke.
https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/10/04/the-next-...
We also voted in a city council that is majority pro-density/urbanist, and the new code timeline claims it should be voted in early next year: https://www.austintexas.gov/department/land-development-code...
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).
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.