Real estate consulting firm Arup describes the long history of the famously car-centric Houston and a recent vote to approve bus rapid transit:

In 2003, voters approved a major extension of the city’s light-rail system, with one of the planned corridors running through Uptown [an upscale community eight miles from downtown with offices, hotels, one of the nation’s biggest shopping malls, 180,000 residents, and popular restaurants and bars]. Houston’s first light-rail line, the Main Street Red Line, opened in 2004 after having been proposed by the Harris County Metropolitan Transit Authority (METRO) in the 1990s. A northern extension to the Red Line opened in 2013; two additional lines are scheduled to debut this spring.      ….

With the future of Uptown’s light-rail line unclear, the district’s leaders discussed other options for reducing traffic congestion. They ultimately chose a model that has proven highly successful around the globe: park-and-ride transit centers connected via bus rapid transit (BRT).

But perhaps the best part of the article is this photo of pro-freeway Houston campaigners in 1958:

Yeah, that worked out well.

“Smash traffic jams?” I’m sure there are lots of other great pro-freeway photos out there that ended up as spectacularly wrong. Feel free to send any you come across, and I can do a future post just on ridiculous pro-freeway photos.