The Texas Triangle: A rising megaregion unlike all others (2021) (opens in new tab)

Check out Vonlane. They are deluxe buses that cover the Texas triangle. We use them for work to move our guys between Houston / Austin regularly and people seem to love it. It's pretty cheap, comfortable, and has wifi.

A plan to connect Houston to Dallas with a bullet train has been grinding its way along for years now[0]. Since Texas is loath to use eminent domain, the planning phase has been stalled for a loooong time.

[0]: https://www.texascentral.com/project/

Edit: Whoops, wrong project. Still, the plans are there, we just need willing politicians.

That triangle is why Southwest Airlines exists. I think the original brainstorming napkin drawing of the triangle routes is on display at Dallas Lovefield airport.

It's true, lack of highly available public transportation between the cities puts us behind other regions (not to mention other countries). I've been doing the ATX -> HTX drive for years.

Best private alternative I've found is Vonlane (https://vonlane.com/) - takes longer than flying but it's a business class bus so you can get work done.

other than maybe parts of the Northeast Corridor, do any of the othe "megaregions" solve that problem?

the top down purview is that texas is an oil state.

Driving from Houston to Austin, there is not even a freeway. It's highway with traffic lights and small town speed reductions.

Spent a lot of time on the I-35 corridor between Austin and Dallas in the last 15 years

There's still a ton of farmland/open/rural space, but you pass a number of smaller cities along the highway (Waco, Temple, West, etc), and some of them have been exploding economically. Some are unrecognizable from how they used to look

Having spent nearly a decade in the San Antonio/Austin area, no. I'd say only recently have San Antonio and Austin even felt connected. But Dallas and Houston are completely different worlds in my mind. It's nearly 5 hours from San Antonio to Dallas, with not much interesting in between.

I'm no longer there, but I grew up there, and I would say yes to an extent. Yes in that there's a large amount of movement within the area (e.g., grow up in Dallas, go to school at A&M, settle in San Antonio) and that you may have to go to one of the other cities now and then for something specialized (e.g., from Austin to Houston for a consulate or a highly specialized medical visit). There's also somewhat of a rivalry, I guess. But, still, there's not a "feeling" of connectedness, but is there between, say, Baltimore and Philadelphia?

I can't really compare it to the Northeast Corridor, though. I lived in NYC, but not long enough to really have a connection much beyond the city.

Your intuition is correct.

My place is inside the 610 in Houston. More precisely Third Ward/Museum District.

I think even most Texans wouldn't put Austin and Dallas in the same region. Dallas is radically different from Houston as well.

That said, if you look at what they are calling mega-regions, I think there are many departures from what people in those areas would think. For instance, most people in North Carolina would think of the Triangle as its own thing and Atlanta as another, separate thing. Here, they are saying that Atlanta and the Triangle are the same. Maybe because of people connections? Not sure? But that would strike people in the Southeast as strangely as looping Austin-Dallas-Houston into the same thing strikes Texans.

ETA:

Actually, now that I've looked more closely at the map, I'm not sure it lines up at all with what most people would think? I notice in the Midwest region, Columbus and Dayton are on the map in spite of Chicago's rail links to St Louis, Urbana-Champaign, and perhaps the most baffling omission on the map, Minneapolis? They got some serious economic firepower up there in that metro, and more commercial links between them and Chicago than anyone else in the region. Maybe because Minneapolis is thought to be its own thing? Whereas they don't believe Dayton or Columbus are their own thing?

It'd be interesting to read how these regions were determined? On the surface, yes, many of them seem a bit, off?

I believe megaregions is an economic concept. It is supposed to show concentrations of linked economic activity/common infrastructure/interests. The US has 11 megaregions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaregions_of_the_United_Stat...

TBH I think it feels like it's starting to get a lot more "connected". For a long time, Austin was the outlier - very progressive and uniquely a tech center compared to the other cities. Over time, though, I think that has changed:

1. Pretty much all the cities in Texas are rather progressive now - like pretty much everywhere else it's an urban/rural divide now. Houston was the first city in the US with a lesbian mayor.

2. Austin is still the tech center, but I've started to see more companies (and people) move to Houston or Dallas as Austin has gotten ridiculously expensive.

3. You are correct about the wide expanses of nothingness in between the major urban/suburban areas, but I don't think that's quite critical to the author's thesis. That said, as Austin has gotten more expensive I lot of areas further out that I used to think of "nothingness" now have seen big booms. Lots of places between Austin and San Antonio in particular feel like they've exploded over the past decade.

4. One thing that I think that you're likely to miss from asking HNers is that, at least among people I know, there is much more "connectedness" among the cities between people and industries not in tech vs. those in tech. E.g. on the upper end folks I know in legal and banking travel fairly frequently between some of these cities, and on the lower end I know a bunch of Mexican immigrants that have friends and family spread out in San Antonio, Houston and Austin.

The big question in my mind is climate change. I've lived in Austin for a quarter century, and while our summers are always hot, last year was a new beast entirely - relentess week after week after week of 105-110 weather. I'm doing everything I can to get out of Austin in the summer now.

Not to me. I've lived in Dallas for over a decade at this point. I've visited Houston once. I've visited New York at least once a year. Putting aside that we're as far from each other as London is from Paris and Amsterdam, there is damn near nothing between us. When you add in the several hours you spend getting to an airport, getting through security, waiting for your plane to board, then the massive amount of time spent taxiing because DFW the airport is bigger than Dallas the city, the time difference between flying to Houston versus flying to a coast is negligible compared to your total door to door travel time, so frankly, Houston may as well be as far away as New York is.

I feel like I'm missing some nuance, because it looks like it's basically just taking the largest population cities in the US and drawing circles around the ones near each other. "Most economic activity happens where the most people live" doesn't seem like a particularly novel insight.

Those regions cover the majority of US population, so that is statistically the likely situation. There are a few significant cities (St Louis, Minneapolis, Denver...) not in a mega region, but most of the big cities are in one and so odds are your business is mostly in a mega region for statistical reasons.

The article tries & fails to convey this megaregion is "distinctive". Main pieces of evidence it offers are,

1. Distinctive set of demographic and economic realities

This is not a very compelling argument. Different places have different people. We should not be surprised by this observation.

2. Integrated economic system within a single state

Same article also cites other one-state megaregions like Florida, Southern California, Nortern California.

FWIW they provide this [1] map. Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio are roughly collinear.

[1] https://kinder.rice.edu/sites/g/files/bxs4896/files/images/U...

That's as far away as "Nawlins" from the triangle, so I don't see why it's relevant.

Half of the people of Texas would say "Bless your heart, stay where you're happy" and the other half would say "Come on! We need more like you"

I think the consensus is that the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver corridor is the "real" megaregion of the PNW. That corridor has ~10 million people and a high per capita GDP, especially the middle part which kind of ties it together.

If you were going to include Spokane, it isn't that much of a stretch to include Boise as well.

Some of these megaregions really are "kind of one thing" like Southern California, others are pretty separated. Spokane is close to Seattle and Portland so there's traffic there, but I don't know they really operate as one "region".

It's true that some Texans like to talk about secession. However, there's very little overlap between those people and Rice University faculty.

Texas is not going to secede. In the 2020 election, the vote was 52:46 between Trump and Biden, meaning almost half the state supported the overall national winner. Compare this to the actual secession crisis election in 1860, where the vote was 75:24 against the pro-Union candidate, with Lincoln not even on the ballot in the state.

With the caveat that I know very little about the legal aspects surrounding secession, Lawrence Wright in his book "God Save Texas" mentions that the idea of secession is only a talking point and it's not going to happen legally.