Highways are a symptom, not a cause. My point is that the reliance on personal cars creates these issues of traffic where massive highways like

It would be wonderful if our systems were separated so we could see direct cause and effect to make easy data driven objective decisions. Sadly that’s rarely the case. Confounding variables abound.

You’re looking at this interchange and presenting its existence solely to passenger cars, further, passenger cars for whom they could be replaced with mass transit systems. That’s two very large logical leaps. Houston is a very large industrial city and that interchange likely serves a massive number of commercial vehicles transporting goods and services not only in the city of Houston but as a thoroughfare to other cities. Additionally, it is likely carrying a percentage of passengers in cars that can’t be served by mass transit.

My point isn’t ‘transportation bad’, but ‘Jesus fucking Christ public transportation in this country is fucked and leaves us with massive, gaping inefficiencies like this’.

Even if you’re aware of both of the confounding variables I listed above, your meme ignores them. Your audience views your message as either naive and uninformed or worse maliciously ignoring inconvenient factors that don’t support your narrative. I don’t believe either of those of you, but other that don’t take the time to talk to you might.

If the space where that interchange is was actually valuable, someone would develop around it. Plenty of cities have development right next to highways and interchanges

I don’t disagree with your position that the US has poor public transportation, but 1) these meme doesn’t effectively (or even logically) make that point and 2) for the most part, US citizens have clearly rejected public transportation