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Engineer Proposes I-45 Tunnel


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It's a no go. They decided the traditional freeway expansion is what they will do.

So they're gonna take out some of those homes to do it? Do we know any more details, like how many lanes, when construction will begin, how long it's gonna take and what segment of the freeway will be expanded?

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And the facts to support that statement are ????

I'm sorry, I do not have any hard facts. I'm just going on my seeing a TXDOT spokesperson address it and revealing their final plans on a news cast a while back. After seeing this I remember being really disappointed about it and frustrated which I attributed to a unhealthy conservative element that has overtaken and permeated the city in the past 10-15 years, creating an atmosphere that overall no longer relishes greatness or innovation but basic functionality and fiscal conservativeness....to a fault.

Let me see if I can find some information on what I saw on the news.

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Let me see if I can find some information on what I saw on the news.

Don't bother. You were somewhat mistaken. TxDOT initially dismissed the tunnel approach out of hand, but later agreed to study the possibility. The time for doing the study would have been this year. However, due to new rules enacted by Congress, the ENTIRE I-45 project has been put on hold since November 2006. In other words, the tunnel has not been rejected, the entire project has stalled.

Here is some more info.

http://i-45coalition.org/index.htm

When the project starts back up, the tunnel will still be a long shot. However, it is not technically dead at this time.

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I absolutely LOVE how slow it takes to develop and think of new and better ideas. I love the picture they have. Too little plans or people going over any kind of smart innovative ideas about public transportation... Metro-rail / Subway tunnels, etc. (Montr

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Too little plans or people going over any kind of smart innovative ideas about public transportation... Metro-rail / Subway tunnels, etc.

rail and subway tunnels are innovative?

back in the day they were

subway-car.jpg

we'd probably get more traffic relief by allowing cars to turn left on red as long as there is no oncoming traffic.

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  • 3 months later...

Maybe they'll do something about the proximity of the e/b I-10 entrance ramp at Sawyer and the 45-N exit. I saw yet another near-disaster there on my way to work this morning as some fool ran the gauntlet across 5 lanes of traffic during rush hour. I understand that it probably cuts 15-20 minutes off of one's commute not having to take surface streets through downtown or up Houston Avenue, but that is one hell of a dangerous game of chicken those idiots play each morning.

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Looks like there may be some long-term potential, but I'm talking about over the course of decades as the expense of acquiring right of way becomes exhorbitantly expensive.

I'd suspect that none of the special interests in this debate is going to be happy any time soon, and realistically, I suspect that once a technology like this is considered in a local project, the neighborhood associations aren't going to be happy with just having added capacity without there being any eminent domain takings. I'll bet that they then start pushing for the upper deck to be made into a greenbelt or something to that effect. Its Niche's Law of Warring Constituencies in action.

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Looks like there may be some long-term potential, but I'm talking about over the course of decades as the expense of acquiring right of way becomes exhorbitantly expensive.

I'd suspect that none of the special interests in this debate is going to be happy any time soon, and realistically, I suspect that once a technology like this is considered in a local project, the neighborhood associations aren't going to be happy with just having added capacity without there being any eminent domain takings. I'll bet that they then start pushing for the upper deck to be made into a greenbelt or something to that effect. Its Niche's Law of Warring Constituencies in action.

I got to read about half of that document he read. It has some decent arguments, although it doesn't present much, if any, bad points of the tunnel. I'd like to see if it does in the rest of the reading.

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By the looks of the drawings, it looks like if there was an accident, the people behind it would be totally screwed. I don't remember reading anything in the Emergency/Evacuation section about the consideration for this.

Does anyone know if TxDot is taking a serious look at this option? It's a well put together document, and the speakers and people involved seem to be very prominent as well.

--------

I just signed the petition too. It only has 89 signatures so far. yikes

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  • 1 year later...
rail and subway tunnels are innovative?

back in the day they were

subway-car.jpg

we'd probably get more traffic relief by allowing cars to turn left on red as long as there is no oncoming traffic.

Considering that were talking about Houston and for that matter Texas, anything other than what is here is innovative. Were Texans and we like to do things different and sometimes backasswards which explains why we got a train that runs along the center of main street and basically acts as a bus. lol

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  • 7 years later...

Elon Musk technology to the rescue?!

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-16/elon-musk-is-really-boring

 

Quote

the Boring Company would be open to building tunnels as part of Trump’s infrastructure plan, it intends to move forward regardless of what happens in Washington. Musk says he hopes to build a much faster tunneling machine and use it to dig thousands of miles, eventually creating a vast underground network that includes as many as 30 levels of tunnels for cars and high-speed trains such as the Hyperloop.

 

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12 hours ago, cspwal said:

I would love to see the boring machines be computer controlled, and then they just start making tunnels everywhere like giant moles

The [problem with that in Houston, and other parts of Texas, is avoiding drilling through the thousands of abandoned oil wells that have mostly been forgotten. The Railroad Commission has a few maps, but they are approximate for historical wells.

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