Commuter Rail in Houston

[BeerNut]

http://www.chron.com/news/transportation/article/Emmett-draws-line-fro-Harvey-to-lost-rail-tracks-12393177.php

 

 

[IronTiger]

On 12/1/2017 at 8:17 PM, BeerNut said:

http://www.chron.com/news/transportation/article/Emmett-draws-line-fro-Harvey-to-lost-rail-tracks-12393177.php

 

 

We've had the Katy Freeway/rail discussion many times, but to get off rail politics and explaining all what actually happened, what people often fail to account for in the Katy Freeway railway was that it was incompatible with the way that everything around was set up. It was set up so that it paralleled outbound traffic, and when the train routinely blocked off crossings, people couldn't turn right on frontage roads, which backed them up, which caused slowdown on the highway. Northwest Freeway doesn't have this problem for several reasons:

 

1) The railroad is on the inbound side.

2) The railroad is only near the freeway outer loop

3) Outer Belt US-290 wasn't nearly as developed as Outer Belt I-10 was in the 1990s

 

It's also a common misconception that the Katy Tollway was "designed" for rail. It is true that they were designed to potentially be converted to rail use, but it was never in the plans. The reason it came about to be that METRO was even allowed a voice in the construction of the Katy Freeway because the original HOV lanes used federal funding, and the resulting legal stuff of that let METRO have a say in the construction, and METRO decided to dump a bunch of money into over-engineering the center tollway lanes so it could be converted to rail use somewhere down the line even though there was never a guarantee to do so. (Ironically, this waste of money probably screwed over Inner Loop rail funding more than Culberson ever did).

 

edit: outer loop -> outer belt

[Ross]

Emmett, et al also forget that the track along the freeway was a single track, and there was no room for another track, which would be required for commuter rail. And, for all the complaints about "it's still congested", the Katy carries far more vehicles than it did previously, and it's hard to imagine what it would be like without the expansion.

 

At some point, I think there will be rail out I-10, but I haven't seen a viable plan that incorporates stations, parking, and a means to get from the parking to the stations.

[IronTiger]

6 hours ago, Ross said:

Emmett, et al also forget that the track along the freeway was a single track, and there was no room for another track, which would be required for commuter rail. And, for all the complaints about "it's still congested", the Katy carries far more vehicles than it did previously, and it's hard to imagine what it would be like without the expansion.

 

At some point, I think there will be rail out I-10, but I haven't seen a viable plan that incorporates stations, parking, and a means to get from the parking to the stations.

 

It would also have to be elevated the entire way, as there were far too many crossings on Katy Freeway to make commuter rail safe. Just for fun, I did a quick head count of the railroad crossings (road, crossover, private) as they would have appeared in 1997 10 miles out from 610 on both I-10 and US-290. Both would be a little past Beltway 8. US-290 had 18. Katy Freeway had 28. Considering that one of the proposals from residents around the freeway wanted a depressed freeway partially due to noise concerns, an elevated rail right next to their houses wouldn't have gone over smoothly either.