wilcal

I don't think commercial/consumer GPS is good enough for that. Some cities have introduced specific parking areas for scooters on the sidewalk or in on-street parking spots and I don't think GPS resolution is good enough to determine if you parked on one part of the sidewalk.

It's a big disappointment. They did talk a little bit about it. I think the leading reason was that they've decided with certain low traffic thresholds it's not worth upsetting people by removing street parking.

Report from last night: first of all, it was surprisingly packed. Every seat full plus 30-40 SRO, so maybe around 100 people? PDF of the presentation not available online yet, so my phone photos will have to suffice. Timeline: 50% design early Feb. 90% design late Feb, 100% design mid-March, Construction begins late March. Here is the proposed system as a whole. They are thinking that construction on all 4 of these will be mostly done by the end of the summer! The detailed #2 segment: The route will extend from a soon to be built plaza at Austin street on the north end of downtown, where the parks board will be joining the westbound and eastbound bike trails together. They originally were going to split the north and southbound bike trails to Caroline and Austin, but due to Caroline being a clusterf*ck with construction for the next 2 years, they are going to go 2-way just on Austin. So a reduction of one lane and parked cars between the street and the protected bike lane. Big thumbs up for this solution. This will run from the north side of downtown all of the way to McGowan. Next section: This is where the only negative comments came from. Several townhome owners from the Anita/Tuam area were there and mildly perturbed that there would be a parking reduction. Peter Eccles actually handled this pretty well. Total loss of parking spots would be 37 spaces. One homeowner, who identified himself as a bicyclists, was unconvinced that it made sense to eliminate the parking and had they studied it. He said that it had been studied, and that the parking in the area never topped out above 45% utilized, and that was actually during the day when it was likely that construction workers were parking. At night, it varied from 30-35% utilized. The 37 spaces were equivalent to 7% of the parking. (Ed. comment by me: rekttttttt) One homeowner said that although his parking would be affected, the bike lane was so so much more important (raucous applause followed). All intersections with lights would have the bike traffic lights added to give bikers a few extra seconds to enter the intersection. At HCC, the project would dogleg over one block, and that dogleg would occur in HCC's campus at Winbern. Everything south from there would be sharrows, so shared on-street with cars and bicycle arrows painted on the street. At either Prospect or Calumet, the sharrows would dogleg over to Crawford. Crawford at Hermann will likely be turned into a four-way stop. They received feedback from the children's museum that they didn't want to have the bike lane going through when they have so many buses parked along the street there. Let me know if y'all have any questions. Edit: presentation looks to be up now http://houstonbikeplan.org/implementation/infrastructure/austin-corridor/

I asked last night, and the dogleg is going to be on HCC's campus (at Winbern). About to do a writeup.

Yep, mentions of needing to fill in hundreds of acres of wetlands to do the project at the meeting.

Yep, you're right. And that makes much more sense. From what I understand, they are both going to have them. Each being a one-way.

First of all, there is a public meeting on this tonight at 6:30 PM. I'm planning on attending, so if anyone has any questions that they want me to ask I'll be more than happy to do so. You can see how this fits into the Houston Bike Plan here, on the greater 3rd Ward section http://houstonbikeplan.org/implementation/infrastructure/third-ward/ I was initially upset that nothing was planned to connect all of the way to Hermann Park, so it's welcome to see that extension. HOWEVER, it appears they are not going to utilize both La Branch and Austin with a dogleg on Alabama? Hard to understand how we can't find a single street to continuously run a straight bike lane on. Based on the flyer stating partnership between CoH and Prct 1, have to think that this will be funded by part of the $10 mil from Ellis.

Found some screenshots of the story on another forum: http://www.andhrafriends.com/topic/786199-foreigners-funded-houston-development-to-get-eb-5-green-cards-they-were-duped-sec-says/

Totally forgot to post, this is from Dec. 20 when I was taking a bike ride. Soil samples happening in NE corner of lot.

https://www.houstontx.gov/ecodev/tirz/10.html It's an old one actually. They are spearheading an expansion of Northpark Drive right now, and just got an extension on the life of the TIRZ to borrow the money to pay for it. The TLDR of the Herons portion of the meeting is that everyone that lives anywhere near the area doesn't want it (insert shocked pikachu). TIRZ is authorizing up to $100,000 in funds for a drainage study for the greater Kingwood area to help the county/city spend the flood/drainage bond in the area, and one of the nearby HOAs wants to use that info against the Herons. Right now, the Herons is not in the city permitting process, but with the federal government/Army Corps of Engineers. Councilmember Martins office encouraged feedback to go to national legislators Crenshaw/Cornyn/Cruz as they don't have any effect on the process at this moment.

They are discussing this at the Kingwood TIRZ meeting tomorrow morning. May have some kind of an update after that. I heard something about some kind of permitting being done.

Won't be there for long with highway expansion. Huynh is walkable, too of course.

Totally agreed that a Torchy's would have done very well. Asian missing in this area as well tbh. I'm not really seeing too many of the families that are going to Discovery Green venture over to eat at GRB, so any type of low cost option is better. Still hard to eat at Saltgrass for < $10. Torchy's or a fast food option would have given people that as a choice.

Re: that Galveston electric scooter sharing article. "People already treat the beaches bad enough, so seeing scooters lying around the streets would not be good either," Galveston resident Michael Ford said. "It's using public property to store your private property to showcase your private property," O'Neal said. "It's irresponsible, and its unsustainable." Nice to know that he's so progressive he is against parking cars on public streets. Should make it much safer to bike.

Saltgrass? Groannnn

Was passing by on the light rail just before Christmas and the top of the clock tower was done. I'm not fully convinced yet. Looks a bit strange. Like an apartment complex with a clock tower stuck on the corner.

Getting some donuts and kolaches this morning and there was active demo happening in the rain

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/amp/The-year-ahead-in-business-13496575.php?__twitter_impression=true Rice University is preparing to release more details on how it will help transform the former midtown Sears building into an innovation district. “We’re on track for a fourth-quarter 2020 opening,” said David Leebron, president of Rice University. “And that means 2019 is entirely the year of launch.” Rice will begin construction next year and unveil plans about the types of programming that could be offered to entrepreneurs, said Allison Thacker, president of the Rice Management Co. and Rice’s chief investment officer. “I think people are going to be stunned by what they see here,” Leebron said. “It takes a lot of imagination to take a building that was purposefully designed as a windowless facility so people would stay inside shopping, and transform it into a destination.” He’s envisioning a destination for startups and for those interested in learning about Houston’s innovation ecosystem.

I don't think Houston is a particularly naturally beautiful place. I think we've done a good job with what we have. Our defining water feature being Buffalo Bayou and effectively zero discernible elevation change doesn't create much drama in our terrain.

They want to do BRT between NW Transit Center and downtown. I think it would be tough to fit LRT on Washington.

I think the entire plan costs less than running a subway from downtown to the Galleria via Westheimer.

New signage for the Houston Bikeways went up near Saint Arnold in the last few days: https://twitter.com/JamesLLlamas/status/1073211750374408192 This section is being re-striped (to a wider range) and having curbs replaced and no parking signs installed along entire route. It's currently not illegal to park in a bike lane unless there is a corresponding no parking sign (rolleyes X infinity) They've made big strides with this project in the last few weeks. They're going to be doing Lyons from Jensen all of the way to McKee. Hardy and McKee will eventually have dedicated bike infrastructure to head into downtown.

Kind of torn on what I would like to see here. As long as it isn't turned into parking.

Definitely not enough room on Westheimer. Their "premier westheimer bus" is going to skip Westheimer in Montrose and utilize the 59 HOV and head into Greenspoint. Additionally, I wonder what BRT even looks like in some of these examples. I do agree that you dump Purple Line to Hobby extension. Utilize those funds to convert UH to Bellaire/Uptown transit to LRT. You can keep the outer bits as BRT.

I think that is why they scrapped extending the red line to Hobby. The green line averages between 17 and 19mph in the East End from my limited understanding. So lets say 18mph average (including time at stops of course) and that gives you an extra 21-22 minutes to extend green line to Hobby. That would put travel time from Hobby to the Convention Center/Discovery Green stop at under 40 minutes unless I'm missing something.