TheNiche

Is this the highest and best use of this park land? My rough outline of the course and club house is about 125 acres.

Yeah, for right now, I don't think that redeveloping the golf course as intensively-programmed park space would lure enough additional people per acre to keep the park from feeling more empty (in terms of the number of users at any given time). If I want a sense of naturalistic isolation, that's what Memorial Park is for.

The part I always wonder about is the gardening center. It can be very inconvenient for someone trying to exit the park walking northbound, especially at night. And I just don't know who uses it. Seems kind of like a fuddy duddy relic of a generation that's dying out.

Uh, no. They have recieved federal money one time, and that was last year. Correct, for METRO, the money is not unlimited. In fact it is like pulling teeth to get the federal government to finance any METRO project.

That is correct, under current Republican congress, there has been a severe curtailment of funding for public transportation projects. METRO's tax base has shrunk since it was created, hopefully they can get their full tax back.

Oh no! It's been an entire year since METRO received $1.6 billion dollars from the federal government under the crushing leadership of a single house of congress to construct the most marginal lines being proposed! Woe is us. Surely we shall perish? Of course, it wasn't easy! Look at whose district its in and then consider that the routes themselves suck. We tried to delete them in favor of BRT at one point because that was ----ing sane. But then, the feds came in and told us we could build something stupid. And in lock step, we exclaimed, "How stupid, sir!" We weren't asking a question, merely fulfilling a destiny thrust upon us.

TxDOT and other freeway construction agencies have NEVER gotten enough gas taxes to cover highway construction. The Interstate Highway system was constructed ENTIRELY by taxpayers.

The interstate highway system was built for the sake of civil defense, with underpasses built seemlessly with uniform clearances that could accommodate truck-mounted ballistic missiles and other military convoys. Many underpasses were capable of sheltering fighters or bombers and had long straight-aways with concrete as thick as runways because they were ----ing runways! And yes, they were originally built by taxpayers; taxpayers also paid to dismantle streetcars at the same time because the damned buses were the operationaly superior technology! After it was built, many subsequent modifications, enhancements, and maintenance functions transferred to the state.

While this road will be a toll facility, all freeways will have to be converted to tollways to have revenue even come close to covering the costs of building highways.

I would favor either making all roads toll roads or raising the gasoline tax. Either way, its an affordable user fee as compared to transit.

It's already been figured out. It's common fact to anyone who knows what they're talking about that in the long run rail is more cost efficient than building highways.

It's a common fact to anyone who has matriculated beyond the third grade that opinions are not fact. ...and that in the long run, we're all dead. Too much deferred gratification is a miserable, miserable way to live.

I do currently ride the damned bus, and it sucks.

Then drive a car. It will not suck. I assure you, this is a fact. I know what I'm talking about, mfastx. I just told you so, after all, and only an idiot would question a factual statement. So be quiet and go away.

There is/was talk of a reservoir near Wallis. This is a little south & west of the construction we are talking about. Just under 10,000 acres. More for drinking water than flood prevention - although I'm sure their is a flood component also. It's on the other side of the Brazos - it was originally a site approved for a nuclear plant back in the 1970's before Three Mile Island. The reservoir was to be the cooling pond. Now Houston is thirsty.

Yeah, but the Allen Creek Reservoir project would have a dam only about a half-mile upstream of the Brazos River. It could only help with downstream flooding for Richmond/Rosenberg and further downstream. None of the affected area is ecologically consistent with the Katy prairie.

What are the chances that another area lake is built, if flooding is such a concern?

Slim to none, unless its a regional stormwater detention project similar to Willow Waterhole or Art Storey Park. I'd suspect that the on-site detention requirements for new subdivisions (and infrastructure like the Grand Parkway, itself) may actually provide relief to the existing reservoirs.

Right, I understand that. But TxDOT gets its money from the federal government, and they get whatever they want. They don't have a budget like METRO does, or the City of Houston does. They have an unlimited supply of money, which is something that METRO and the City of Houston doesn't have, which is why we can't improve our non-freeway infrastructure.

METRO also receives money from the federal government to finance many of its capital outlays, however you may have noticed that the money supply is not unlimited. In fact, there have been fairly severe curtailments of federal grants in recent years. And at least METRO's tax base is healthy and grows to match the level of inflation; TXDoT's is a fixed tax per gallon of gasoline, and it barely brings in enough money to maintain the roads it has much less build new ones...which is why this road (and many like it) will be a toll facility!

If you're lamenting the lack of investment in rail-based transit, then figure out a way to balance the capital and operating costs with a higher level of farebox recovery. Otherwise, quit belly-achin' and ride the damned bus.

To me, (and SEVERAL other people) that "patch of weeds" as you've so eloquently put it, is FAR more attractive than your idea of urban sprawl.

As for your comment about this not being the Everglades, much of Houston WAS built atop swamplands. Build up and sprawl will NOT make this area look better, it'll only serve to increase the crime, the flooding, the traffic, the light pollution, the air pollution, the heat, and I could keep going. As a native Houstonian who was raised on the west side of town, I often pine for the older days, when there was a lot less of, well, everything out here.

With or without the Grand Parkway (and it's a little late to be having that discussion), sprawl is going to happen. Lets not kid ourselves. And if it has to happen anywhere in the Houston region, this is the ugliest, flattest, safest, best place that it could possibly happen. It's not in any river's floodplain, it's not covered with mixed pine forests, and its not in a coastal county where there's the potential for severe windstorm damage.

If you want to see the way things were, just drive into Waller County. Realistically, it'll be many decades before your beloved prairie is swallowed up. You'll probably be dead by then. And then who will remember enough to mourn its loss, anyway?

I don't get it.

Are you suggesting that every person moving to Houston over the next 20-50 years is going to want to move to points west/northwest of town?

That's a very narrow view of Houston, and not giving people who would move here enough credit. If you want to be absolutely and completely shocked, take a look at northeast Houston, over around lake Houston.

Say that you were looking to distribute typical suburban development spanning an area approximately equal to Beltway 8 within our metro area. Let's call it about 400 square miles, which is a block of land area 20 miles long and 20 miles wide. You might be able to fill up about 15% of that with development inside of the San Jacinto River to the northeast. Crossing the river is inconvenient for lots of reasons. Aside from right up along Lake Houston, I wouldn't expect much.

Maybe another 10% of that would be required to build out Cy-Fair ISD. That's pretty much effortless, and then you're right up against the Grand Parkway. Where does the other 75% go?

Well...on the one hand, the area of a circle increases geometrically as the radius is increased. So the outward rate of growth should be expected to slow down. On the other hand...not all rural areas are created equal. Vast swaths of Montgomery County were divided out into very low-density acreage communities, some deed restricted and others not, but none particularly useful for a developer. They will not get denser. You can't build there. A similar pattern is evident all along the Highway 6 corridor to the south, leaving predictible swaths of developable land...but not enough. It wouldn't be terribly long before development to the south would have to leapfrog toward FM 1462, deep in Brazoria County. But...

...just where did you put your new employers relative to where you think people will live? I'm betting that you didn't cram them all into Kingwood or assume that vast new refineries were going to get built or that the refineries would revert to labor-intensive practices. I'm betting that there's a general westward movement of jobs. Some go north. Many go for central Houston. Aside from that, the pattern seems to be...west.

As go the jobs, so go the people; as go the people, so go the jobs.

If they planned that far ahead for the grand parkway, I wonder if they have other plans outside it for the future?

There are.

I've seen documents and maps from Waller and Fort Bend counties that depict the "Prairie Parkway, a new freeway which would connect from Highway 6, north of Prairie View, over 290, and then south across Waller County, across I-10, across the Brazos River, skirting the west side of Rosenberg along Spur 10, and then taking an eastward jog toward where the Fort Bend Parkway would be extended across the Brazos River and past Segment C of the Grand Parkway.

EDIT: Oh, and the route was most recently revised and re-approved last month.

http://www.thewallertimes.com/pdf/04april/thewallertimes_04_25_12.pdf

But the central question remains... when does this cycle of Sprawlmageddon stop?

LTAWACS is right. It won't stop. It'll only slow down when as it leap-frogs over Austin's sprawl into the hill country.

Why would they build a highway when there is no one there?

The timing actually had a lot to do with the decade of construction work that has only just begun on US 290. Beltway 8 to I-10 is already a preferred alternative just due to pre-construction congestion, but that detour is going to become much more heavily utilized in the next few years and they want an alternative to the alternative.

Uhm, you're just playing around here -- this opportunity cost is a standard infrastructure argument -- it applies equally to freeways, transit, water, electricity, etc. Houston is experiencing a period of dramatic growth -- including higher density developments inside the loop. There is huge value in making it explicitly clear where transit lines will be to shape development to maximize their use. Otherwise we'll be 30 years down the road (again) and trying to retrofit transit into an even more difficult to change landscape, which will fare even more poorly than the current efforts, and require even more compromises. Now, when we play Sim City or China, it's easy to make a modern metro system appear overnight by fiat. But in this world of property rights, (semi) accountable government agencies, and environmental impacts... it's a messy process. Compare Beijing Metro to 2nd Ave Subway.

I'm in favor of making it explicity clear where transit lines will be and fiercely protecting those easements from development. I don't see that we should necessarily be in disagreement.

I'm married, but I don't have children. I don't plan on ever having children. But I pay about $2,000 every year to HISD.

School taxes fund the incarceration of our young people, serving three purposes: 1) to keep them from stealing your car's audio system and then puncturing your tires just for fun, 2) to keep them out of the labor force where they would compete with unskilled labor, and 3) to demonstrate to future employers that 'graduates' of these institutions can commit to a menial existence for more than a few weeks at a time. That children might learn anything is incidental.

I don't believe you should be paying school taxes toward this dysfunctional system; I believe that you should be paying school taxes toward a reformed system that prepares young people for the real world so that they can support a more balanced and viable tax base. However, under no circumstances is school funding analogous to transit funding.

The biggest challenges and risks do not have to do with constructing or operating the line. It is getting people to and from the terminuses of the line and marketing the service. It is that the line has to be fitted to our geography, our urban landscape, our infrastructure, and our culture.

Well, the main player is Japan Central Railway. They have as much experience as anyone in operating successful high speed region rail systems.

...in Japan.

The only fair way to do this is for someone to pay for it. METRO benefits everyone in our region. More people using METRO for transportation means fewer individual cars on the roads. That's less traffic and increased mobility for everyone.

That's simply not true. The benefits of transit are asymmetrical when comparing geographies and households.

For instance, Sugar Land should not be interested in becoming a METRO member because there's already a Park & Ride at the county line to serve its citizens and mitigate congestion along US 59. Meanwhile, if a Sugar Land household with two workers has one commuting to Westchase and another that works for the school district locally, then there's really no practical circumstance whereby METRO will benefit them enough that they should pay taxes toward it.

Likewise, when I used to live around the block from where I worked, METRO could not possibly have benefited me; I didn't need them. Before that, I was a reverse commuter; METRO didn't help. And now that I live close to a light rail line that doesn't go where I want to (and for which there are no plans to expand the system to go where I want to or as fast as I need to), I just commute during off-peak hours and rarely encounter congestion. For me, METRO does not pull its weight.

Houston is one of the most rapidly growing regions in the country, and we need to invest in public transit improvements now while we have the chance. As more and more people move here and clog up the freeways, we continue to put our citizenry at risk.

Just what is the shelf life of an opportunity to invest in public transit? Why is that opportunity perishable, in your eyes? And what is this risk, you speak of? Qualify the proximate cause of the risk and quantify its impact, please.

Yes.

Well damn, I've been out of the development game for too long.

Whatever the case, adding a highrise would require more parking just to suit tenants' needs. And more importantly, I fail to understand why a developer seeking to add a tower would build one here. There are better blocks with fewer complications elsewhere in downtown.

Has downtown been made exempt from the City's parking requirements?

But there's garages right across the street?

Are they not already in use? Code will require more parking. It helps the formula a little bit if the parking is shared by land uses that operate on different schedules...but then, apartment/condo tenants hate mixing with public parking and will want reserved spaces.

Again. What you see is what you get. The fee developer had to compromise on density to take advantage of what I like to call 'stupid money' when it became available. Otherwise, these would just be three vacant blocks.

The ability to go vertical would've required some kind of accommodation for on-site structured parking. So...what you see is what you get.

You had to re-post this drivel on three separate threads simultaneously?

It is interesting that I am able to move on and talk about other subjects, but you are not. You are getting your cruddy walmart paid for in part with your tax dollars, but you seem to be unable to contribute anything other than your weak attempts at humor that are just dripping with your class envy and resentment. Walmart is getting build and, absent a judicial miracle, funded with tax dollars for improvements. It sucks, but life goes on. I have better things to do than rehash the same tired arguments that have been made over and over on this board.

Not enough time to argue about it but still plenty of time to spread your misinformation, I see.

Nah, making ironic grievances against the Heights Wal-Mart has become a sort of internet meme, like Planking, Tebowing, or Foul-Bachelor-Frogging. It'll be over soon enough, but for the moment, it's still funny. I encourage anyone who agrees with me to LIKE THIS POST!

The chef at Stella Sola must've forseen that fierce competition from the sit-down only golden arches in the new Heights Wal-Mart would spell the end for his endeavor, his reputation, and his career. It was a good call for him to make a graceful exit, but it sure is sad that yet another Heights institution has succumbed to the evil Wal-Mart plague.

CNN/Fortune has a good article on the subject. Their premise is United moving it's headquarters to Chicago is biting them in the butt b/c now they have lost their political clout.

I don't like this, could mean a farther drive to an airport for me:

Are GHP leaders' pockets getting any deeper in this?

It's a stretch to believe that the GHP is being bribed. Given how ridiculous United's study was, I'm inclined to doubt any threat that they may make.

I'd be interested to see a copy of the agreement between United and the Houston Airport System regarding the terminal expansion. There is hopefully a clause that would address the penalties for one party or the other abandoning the project mid-way through.

I suspect that those being critical of West U's preference to keep its share of the transportation revenue are also people that wouldn't desire to live there if they could afford it....which is to say, pretty much under any circumstance.

According to 2010 Census estimates, there are only 38 employed persons living in West U that commute using public transportation.

Of the broad category that might be doctors (or petroleum engineers, or whatever), there are only 27 citizens. Is that "a lot"? And yeah, if lived in West U, I wouldn't care how my maid came to work; if one candidate can't drive (or walk into the city limits from Houston), then I'd hire the next candidate that can. What the hell would I care?

Public transportation (excluding taxicab): 38 +/-42 Management, business, science, and arts occupations 27 +/-39 Service occupations 0 +/-127 Sales and office occupations 0 +/-127 Natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations 0 +/-127 Production, transportation, and material moving occupations 11 +/-18 Military specific occupations 0 +/-127

West U's population is approximately 15,000, so we're talking about $20 per capita. But considering how little of West U's population is likely to use transit, that seems like a raw deal. If I were a citizen of West U, I'd want out of METRO completely if that's possible. Make the buses go around.