HouTXRanger

It looks like the post I wrote was lost to the ether . . . to summarize, losing Fields is a tragedy for the city. A few years ago, when he first started, I was fortunate enough to speak/work with him a little, and I was impressed with his attitude regarding the city and its potential. He went out of his way to make projects work (like attending an opposition meeting for 11th street to answer questions and talk with concerned residents) and I respected his decision to take his career (multi-modal planning) to a challenging place (a sunbelt metropolis). It will be difficult to find a replacement that has his attitude and outlook, if Whitmire plans to get a replacement at all, which I doubt considering how he's conducted his office so far. Very disappointed that my hometown seems to be taking ten steps back.

Of course, how could I forget! Unless you own the land, you get zero right to opine on how your neighborhood changes for the worse. Someone should tell all those people protesting NHIP . . . Also, if I really cared what the landowners thought, I wouldn't waste my time commenting here, would I? I doubt any landowners of any projects we discuss even know we exist. Calling a parking lot "architecture" is a stretch. Calling storage for unoccupied cars "functional" is less of a stretch, in the same way an empty dirt lot is functional because it's non-permeable and absorbs water when it rains. Looking at google earth, in the eight blocks surrounding the church, there are three multi-level parking garages and four surface lots, one of which is already owned and used by the church. Nobody is saying your grandparents should take transit or bike. There is a drop-off area for people of any physical ability. There is already a parking lot owned by the church for them to use, and the building is surrounded by even more parking lots and street parking. Demolishing the old building doesn't make anything easier for your parents. In fact, it might make things more difficult by inducing the demand for parking when more people start driving there and expecting an easy parking spot. Why are the only two possible uses for you a parking lot or parking garage? This is in downtown Houston, within walking distance of hundreds of apartments, tons of workplaces, and the downtown transit center. Why can't this be used as a church facility again? Or as a school? Or as, god forbid, housing? The church is demolishing this because they can't be arsed to take care of their property and want to wash their hands of a potential asset for short term gains. It's not about parking. Or about the plaza. It's about doing the bare minimum by lazy management, and pretty much everyone will be worse off for it.

I'm really proud of what Houston has done over the past decade or two, but this is a stain on the transformation of Downtown. It's honestly pathetic. If they can transform a freaking post office into a mall and it works great, y'all really don't think they could do something amazing with this site? All for a goddamn parking lot. Two blocks from the Downtown Transit Center! Outstanding. Even better when the pierce elevated comes down, and more prime real estate is eaten up by a surface lot.

They'd have to rebuild the stations, all the bridges, tear up all the roads to put tracks in, tear down more trees for the wire poles, etc. All the while somehow not disrupting the BRT operations since, I assume, there will be enough passengers to warrant the light rail and therefore enough passengers to be really pissed off if they closed the route for 5+ years for all this construction. In the end it wouldn't be that much cheaper than building a line from scratch. Cheaper certainly, since certain studies won't have to be redone on some segments and METRO will still have accurate maps of the utilities from when the BRT was put in. But in terms of materials and labor, about the same. However, I do think it is very cheap Politically to do this since METRO will already own the right of way.* It's much easier to get people against this sort of thing to agree to a BRT now, and then agree to a BRT>Rail decades later. In terms of how to make the LRT cheaper in the future through the design of the BRT now, there really isn't much they can do. All that would possibly help is just ROW. The more room METRO owns through the BRT lanes, median, curbs, and station, is all room that METRO would desperately need to fit a train through, and any more ROW they take is an additional political complication. And although that ship has sailed, the bridge over the train tracks by Harrisburg would have been easier to convert if it was a tunnel instead. I'd bet you a nickle that the BRT bridge will be simply incapable of holding the weight of a light rail, and will have to be torn down and rebuilt when the time comes. *METRO will have to buy more ROW at some intersections if they convert to rail, since the trains can't take some corners as tightly as busses. See: Redline in near northside.

Attended the Zoom meeting on the 28th. They said they were at 30% design completion. Some interesting tidbits: They plan for 6-minute frequency during peak hours, just like the redline (why doesn't the silver line BRT run this frequent?). The alignment between the Wheeler Transit Center and UH is now as follows: directly east on Wheeler to Ennis Street, north on Ennis Street to Elgin, east on Elgin Street until it turns into Lockwood when it crosses 45. They said this was changed after feedback to serve the residents of 3rd Ward better instead of just trying to get from Wheeler to UH as directly as possible. On Lockwood, there will be a bridge over the rail line between Rusk and Harrisburg. They are committed to doing the bridge because the R in BRT won't work if the bus gets stopped by trains. A tunnel won't work because the rail line currently acts as a makeshift levy for the neighborhoods to the south, and a tunnel would cause all sorts of knock-on flooding concerns they couldn't touch. The bridge will not include space for cars, but they are going to add space for bikes and pedestrians, or at least some way for bikes and pedestrians to use the bridge to cross the tracks. They also made a point of saying they would fund artwork at the bridge on Lockwood to make it suck less, I assume something like what they did for the green line bridge. On Lockwood, they said all the older trees on the roadsides should stay, and they only expect to remove the trees in the median. Apparently there were actually plans in motion to convert the intersection of Lockwood and Canal into a roundabout, but that won't happen now since they couldn't find a way to make that compatible with the BRT design. They are generally trying to avoid ROW eminent domaining wherever they can (of course), only project they often need to do that to make room for stations. They are planning on completely rebuilding the street along the entire alignment. So should include utility undergrounding if needed, sidewalk reconstruction, new crossings, better crosswalks, better drains, etc. They are taking into account where the project intersects with the high injury network and how to generally design the streets safer since they're rebuilding it all anyway. For instance, on Richmond, you won't be able to cross the BRT lanes at unsignaled intersections, only at intersections with stoplights. They will be adding more signals along that route to make sure the community around Richmond doesn't become too disconnected. Claimed plans for security cameras at all stops, and low emission or no emission busses including electric. I personally doubt this one comes to fruition but would be nice.

God, I hope not. That thing was terrible to walk under. Hopefully they at least tear down half of it to free up the street frontage on pierce.

In a place like Houston, I don't think seeing this as a "missed opportunity" for something better makes a lot of sense. If you look at google maps, there are tons of empty or under-utilized lots all around that will likely get filled in with denser housing soon. Houston's imperfect pro-housing codes work precisely because they aren't concerned with creating the "ideal" land use on a given parcel, but by pushing every development to be at least a slight improvement on what was there before (in terms of density, mixed use, TOD, etc.) Look at this another way: the increased number of people living on what used to be a grass lot, and the increased number of people living in other imperfect but "good enough" residential developments nearby, will drive growth for future mixed-use and dense developments like the one you would prefer be built here (and objectively would be better). On a completely 100% subjective personal note, little oddities like how these townhomes don't *quite* fit the capacity of this street, and how they will look *slightly* out of place as Harrisburg continues to fill in with denser buildings, is probably going to add to the character of the neighborhood decades from now. Generally many fine-grain developments that don't quite match are a lot more interesting than large-grain full-block developments that would occupy the same space. We used to build that all the time, but now we call those neighborhoods "historic districts" like market square. Worst case scenario is they get torn down in 20 years for something better, but in the meantime people get to live there and nearby businesses get patrons.

Holy crap. These are some of my new favorite pictures of Houston! I always tell people it smelled funky because we were right next to all the refineries, and nobody really knew what that meant . . .

Now that I've had to move to the Bay Area for work, people look at me like I'm an alien for talking about all the good qualities of central Houston's urban fabric. It might not be "world class" yet (just wait a few decades) but at least it doesn't take ten years to permit one affordable housing complex . . . . Can you link that video you mentioned? I'd like to take a peek.

Ah, looks like I mistook this for a different development. Glad to see this one is moving a bit.

How long has that building in the little triangle been planned???? So pretty!

I've actually thought about this as well, in terms of somehow lengthening the current green or purple line up Shepherd/Durham to replicate the actual streetcar that once made living in the Heights attractive in the first place. I'm not sure if a circulator like the downtown circulator makes sense for the heights, since it has much less density in destinations, but it could theoretically work. The Heights is already getting increasingly better bike infrastructure too, which can make such a short haul bus route less useful. I agree 100% though, the best thing for the heights would simply be better and/or more reliable access to routes we already have. If this helps increase that access, then that would be fantastic.

Man, he REALLY got the locations of the Houston and Dallas stations wrong . . . regardless don't really disagree with his points. We've already discussed the pros/cons of the Houston station to death.

Did you heard anything regarding the owner of Central Cadillac being willing to sell? It would be awesome if all that land close to the rail station got turned into something better!

It's not really Rice's project itself. It's the fact that they expect land prices across 288 to skyrocket due to the Ion, displacing people there. Imho Rice is doing a standup job, assuming they follow through. This coalition is based on the assumption that unless an agreement is made with them and them specifically, Rice can disregard whatever agreement they made with the city and not be penalized. How that's different than Rice theoretically disregarding whatever agreement they might make with this coalition, when the city is probably going to be the one they call to enforce their agreement . . . I'm not sure really.