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ADCS

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Everything posted by ADCS

  1. On top of the trenched I-10. You could cantilever the tracks or post them on pylons centered in the middle of the highway. Not sure the best way of getting them downtown. It would be really hard to hit the Post Office site going that way without some residential takings.
  2. So the Montgomery County conversation has become completely moot.
  3. The one thing about The Woodlands is that they don't see themselves as a suburb or edge city. They see themselves as the emerging second city of the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land MSA. In their minds, this would be as if a high speed line were being constructed between Minneapolis and Chicago, and didn't go through St. Paul (imperfect an analogy though that may be).
  4. It isn't even that - for people who live next to the proposed route, it's more about city folk disrupting their lives without them having say-so in it. For people near The Woodlands (read: O&G managers who would use the line fairly frequently, along with land developers), it's about having to drive all the way to Downtown to take the train, and the lack of TOD opportunities. You wouldn't be seeing such strong opposition from Montgomery County state/federal politicians if it weren't for that latter constituency.
  5. I'd like to think so, but with ExxonMobil being up there, they've got a very powerful political ally at their disposal. They managed to get the dead-in-the-water Grand Parkway pushed through, after all.
  6. They want a station in The Woodlands, and if they don't get one, they want to derail (sorry) the whole project as a show of political strength. Sort of the same way Fort Worth gets all in a tizzy when Dallas gets some cool project and Tarrant County's left out. It's parochial politics at its dullest.
  7. As many as were needed to handle long-distance connections and maintain enough redundancy in case of Soviet attack in the 1960s. Those were designed to survive nuclear war, after all.
  8. That's not the scope of what they're doing - it's to serve a very particular market, which is essentially the only way to profit with rail infrastructure. Its bread and butter will be business travelers who now have the convenience of starting and ending the day at their offices in Downtown, Greenway Plaza and Uptown Houston, along with their counterparts in Dallas. Commuter rail does not serve a purpose for this company, because commuter rail has almost never been profitable (with few exceptions in particularly dense cities like London or New York). Even during the rail era, commuter routes were run as public services in exchange for various benefits given to them by the state and municipal government, along with kickbacks from land developers, or because they were developing the land themselves. TCR is already incurring an enormous amount of debt to put the high-speed line into place - it's considerably unlikely that they will be able to secure more capital to build out a system that will almost certainly lose money. Like it or not, the only agencies who have a shot of building commuter rail in Houston are TxDOT or Metro.
  9. Just sounds like that was for scale. Since the meeting was in Tomball, everyone would know how long it takes to get to Houston.
  10. I don't think that's the question here. It's where you can get the greatest benefit for an acceptable cost, not just the lowest. Capital costs are already high enough that the normal dynamics of operating a business are relatively skewed - a critical mass of ridership is by far the most important goal here, much more than marginal reductions in those capital costs.
  11. You could also post large wayfinding signs, as is done for every other major transportation terminal, such as the airports. This would also likely factor into the developing Pierce Elevated plans.
  12. Never quite understood this argument. Short and medium-range transportation projects almost always work best when they respond to existing demand, and serve to enhance and entrench that existing demand. If you put a transportation terminal in a run-down area, it's not going to revitalize it - instead, people will avoid it in preference to existing options. A perfect example of this is the NJ Transit River Line, running between Camden, NJ and Trenton, NJ, two particularly undesirable areas. Even though tickets are a fraction of taking SEPTA Regional Rail between Philadelphia and Trenton, and the time in transit is fairly equivalent, the latter route gets far higher ridership for two reasons - first, that most riders are trying to get to Center City Philadelphia or the transit links that can be found there, and second, most people would prefer to avoid Camden. While Lazybrook and Timbergrove are improving in esteem, Spring Branch East is not. Northwest Mall is more associated with Spring Branch East than the other two, and combined with the access difficulties that Luminare described, could make a terminal there a difficult proposition for success.
  13. It would be the Southern Pacific Grand Central Station reborn. We'd have to call it GCS, wouldn't we?
  14. There's no reason that you couldn't have solely express train service during the peak hours, say at 6:30-9am and 4:30-7pm, then have intermediate stop service during non-peak hours. With B/CS being a college town, schedules are likely to be more flexible than those of the business travelers between Houston and Dallas.
  15. On the dallashoustonhsr.com site, you see that it's following a high-voltage line after turning north from 290 around Hockley. Both routes intersect near Shiro (this was brought up at the scoping meeting), which is why that location is getting a lot of attention for a station that would serve B/CS.
  16. ^^ Agreed. Bypassing 450k to better serve 14 million makes a lot of sense, especially when you're having to consider the feasibility constraints involved with private funds. When the Texas T-bone was being proposed, the political bias that Texas has towards rural interests had to be taken into account. Without those political considerations, the direct connection between two megacities makes much more sense.
  17. From what I could tell at the meeting, local politicians are on board. Democrats like that it will provide jobs, and Republicans like that it will be a private enterprise. This should ease things significantly.
  18. I always preferred the Post Office/Grand Central Station location to the Hardy Yards location simply because it already is a train station in layout. Hardy Yards was already separated from downtown, and only had the advantage of being close to the existing rail line. Having lived in the Philadelphia area, it was my experience that most business travelers did not use SEPTA when they left the train station; they would either walk or take a cab since they were so close to Center City already. The Post Office/Grand Central Station site is of similar proximity to Downtown Houston as 30th Street Station is to Center City Philadelphia, and I think the same sort of dynamic would be at play here.
  19. Maglev would, at the very least, quadruple construction costs. There is no way that a private company would take on that risk, especially in an emerging market.
  20. I-45 really does not make much sense, especially when you consider how much rolling landscape there is in Madison and Walker Counties.
  21. December 1, 2014 Jewett Civic Center 111 North Robinson Jewett, TX December 1, 2014 Waxahachie Civic Center 2000 Civic Center Lane Waxahachie, TX December 2, 2014 Truman Kimbro Convention Center 111 West Trinity Madisonville, TX December 2, 2014 Waller High School Auditorium 20950 Fields Store Rd Waller, TX December 3, 2014 Lone Star College Beckendorf Conference Center 30555 Tomball Parkway Tomball, TX December 4, 2014 Grimes County Expo Center 5220 F.M. 3455 Navasota, TX Wow, they're going to take a beating at most of these. Right thing to do though.
  22. Highways are public or owned by toll road authorities. The users are separate from the infrastructure, which is decidedly not the case in the American model of freight railroads. Please take a look at a map of the right-of-way, particularly in satellite mode, and see why this would be extraordinarily difficult, especially since it is private companies that are involved. You would also be involving the City of Houston in this, given that there would be several major street disruptions that would be involved with this, each of which would be a 2-3 year, multimillion dollar project. None of these serve to improve the product; they serve only to appease people who truly do not want change in their neighborhood - an extremely small fraction of the people who will benefit from the project.
  23. Please explain how trenching could be done without reducing the BNSF/UP line to single tracking for weeks, if not months.
  24. The company doesn't care about commuter rail; that's outside the scope of its goals. It would actually serve to make operating its line more difficult, since you'd have to triple or quadruple track the mileage shared with any commuter route, and you'd have to reduce speeds (from ~150 mph to 90 mph) to keep from disrupting passengers on the commuter platforms. There is also history to consider; commuter rail has rarely been profitable, even 100 years ago. Given the population distribution disadvantages that Houston has compared to other US cities, I can't see why a company would want to take on a project that would almost certainly bleed cash from the start.
  25. Trenching would disrupt the UP and BNSF operations on their trackage there more than elevation would. They would likely not agree to this.
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