Ianbian

Hi everyone -- I thought the group might be interested in the mini novela of comments I sent to TxDOT (see attachment). My focus is on maintaining and improving local, inner-city connectivity options between the East End, Downtown, and neighborhoods west of Downtown. I don't feel like we can afford to lose any more of our existing east-west roadway options, because we already have so few of them. I would hate for our local east-west roadway connectivity to start looking like Austin's north-south connectivity! Remember, comments are due by July 27, 2017. Feel free to use any of the figures/arguments I've put together if you agree with them -- no need to reinvent the wheel! IH-45 Comments - FINAL (Sharing).pdf

Brady house at 3805 Wilmer no longer on HAR. . .also removed from the real estate agent's website. Shucks, I had just about convinced myself to pony up the dough and try my hand at restoring it. Hopefully the buyer has similar aims!

That's easy: someone who wants to live in a cool old house a block or two from a light rail station. That's a pretty rare combination! Add in a dash of having been baptized at and having attended for years Blessed Sacrament church a couple blocks away, and you've got a potentially good fit. Potentially. But that potential candidate would also want to make sure that some of the charm on the outside remains on the inside. . .

Hey Niche, from the pictures on HAR the main house itself looks (perhaps superficially) sound, and the parts that really look shoddy are the wooden extensions that have been built out on the rear and the side. Does that seem about right in your estimation? Did you feel that it might be reasonable to restore at least the main part of the house? (I know you can't really answer that, just asking for your best guess!) I know it's just a naive, overly optimistic pipe dream. . .but damn, is that one cool, unique house.

Man, I'd love to take a peak inside that house, but the owner and real estate agent, Susan Delgado, isn't showing it off. She's selling the house as investment property -- ie, for the land, and as such her target buyers don't have any need to see the house. What a shame! Such a magnificent, historic house targeted for a teardown. I wonder if she'd be willing to do an open house for a number of interested/curious people at once. . .

Yeah, but do I? A Harrisburg overpass will be over twice as long as an underpass because: 1. Overpass will have to go over freight trains. Freight trains can be very tall, somewhere in the neighborhood of 22-25 feet. A bridge has to completely clear that. The tallest thing an underpass will have to clear are the light-rail vehicles, which require about 15 feet. 2. East Belt rail line is at a higher grade than Harrisburg. The freight tracks are several feet higher than Harrisburg. IE -- there's a bump there as you drive over the tracks. Those extra feet add to the clearance a bridge needs. Conversely, they take away from the required depth of an underpass. 3. ADA Compliance. A bridge cannot go any steeper than a 5% grade because the accompanying sidewalk can't be too steep for people in wheelchairs. The sidewalk of an underpass, however, is not constrained to the same depth/grade as the main lanes. Therefore, the slope of the underpass is determined by the light rail vehicles, which require a slope of no more than 7%. Steeper slope = shorter incline for a given height. 4. Caylor Street must remain open. Houston Armature Works owns warehouses on either side of Harrisburg and uses Caylor as an access road. Because of the above three considerations, a bridge will not be able to descend before Caylor and thus must remain in the air over Caylor. An underpass, because of the above considerations, will be able to reach grade by Caylor, and its length is thus unaffected by the need to keep Caylor open. Two comparable locations: the Navigation bridge over the same freight tracks (almost 2000 feet) and the Fannin underpass under Holcombe (a little over 1000 feet). The Harrisburg bridge will be longer than the Navigation bridge because of the Caylor requirement. There should be no substantial difference in length between the underpasses.

Something else to consider: even if an underpass ends up costing more, I believe it would still be worth it. Along Harrisburg is where we have developers like Frank Liu and Julio del Carpo buying up property and trying to turn it into something that serves the community. I for one am dying to see more grocery and restaurant options in the neighborhood, and Harrisburg is the natural location for these projects. It's also where a rather expensive light rail line is going, which I think is a pretty good sign that Harrisburg is where METRO and the City expect development to happen too. But many of those same developers who want to build these things for the community and take advantage of the proximity to light rail are saying that a 2000-foot bridge will make it a LOT harder, if not impossible. The East End subforum has a poll about what people would like to see in the East End. I strongly believe we are going to be seeing ALL of those things built (grocery, restaurant, bars, entertainment, etc) if we don't put obstacles in their way. And a bridge is just that kind of obstacle. And it's going to be an obstacle for 50-100+ years. How much would a good alternative to the Cullen Kroger be worth? How much would an alternative to Mexican food (the East End has some damn fine TexMex, but not much else) be worth?

Fair enough -- there won't be a river. The hope/plan is to have diverse architecture and a mixture of different retail and restaurant options along with nice landscaping and comfortable sidewalks. I guess another comparison would be the Village -- but with fewer cars everywhere. I'll post some pictures of the vision when I get some from the Harrisburg Merchants Association (they're working on them now to present to city council). I don't know why they don't have a website, but I promise they're a real group. It might be a more informal kind of association of business owners. Possibly. Almost certainly cheaper than METRO's estimate for the bridge ($45 million -- although this is probably an overestimate). Because of many factors (which I'd be happy to go into), a bridge would have to be nearly twice as long as an underpass. METRO doesn't deny this. That increases costs both in terms of construction but also right-of-way.

I also posted this in the East End subforum because I wanted to reach as many interested people as possible, and I didn't know which area would be more appropriate.