august948

Now that we are naming areas of downtown proper, we'll also need to rebrand EaDo to the more geographically accurate SoEaDo so we can free up the EaDo moniker for area around Discovery Green and Minute Maid. I'll propose DoDo (Downtown Downtown) for the very center. Given the number of homeless in that area, shouldn't we call it NoDough?

Sounds like it is the area north of the junction of 45 and 59.

SoDo isn't any more artificial than EaDo.

I'm reading that as 90 minutes total in what I can see of the article. 45 mins each way is what I had door to door from just west of westchase to downtown in the early aughts. It's what it takes to go from the same place now to UH in the mornings and evenings. That seems normal to me, not super-commuting.

Ok. So how many people in total commute each day?

Looking at the quickline schedule, it's listed as 35 mins from tmc to the end at chinatown. Not too bad for that stretch of road. Red line is about 16 mins McGowen to tmc. With layover at tmc probably just under an hour.

I've never taken this particular route, but can't you take the red line to the tmc transit center and then hop on the quickline to chinatown?

Once you get professional marketing folks involved it's all downhill (DoHi).

Beltway 8 bisects Chinatown on Bellaire. There's plenty of interest if they were to put a station next to Dun Huang Plaza. Also, there are a lot of towers right on the Beltway north of Westheimer. A Westheimer and Beltway 8 station could serve some of that and connect to the buses running on Westheimer which go past plenty more restaurants and shopping.

The Houston MSA is about 7 million and the city itself is about 2.5 million. That means 4.5 million are outside the city limits, or just under 2/3 of the entire population of our area is outside the city limits. I'm afraid you can't just wave that away and ignore it as a factor in our transportation problems. And since the city limits encompass such a large area, residents of the COH are also using the freeways to get around. Solve the in and out on weekdays and you've solved most of our transportation problems. Since Metro runs the P&R service they are already involved in this. Making the HOV connectivity work would go a long way towards solving the real problem we have. I'm sure we could engineer a few HOV lanes at complicated junctions if full expansion wasn't feasible.

First of all, the world's largest freeway is only 21 miles long. That's a drop in the bucket compared to all the freeway miles in the Houston area. the HOV/toll lanes start and end along it's length and don't connect to anything except the mainlanes and surface roads. You can't get on the HOV and even go all the way downtown, much less drive HOV all the way to Pearland or any other destination in the city. The better idea is to make all the freeways the same size with interconnecting HOV lanes so we can run P&R style service between major destinations all over the city. The number of mainlanes can vary even, but the important thing is to make all the HOV lanes connect in both ways throughout the entire freeway system.

I would say that this documents a specific instance in Brussels and that each city has it's own unique layout and bottlenecks, but you don't really need this article at all. Drive the highways of Houston at 10pm and see how it flows vs 5pm. There's a considerable reduction in cars on the highway since it's not rush hour. Traffic flows fairly freely unless there's construction or an accident. As I've been saying all along, our primary transit issue is getting people into the city on weekday mornings and out of the city on weekday afternoons. I'd love to say that all we have to do is build commuter rail and that will magically solve the problem, but will it really?

Why can't we do both?

You clearly don't know enough Baptist girls.