samagon

decades of driving that Fairview/Tuam curve with no stop sign, and then there's a stop sign. when I first encountered the stop sign, it was obscured by overgrown oleander. there were no cones, traffic barrels, or other things noting that the traffic pattern had changed. it was just 'surprise stop sign!'. and I was indeed surprised. they didn't even have the flags on the stop sign to help gain attention (not that I'd have seen them through the oleander). I blew through it once, immediately after it was put in, and saw the stop sign when I was too far into the intersection to stop. they seem to have cut back the oleander and I can see it far enough away, but I doubt I'll ever forget that they changed the configuration to have a stop there. if we're redesigning that intersection, just kill that little stub, and make a left turn from Memorial onto Lubbock to accommodate that traffic. or if they want to maintain that section of street for METRO and fire/EMS, but close it to regular traffic and put the left turn from Memorial to Lubbock. long term it shouldn't matter because with the I45 rebuild there's some serious rebuilding of roads on that side anyway.

there are a few points to consider. 1. many of the bikes lanes do not connect together, which makes them roads to nowhere. I can safely cycle down Lawndale from Telephone road to Forest Hill drive, but without any real connections from there, I have to then navigate shared spaces with cars, and that's not healthy for my ability to live a long healthy life. and sure, I can drop into the bayou path on Brays, but that hardly gets me anywhere I want to go, unless I want to go to a park. 2. the amount of money spent on bike infrastructure compared to vehicle infrastructure is pretty similar to use of vehicles compared to bikes. 3. the negative impact for vehicles on roads like 11th, or Lawndale with safe alternatives to vehicles provided is seconds in their overall commute. 4. you aren't using the term road diet because you came up with it, you are using the term because someone else used it, and you haven't been told differently. it isn't a road diet. traffic engineers did studies to see the volume of cars using the road and determined that the amount of ROW being dedicated to vehicles was higher than necessary, so they aren't reducing lanes in an effort to reduce the vehicular travel on those streets (what you would commonly associate with the term diet), they sized the vehicle lanes appropriately for the current volume of cars. in turn, they used the surplus ROW to accommodate safely allowing for other forms of travel. so no, road diet isn't an appropriate term at all. right sizing the vehicular lanes for the volume of cars, and providing safety improvements for other road users is very much more appropriate, or if you just want to write something shorter, maybe just say safety improvements. what people who are against these changes are effectively saying is that the safety of others isn't worth the 15 seconds they have to sacrifice to accommodate them, and that the 1627 crashes with pedestrians and 209 deaths in those collisions is acceptable trade for your convenience. is that who you want to be?

they should at least keep the name, vision zero could mean, zero options, unless it's a car?

right, the terrorists are going to target Houston Ave because taking out that street is going to cripple our entire infrastructure. honestly, they should just close Houston Ave. entirely it seems a bit like wearing the band shirt to the concert to name a street after the town you live in.

I don't understand needing to go through neighborhood streets though. I can easily go up to the next intersection, do a u-turn, and then go right on 11th there should be a solution for a left turn though. I have to wonder if there might be enough room for a roundabout? well, I'm sure with this mayor that won't happen, but maybe for the next mayor they can at least go measure the dimensions to see if it would fit TXDoT recommended specs.

the real selling point is safety. a driver going 30, or 35, instead of 40, or 45 is far less likely to cause serious injury, or fatality in an accident. and with the slower speed, may even be able to avoid the accident all together. considering 30, or 35 is the speed limit anyway. in a world where cars are getting substantially larger and heavier, slower is safer.

when water isn't present in the ground, it has less volume, and settles. so if there's a roadway on top of that settled ground, it too will settle. this doesn't happen uniformly. this is very important around your house, so while it sounds silly, you may need to water your foundation.

no matter what they would have done, this would be the thing. the drought last year kicked a lot of streets in the butt. last spring they scraped and redid the asphalt on MLK going into UH campus, drive it today and you'd have no idea it's been less than a year.

so passive aggressive!

if the end result is the bus drivers not straddling lanes, I can't wait for this to be completed.

Bullritos was having major issues for a while, a new owner came in and was hardly ever open, that lasted a semester. every semester Pinks seemed to have fewer people. I was shocked about Jimmy Johns, there always seemed to be deliveries happening, or customer. I'm glad to see someone is coming in.

and this too. Dollar General Bill White though. I mean, I will say that every time I drove on this stretch, 1/4 of the cars didn't pay attention to the lane directions anyway.

a gas line broken, and a water line broken, it's as if some omnipotent being is telling us that the pedestrian improvements should have been kept. all we need now is for the company doing the work to go bankrupt in the middle of the project for my bingo card to be filled.

how long do the neighbors keep their signs in their yards?

yep, anything that opens this spring will be 'soft' and come with no fanfare.

hopefully they can keep doing this good work and remove any medians from Westheimer as well, all the way from 610 to Highway 6. that's sarcastic by the way.

alternatively, that's the guy stuck behind the metro bus that is straddling both lanes and only going 15 MPH.

well, they can't give the neighborhood without a sidewalk a 3' sidewalk. the current ordinance states 5' is minimum. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/sidewalk-regulations.html

oh yeah, if money were no object, then why not both, I think anyone would be in violent agreement with that. money is an object though, and it's something that is only available in finite amounts.

the point I think wasn't that 3' sidewalks are perfectly good. the point, in the context of the statement, was "this area already has something, this area has nothing at all, let's get everyone to a place where we at least have something, and then we can get to upgrading the places with something already" in an imaginary scenario (which maps to real life), you have 2 areas, one has sidewalks that conform to a historic minimum standard. the other area has nothing at all. is it better: 1. leave the area without sidewalks to still not have sidewalks, and upgrade the existing area with sidewalks to have better sidewalks. 2. leave the area that already has sidewalks alone, and add sidewalks to the area without any sidewalks at all. that's the crux of what he said, getting hung up on the phrasing of 'perfectly good 3' sidewalks' is pearl clutching and ignoring the broader message, which is, let's serve the completely unserved, before we give those who have something already, extra. it'll be great if we can have both, I think budgets have something to do with that. now, if he goes in and walks the minimum sidewalk width ordinance from 5' to 3', then we can start wringing our hands, or clutching our pearls. essentially, let's make sure everyone has a plate of food before we start going back for seconds.

once TXDoT has rebuilt all the freeways so they will no longer impact commercial trucking with flooding, they will rebuild the freeways again because we need them to act as flood basins. we will go back and forth in this manner until there is no more concrete available.

contextually that makes complete sense. make sure everyone has the bare minimum to survive (or in this case, travel safely), and when that's done, then we can do more.

when was the last time the Houston Freeways book was updated? on that website it says construction on that section of 59 was done in 2006. the watermark on that photo says 2011. according to this website, that section of freeway flooded during Harvey. https://www.news4jax.com/weather/2022/08/25/5-years-ago-remembering-devastating-flooding-from-hurricane-harvey/ at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. TXDoT is going to ram this through because as was mentioned they have to spend all their money on freeways, or the money goes away. if we want to see any changes, then we have to get our representatives to change how TXDoT is required to spend money so they spend money on more than just solutions for vehicle travel.

it's hard to see on any of the photos except this one, but the top right, you can see a walkway, there's an entrance to the building, that is what will be the entry/exit, the portion that still has excavators, and work trucks, that is going to not be open until the complete building is open later this year. whether Feb5, or later next week, or even early the following week, we're closer than it looks from these photos.

don't disagree with you. the claim by TXDoT that flooding causing breaks in commercial traffic and citing how much commerce was impacted is an atrocious argument. I could give two shits about long haul trucking needs through Houston. if TXDoT comes at me with the number of people have died on that stretch of road because of flooding, ok, now you have my attention, but throwing the commercial impact like that matters to locals? that reasoning makes it very clear that the safety and lives of humans who use those freeways daily are less important than moving freight, unless I missed that part of the presentation where they talk about mitigating people getting stuck in a flooded car on the freeway and drowning. sorry for not coming out and just saying that from the get go, it's just that kind of a statement on a presentation just really pulls out that kind of snarky reply. anyway, let's not talk about raising Houston's freeways, we just talked about going below grade on all of them around downtown. I guess because they aren't in a bayou floodplain, but then, neither is 59 near Montrose, and one of the most iconic pictures of flooded highways in Houston is a dude kayaking down 59. and we just saw 288 get a shiny new refresh, that goes right through a bayou, floods regularly because it is in a bayou floodplain, and all they did was add (managed) lanes. there's little consistency, so it's hard for me to accept a rebuild because of floodplain to really be a thing. I guess maybe the amount of commercial impact on 288 was less, so who cares if it floods, right? and let's not even discuss that the commercial impact argument ignores that there are alternate routes to avoid a flooded I-10. 610 (either direction), beltway 8 (either direction), soon to be Grand Parkway.