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Bridge Over Brazos St. At Spur 527


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I ( and 50 others) attended an almost  kum-bah-ya gathering to turn Bagbystreet that accesses Spur 527, and Brazos bridge to a green space.

 

A few  things stood out to me:

COH owns the land in this proposal , not TxDot, plus willing to go forward without TxDot approval.

The money saved ( minus “spanking” fee from TxDot could see this project started and mostly finished.) might find other money.

Since TxDot doesn’t own it COH would have more leeway in dealing with potential homeless problem.

YES there probably is potential homeless problem but these residents who literally live next door to 527 Spur, would rather deal with homeless and have less traffic noise from spur.

Big statistics thrown out that Bagby doesn’t have that much traffic ( COH/PWE speak for “ not that many Courtlandt Place access users nor Hawthorne street access users)  leaving Smith street and Louisiana ( with a few PWE safety tweaks)  more suited anyway.

COH/PWE are prepared to accommodate the Lower Westheimer reconstruction— when ever that happens ;)

 

you get to vote Yes or No and provide comments............it might or might not be useful....apparently Midtown businesses haven’t weighed in yet.

Buildforward@houstontx.go

 

Midtown Superneighborhood  will have meeting on this subject soon.

 

 

 

Edited by trymahjong
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4 hours ago, wilcal said:

The rendering is 😍

 

XIvvvDm.jpg

 

I used to live in Westmoreland, and it is so dangerous crossing at Holman. 

 

This would be a real benefit for the area. 

"Bagby doesn’t have that much traffic." LOL. This creates a private Spur on-ramp for Westmoreland? No wonder they're in favor. If I could get the government to close the streets by my house to the public and only let me use them, I'd probably be in favor of that too. Doesn't mean it makes any real sense.

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1 hour ago, bulldog said:

"Bagby doesn’t have that much traffic." LOL. This creates a private Spur on-ramp for Westmoreland? No wonder they're in favor. If I could get the government to close the streets by my house to the public and only let me use them, I'd probably be in favor of that too. Doesn't mean it makes any real sense.

 

That is the existing road. It wouldn't go onto the spur.

 

Edit: Also, I lived in Westmoreland for almost 5 years, I would be shocked if anybody that lived there would prefer to have a private spur onto the highway (and have traffic funnel through the neighborhood to get there) versus losing access into the neighborhood from Bagby. 

Edited by wilcal
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9 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

Hopefully this is the first of several phases in eliminating the spur. The Main Street Master Plan in 2001 called for the spur to be replaced with a tree-lined boulevard.

 

 

That would be a disaster, not just in traffic flow to/from downtown, but it would suffocate many of the businesses in Midtown that count on that flow (Specs, Whole Foods, Randalls, and others).  I don't want Midtown to go back to being a food/grocery desert.  I also think a big part of the densification in Midtown is the easy access to/from 59, including big job centers at Greenway and Uptown (and even Westpark to Westchase).

 

My own views on the spur closing/park on my blog here:

http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2020/02/could-houston-get-google-converting-59.html

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2 minutes ago, ToryGattis said:

 

That would be a disaster, not just in traffic flow to/from downtown, but it would suffocate many of the businesses in Midtown that count on that flow (Specs, Whole Foods, Randalls, and others).  I don't want Midtown to go back to being a food/grocery desert.  I also think a big part of the densification in Midtown is the easy access to/from 59, including big job centers at Greenway and Uptown (and even Westpark to Westchase).

 

My own views on the spur closing/park on my blog here:

http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2020/02/could-houston-get-google-converting-59.html

 

Yes, I've seen your blog post. Not surprising at all that you are opposed to this, since you always favor more concrete and non-stop traffic lanes over anything else and even have a co-blogger who goes by "MaxConcrete." As to your arguments that this will hurt Midtown, I think they are thin and specious, but we will see what the local residents themselves think. Now that there is a strong and growing local population, we no longer need to worry about freeway access and high traffic exposure to benefit the neighborhood. Can you agree that this is a decision that should be driven by local residents first and foremost?

 

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Just now, H-Town Man said:

 

Yes, I've seen your blog post. Not surprising at all that you are opposed to this, since you always favor more concrete and non-stop traffic lanes over anything else and even have a co-blogger who goes by "MaxConcrete." As to your arguments that this will hurt Midtown, I think they are thin and specious, but we will see what the local residents themselves think. Now that there is a strong and growing local population, we no longer need to worry about freeway access and high traffic exposure to benefit the neighborhood. Can you agree that this is a decision that should be driven by local residents first and foremost?

 

 

Nope. I think it needs to be a balance of local residents with the needs of the greater community and metro area.  Local residents almost always try to get all the benefits while pushing as many of the costs as possible on others.

 

I think the robust freeway network is what has built Houston into the powerhouse metro that it is - #5 in the country.  Without it, we would be a tiny fraction of what we are now.

 

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that screen name either, lol.  But he's a good, thoughtful guy that does great analysis.

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Just now, ToryGattis said:

 

Nope. I think it needs to be a balance of local residents with the needs of the greater community and metro area.  Local residents almost always try to get all the benefits while pushing as many of the costs as possible on others.

 

I think the robust freeway network is what has built Houston into the powerhouse metro that it is - #5 in the country.  Without it, we would be a tiny fraction of what we are now.

 

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that screen name either, lol.  But he's a good, thoughtful guy that does great analysis.

 

The robust freeway network has been important and continues to be important. But for about 70 years now, nearly every decision has gone in favor of freeways over local neighborhoods. Now that we have some truly successful urban neighborhoods starting to develop, it is time to reverse some of those historic bad decisions and shift the balance more in favor of neighborhoods. That means getting rid of freeway spurs that stick into developing high density areas and essentially function as takeoff ramps for people flying out to Sugarland.

 

Also time to notice that it's not 1980 anymore and the world favors parks over concrete. It also favors streets over tunnels, another issue that you have taken the wrong side of. You told us for years that walkable neighborhoods would never work in Houston because people can't carry portable air conditioners, but the last 10 years has shown that they work very well when they are allowed to develop and aren't covered in concrete ramps with jerks in BMWs going 60 MPH. But I haven't seen an acknowledgment of this from you, just more pushing the 1980 paradigm.

 

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20 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

 

The robust freeway network has been important and continues to be important. But for about 70 years now, nearly every decision has gone in favor of freeways over local neighborhoods. Now that we have some truly successful urban neighborhoods starting to develop, it is time to reverse some of those historic bad decisions and shift the balance more in favor of neighborhoods. That means getting rid of freeway spurs that stick into developing high density areas and essentially function as takeoff ramps for people flying out to Sugarland.

 

Also time to notice that it's not 1980 anymore and the world favors parks over concrete. It also favors streets over tunnels, another issue that you have taken the wrong side of. You told us for years that walkable neighborhoods would never work in Houston because people can't carry portable air conditioners, but the last 10 years has shown that they work very well when they are allowed to develop and aren't covered in concrete ramps with jerks in BMWs going 60 MPH. But I haven't seen an acknowledgment of this from you, just more pushing the 1980 paradigm.

 

 

I've never been opposed to walkable neighborhoods. In fact, quite the opposite. But they need to be stitched together with a robust arterial and freeway network.  From a post of mine 14 years ago (!):

 

"I think New Urbanism needs to realize it is a great paradigm at the neighborhood level, but that those neighborhoods need to be linked together with a freeway and arterial network across a larger region if you want an integrated and cohesive metro economy. The pedestrian and the car operate at totally different scales (3mph vs. 30-60mph), and therefore the right form factors for each are different. You don't build a city around just the pedestrian or just the car, but for both. Getting militant about one over the other makes about as much sense as asking "should our country be built around the car or the airplane?" Well, the answer is both: the car for shorter distances, and the airplane for longer ones - and that means interstates and airports. The same logic applies at the scale of a city/metro-region: you need freeways for longer distances, arterials for medium distances, and narrow streets with sidewalks for very short distances (i.e. the pedestrian district/neighborhood). New Urbanism makes the very valid point that we've sort of forgotten about that last category over the last few decades - and we're now rediscovering it - but that doesn't invalidate the other two scales any more than they invalidated the pedestrian scale."

...

"The bottom line is that citizen mobility = urban vibrancy. New Urbanists need to focus on building great neighborhoods and let traffic engineers decide the right way to knit those neighborhoods together into a great city."

 

There's more in that post as well:

http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2006/02/new-urbanism-and-value-of-mobility.html

and another relevant one is my application of Jane Jacob's principles to a car-based city like Houston:

http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2006/05/applying-jane-jacobs-4-tenets-of.html

 

Edited by ToryGattis
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Milam and Smith provide the lion's share of the traffic going to the Southwest Freeway; Louisiana and Travis have always taken practically all of the northbound traffic.  The reality is that Brazos and Bagby don't connect well to downtown.  Brazos dies at the south end of Allen Center, and Bagby is a rambling indirect cluster between Pierce and Dallas.  Taking it out of the theoretical, the bridge to Brazos has now been closed for months without any noticeable negative effect.

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Speaking as a pedestrian who lived in Westmoreland for more than 23 years (1985-2008), I see many advantages to this plan. 
After a couple of unsatisfactory approaches to the Hawthorn/Holman/Bagby kerfuffle, we finally have one that makes sense. The extension of Stuart St to accommodate Courtlandt Place is an innovative approach to mollifying what's always been the Problem Child of the neighborhood. (BTW, has it never occurred to anyone to bock off the eastern entrance to Courtlandt Place, and move the gates to the western end, accessible via Taft St.? They might lose an insignificant tree, or have it moved to the eastern end of the block, but accessibility would vastly improve.)
Also, it will neatly knit together a couple of currently neglected open spaces (the encampment under the 527 bridge on W Alabama and the Hawthorn/Holman/Burlington triangle pocket park), and alleviate the claustrophobic feeling that the ramp adjacent to Burlington St gives to the eastern edge of the neighborhood, while providing a cut-through that will shorten the distance for those walking to the HCC/Ensemble Station. 

6 hours ago, ToryGattis said:

New Urbanists need to focus on building great neighborhoods and let traffic engineers decide the right way to knit those neighborhoods together into a great city.

And this? What a steaming load of crap. Robert Moses is dead, may he rot in peace.

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Maybe.....just Maybe...those that actually live next to Bagby and Brazos of this discussion should have their opinions heard and

“ weighed” against  the idea that large businesses like Spec’s ( and their many satellite stores) Whole Foods ( and their Satellite stores) and Randall’s ( and their satellite stores) would be adversely impacted by moving off ramps and access ramps TWO streets over....yes literally a stone’s throw— th streets that were constructed for just that purpose.

 

Avondale ( their neighborhood boundary is on the north side of Bagby and Brazos at Elgin) spoke long and hard against the Bagby access (as did Westmoreland, Audubon, and First Montrose Commons)when it was first proposed so many years back——-those opinions were ignored because someone who had “researched and was knowledgeable “ knew what was better for those residents!

 

hmmmmmm and so the residents lived what turned out to be a character building experience.

 

The noise issue is indeed horrible and impacts the quality of life— the idea of a green space there is incredible and will Impact the quality of life.   
 

Closing Bagby access and taking away the Brazos bridge to make room for a pocket green space is a good thing, that deserves support.

 

 

 

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On 2/15/2020 at 2:23 PM, ToryGattis said:

 

I've never been opposed to walkable neighborhoods. In fact, quite the opposite. But they need to be stitched together with a robust arterial and freeway network.  From a post of mine 14 years ago (!):

 

"I think New Urbanism needs to realize it is a great paradigm at the neighborhood level, but that those neighborhoods need to be linked together with a freeway and arterial network across a larger region if you want an integrated and cohesive metro economy. The pedestrian and the car operate at totally different scales (3mph vs. 30-60mph), and therefore the right form factors for each are different. You don't build a city around just the pedestrian or just the car, but for both. Getting militant about one over the other makes about as much sense as asking "should our country be built around the car or the airplane?" Well, the answer is both: the car for shorter distances, and the airplane for longer ones - and that means interstates and airports. The same logic applies at the scale of a city/metro-region: you need freeways for longer distances, arterials for medium distances, and narrow streets with sidewalks for very short distances (i.e. the pedestrian district/neighborhood). New Urbanism makes the very valid point that we've sort of forgotten about that last category over the last few decades - and we're now rediscovering it - but that doesn't invalidate the other two scales any more than they invalidated the pedestrian scale."

...

"The bottom line is that citizen mobility = urban vibrancy. New Urbanists need to focus on building great neighborhoods and let traffic engineers decide the right way to knit those neighborhoods together into a great city."

 

There's more in that post as well:

http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2006/02/new-urbanism-and-value-of-mobility.html

and another relevant one is my application of Jane Jacob's principles to a car-based city like Houston:

http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2006/05/applying-jane-jacobs-4-tenets-of.html

 

 

I didn't say you were ever opposed to walkable neighborhoods. I said you predicted for years they wouldn't work in Houston, because we don't have portable air conditioners to walk around with. I agree that we need freeways to get around the metro area. Midtown residents heading southwest have a very large freeway right close by, the Southwest Freeway. But your post above focused on the need for the spur so that lots of traffic will continue to channel through Midtown and help support big box stores. This does not say to me that you really care about urban neighborhoods, or even understand what an urban neighborhood is. You want Midtown to be a place that people can easily go through, not a place that people particularly want to go to. Your linked posts basically make the point that Houston is great with people getting around by car and doesn't need walkable neighborhoods. Increasingly, more and more people in Houston think otherwise, and you are stuck trying to sell us on Houston 1980.

 

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On 2/15/2020 at 1:44 PM, H-Town Man said:

 

Yes, I've seen your blog post. Not surprising at all that you are opposed to this, since you always favor more concrete and non-stop traffic lanes over anything else and even have a co-blogger who goes by "MaxConcrete." As to your arguments that this will hurt Midtown, I think they are thin and specious, but we will see what the local residents themselves think. Now that there is a strong and growing local population, we no longer need to worry about freeway access and high traffic exposure to benefit the neighborhood. Can you agree that this is a decision that should be driven by local residents first and foremost?

 

The residents in Midtown aren't the only stakeholders here. Plus, lots of people in Midtown use the Spur to get to work. When we lived in Midtown, I worked in Bellaire. I got on teh Spur every morning, and got off of it every afternoon. If the Spur disappears, which seems to be your goal, then how do people in Midtown get to 59? Or off of 59? Taking the Pierce/Gray or McGowen/Tuam exists adds as much as 20 minutes, depending on the time of day. Should people in Midtown who need to use 59 suffer?

On 2/15/2020 at 2:04 PM, H-Town Man said:

 

The robust freeway network has been important and continues to be important. But for about 70 years now, nearly every decision has gone in favor of freeways over local neighborhoods. Now that we have some truly successful urban neighborhoods starting to develop, it is time to reverse some of those historic bad decisions and shift the balance more in favor of neighborhoods. That means getting rid of freeway spurs that stick into developing high density areas and essentially function as takeoff ramps for people flying out to Sugarland.

 

Also time to notice that it's not 1980 anymore and the world favors parks over concrete. It also favors streets over tunnels, another issue that you have taken the wrong side of. You told us for years that walkable neighborhoods would never work in Houston because people can't carry portable air conditioners, but the last 10 years has shown that they work very well when they are allowed to develop and aren't covered in concrete ramps with jerks in BMWs going 60 MPH. But I haven't seen an acknowledgment of this from you, just more pushing the 1980 paradigm.

 

The neighborhoods will develop just fine with the freeways in place.

2 hours ago, H-Town Man said:

 

I didn't say you were ever opposed to walkable neighborhoods. I said you predicted for years they wouldn't work in Houston, because we don't have portable air conditioners to walk around with. I agree that we need freeways to get around the metro area. Midtown residents heading southwest have a very large freeway right close by, the Southwest Freeway. But your post above focused on the need for the spur so that lots of traffic will continue to channel through Midtown and help support big box stores. This does not say to me that you really care about urban neighborhoods, or even understand what an urban neighborhood is. You want Midtown to be a place that people can easily go through, not a place that people particularly want to go to. Your linked posts basically make the point that Houston is great with people getting around by car and doesn't need walkable neighborhoods. Increasingly, more and more people in Houston think otherwise, and you are stuck trying to sell us on Houston 1980.

 

Midtown has always been a place to go through. The Spur carries 65,000 cars a day. Where do those cars go if is closes? If it is harder to get to Downtown, then businesses will locate elsewhere.

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1 minute ago, Ross said:

Midtown has always been a place to go through. 

 

And yet it's the fastest growing neighborhood in the whole city for new multi-family development, so I guess a lot of people don't agree with you. Just like Tory, the old-timers can't realize that it's not 1980 anymore.

 

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2 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

 

And yet it's the fastest growing neighborhood in the whole city for new multi-family development, so I guess a lot of people don't agree with you. Just like Tory, the old-timers can't realize that it's not 1980 anymore.

 

Do you really think that Midtown will end up being an area that people only go to, not through? That's stupidly ridiculous. It's fast growing because for decades no one lived there. In the 1990 census, there were less than 1000 people in Midtown. It started growing in the late 90's.

 

You haven't said what the 65,000 cars per day that use the Spur should do if it is closed. They still need to get to Downtown.

 

Personally, I don't give a crap what the residents of Midtown think. They live in Houston, and have to understand it ain't just about them.

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4 hours ago, H-Town Man said:

 

I didn't say you were ever opposed to walkable neighborhoods. I said you predicted for years they wouldn't work in Houston, because we don't have portable air conditioners to walk around with. I agree that we need freeways to get around the metro area. Midtown residents heading southwest have a very large freeway right close by, the Southwest Freeway. But your post above focused on the need for the spur so that lots of traffic will continue to channel through Midtown and help support big box stores. This does not say to me that you really care about urban neighborhoods, or even understand what an urban neighborhood is. You want Midtown to be a place that people can easily go through, not a place that people particularly want to go to. Your linked posts basically make the point that Houston is great with people getting around by car and doesn't need walkable neighborhoods. Increasingly, more and more people in Houston think otherwise, and you are stuck trying to sell us on Houston 1980.

 

 

I didn't say they wouldn't work - just that Houston was built around the car because it is the only way to bring an A/C with you everywhere - and most people like that at least 5 months a year.  But I think we've developed some very fine, vibrant walkable neighborhoods.

 

I think Midtown works great as it is, which is part of why it's growing so fast. It accommodates a ton of cars during the day, but turns into Houston's biggest nightlife neighborhood at night (downtown is able to do this as well).  It also has fantastic access to the rest of the city (partly through the spur), which is very attractive.  And the most walkable part is developing exactly where it should - along rail+one-lane Main St.

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and Midtown wasn't always a place to just go through. 

 

I think providing upgrades to make Midtown a better neighborhood for those that live there are far more important than providing upgrades for commuters just buzzing through. Hell, who knows, maybe if that becomes decent park space, someone will decide the commute from Sugar Land isn't worth it and move to Midtown taking a car off the highway. 

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3 minutes ago, KinkaidAlum said:

and Midtown wasn't always a place to just go through. 

 

I think providing upgrades to make Midtown a better neighborhood for those that live there are far more important than providing upgrades for commuters just buzzing through. Hell, who knows, maybe if that becomes decent park space, someone will decide the commute from Sugar Land isn't worth it and move to Midtown taking a car off the highway. 

 

This is the fantasy of urbanists, when the reality is that is far more likely for an employer to give up on the core and move out to the suburbs where their family-centric employees want to live - with good schools and affordable nice new homes (like Exxon did) - than those employees moving into the core of the city. Houston can do both: upgrade and improve mobility from the suburbs to jobs in the core, while also supporting plenty of nice walkable core neighborhoods.

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31 minutes ago, KinkaidAlum said:

and Midtown wasn't always a place to just go through. 

 

I think providing upgrades to make Midtown a better neighborhood for those that live there are far more important than providing upgrades for commuters just buzzing through. Hell, who knows, maybe if that becomes decent park space, someone will decide the commute from Sugar Land isn't worth it and move to Midtown taking a car off the highway. 

Almost no one with children is going to make that decision. People with children tend to want to live where the schools are better than in Midtown, and where they can buy a house with a yard and a garage and room for all the stuff that middle class life generally entails. They might move to the Heights, GOOF, etc, but they aren't moving to Midtown.

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On 2/15/2020 at 8:34 PM, dbigtex56 said:

The extension of Stuart St to accommodate Courtlandt Place is an innovative approach to mollifying what's always been the Problem Child of the neighborhood. (BTW, has it never occurred to anyone to bock off the eastern entrance to Courtlandt Place, and move the gates to the western end, accessible via Taft St.? They might lose an insignificant tree, or have it moved to the eastern end of the block, but accessibility would vastly improve.)


 

10 hours ago, iah77 said:

This is ridiculous and the flow in those illustrations looks like a disaster. This area is so selfish, they should be obligated to take down their gates if this happens to open up "their" greenspace as well.

 

It was open on both sides originally 

 

Zu7kG4I.jpg

 

 

2 hours ago, Ross said:

The residents in Midtown aren't the only stakeholders here. Plus, lots of people in Midtown use the Spur to get to work. When we lived in Midtown, I worked in Bellaire. I got on teh Spur every morning, and got off of it every afternoon. If the Spur disappears, which seems to be your goal, then how do people in Midtown get to 59? Or off of 59? Taking the Pierce/Gray or McGowen/Tuam exists adds as much as 20 minutes, depending on the time of day. Should people in Midtown who need to use 59 suffer?

The neighborhoods will develop just fine with the freeways in place.

Midtown has always been a place to go through. The Spur carries 65,000 cars a day. Where do those cars go if is closes? If it is harder to get to Downtown, then businesses will locate elsewhere.

 

We are not talking about removing the spur.  We are talking about removing one of the entrances and the exits to the spur. 

 

2 hours ago, Ross said:

Personally, I don't give a crap what the residents of Midtown think. They live in Houston, and have to understand it ain't just about them.

 

It appears your compassion is as keen as your reading ability. 

 

21 minutes ago, ToryGattis said:

 

This is the fantasy of urbanists, when the reality is that is far more likely for an employer to give up on the core and move out to the suburbs where their family-centric employees want to live - with good schools and affordable nice new homes (like Exxon did) - than those employees moving into the core of the city. Houston can do both: upgrade and improve mobility from the suburbs to jobs in the core, while also supporting plenty of nice walkable core neighborhoods.

 

Of course it's a balance, but sending tens of thousands of commuters through surface streets (and having them drive 40+ MPH) through a rapidly growing neighborhood doesn't make sense. Giving people options on places they want to live near desirable jobs that don't require them to drive 50+ miles/day is the only way sustainable way forward. 

 

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1 minute ago, wilcal said:


 

 

It was open on both sides originally 

 

Zu7kG4I.jpg

 

 

 

We are not talking about removing the spur.  We are talking about removing one of the entrances and the exits to the spur. 

 

 

It appears your compassion is as keen as your reading ability. 

 

 

Of course it's a balance, but sending tens of thousands of commuters through surface streets (and having them drive 40+ MPH) through a rapidly growing neighborhood doesn't make sense. Giving people options on places they want to live near desirable jobs that don't require them to drive 50+ miles/day is the only way sustainable way forward. 

 

 

There was a scenario/wish made earlier in this thread about removing the spur entirely, which sparked these responses.

 

There are plenty of options for people who want to live closer to core jobs, and more are built every day. We're not lacking for options.

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1 minute ago, ToryGattis said:

 

There was a scenario/wish made earlier in this thread about removing the spur entirely, which sparked these responses.

 

There are plenty of options for people who want to live closer to core jobs, and more are built every day. We're not lacking for options.

 

Midtown represents more than half of the market-based parking area and will likely be a heavy "participant" in the walkable places ordinance. It's uniquely primed with the red line connecting it to the two of the major job centers. 

 

We don't have plenty of options who want to live closer to core jobs and have extremely convenient public transit access. 

 

It will be interesting to see what the 2020 census info looks like for Midtown and inside 610. 

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9 hours ago, wilcal said:

 

Midtown represents more than half of the market-based parking area and will likely be a heavy "participant" in the walkable places ordinance. It's uniquely primed with the red line connecting it to the two of the major job centers. 

 

We don't have plenty of options who want to live closer to core jobs and have extremely convenient public transit access. 

 

It will be interesting to see what the 2020 census info looks like for Midtown and inside 610. 

Regardless of those results, there will still be hundreds of thousands of people living in Sugar Land, Katy, et al that will need to get to Downtown. Any proposed changes need to take that into account, because those folks are not moving from the suburbs any time soon.

 

I don't have any real issues with closing the Bagby and Brazos ramps to the Spur, but the Spur is still a necessary part of Houston's transit infrastructure.

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