Highway6

Not worth a new thread, but I have an observation/gripe. I realize most bus lines run like a wheel's spokes, In to Out, but Metro seems to do better job with the Crosstown routes in some part of the city, while in other parts, they don't exist. Between 610 and 8, there are only 2 N-S crosstowns and they are at either end, PostOak and Gessner. There is nothing on Bingle, ChimneyRock, or Fondern/PineyPt/Bunker Hill. My guess is the Villages had their say in making it this way... A Bingle/Voss crosstown connecting the Pinemont P&R to the Hilcroft P&R and intersecting main bus lines on Richmond, Westheimer, Longpoint and Memorial, all of which run DT, would be very useful.

If you are a lover of the PB&J, may I suggest adding BaconBits, and then garlic-onion croutons if you're feeling really adventurous. It works best with Raspberry preserves.... HEAVEN !!!!

Just to make sure I understand what I read.. the MAC boundaries are exclusion zones to this new proposed ordinance ? I don't really see this as zoning. Like the language in the pdf says - It's meant to discourage hi-rises next to single-family residential, not prohibit. Prohibiting commercial would be zoning. Of course, It could have the same effect of prohibiting if the site is too restrictive, unless the developer/architect finds a way. Would this new proposal save the people off Bissonnet from their tower of terror? I don't think so. The Ashby site is 320x220. SFR only exists on the back side. So per the new rules, they would have to be 50' from the back PL, and 100' back at 90' elevation and higher. Plus you have the 10' building line up front and sides. So You could still have a floor plate of roughly 300' x 160' for the first 40' and that slopes back to 300'x110' at 90' and up. Looking at the Ashby plans and elevations.. What did they propose? Their Ground level floor plate with parking is roughly 300'x200' . However, that includes significant retail and an additional 10' landscape/pedestrian buffer along Bissonnet. Lose your 40' of ground level retail depth, lose that 10' buffer and you are still in business. As for higher up.. the developers were already stepping back significantly at around 70-80' elevation it looks like. Judging from the elevations, it looks like the depth of the actual tower part is about 120-130', the width along Bissonet is about 275' and it's about 70' away from the back property line. With maintaining that 100' distance and pushing the building forward that extra 10'.. they'd only be losing about 10'-20' in tower depth. What would the result be? Ground level retail.. Out. Pedestrian zone off Bissonnet.. Out. Slightly skinner and disproportional tower - In. A residential development that strives to add streetlife to the community - Out. If this ordinance goes through, and Buckhead plays ball, would the city have any ground left to say No. The anti-Ashby clan will find out that they'd be better off had they kept their mouths shut.

Google+ , In Praise of Starting Over.

Ahh.. You're too kind. Lockmat's opening post stated.. "or even conceptual ideas architects had for Houston." So I'm pretty sure my icon is qualified to be here. Plus... it's a helluva lot more realistic than the downtown dome.

My Lord, it would have been beautiful....

Joined yesterday. Pros: Google clean and simple I think it leans more towards Twitter than FB... There is the Feed but no wall. You make your directed (circles) status updates, and people can comment on those... but I really like that there is no wall. Friends can't clutter up my profile - no invites, no happy bdays, no need to police your own profile. No games, No apps, no farmsvilles, and so far, no yappy minors... this is all good. Not only can you post per circle, but read per circle too. I like this.. This is how I use my Bloglines news feeder - Channels of interest. Nicely integrated - My gmail, which is always open, now that I'm plus... the gray bar at the top of gmail has a direct + link, +notifications, and the directed share form. Cons: Can't trim the feed yet. - I have one friend in 1 particular circle.. his posts are fine, but he's already loaded with friends responding. I don't wanna mute my friend, but i don't yet have the option to mute his friends. I hope this changes. Linked with picassa. At first I liked that there wasn't going to be photo tagging.. but it looks like they're making that possible with the rebranded picassa. My problem with this is my picassa isn't for the public.. i use it as my photo host for my website, and i share event photos like weddings and such. You can go and privatize the albums, but this will force me to use picassa in a way i didn't want to. I think circles are going to be the selling point for people fed up with FB. My FB is easily 50% people i really don't give a damn about... lots of acquaintances and people you feel obligated to accept. Now I can just shove them in my "Acquaintances" circle and easily ignore them and not share with them. I like the focus on directed interaction and control. You can even make it where a post or response cant be forwarded, or retweeted. Haven't tried the Hangout video thing yet.. no cam. Die FB Die.

I stand corrected on the benches and shade... but location still sucks. If it's located such that only one building is going to benefit from it, I guess it shouldn't even considered a 'public space'.

I've always thought this was a waste of a public space. It's on the wrong side of Main and Holcomb to get any visitors from the TMC. No benches, no shade. I pass here multiple times a week and I've never seen anyone even attempting to enjoy it.

Mostly gray and flat.. a little bit of white paint thrown in for good measure.

It's not faster for me to have to input the fruit code, since I don't know it by heart. It's not faster to have to wait on the one employee who has dominion over 8 self checkouts to come okay my alcohol purchase. Having never worked in a grocery store, it's not faster for me to scan items. I haven't done it a thousand times and learned how to hold each item so that it scans on the first pass. It's not faster to not have someone else bag my groceries while I'm paying. It's not faster when i have big items that I have to move off the bagging area to make room for other items and I get the "Return your item to the bagging area" warning. This is a welcome change. Random Tangent Time I also hate when I go deposit a check at the bank and the teller tells me I can just do that through an aTm. a ) No i can't.. Burned once, depositing at a BoA aTm.. never again. b ) How stupid can a teller be to encourage the use of their machine replacements ?

I'll give you one guess as to which Kroger this article is referring to.... For those of you who haven't visited Disco Kroger recently, In addition to removing the self-checkouts, they've set up an express-checkout area that works very well, I think. They have 1 line set up that leads to 6 or so mini-express checkouts that are similar to, say a CVS counter. No converyor belt. Not enough counter surface for some greedy bastard with over 15 items. Overall, I'd say it's just as fast as the self-checkout, but I've never been fond of them anyways.

So you too think you have the right to break the law if you think nobody is watching.... on the highway.. not me. Anarchy triumphs.

So, are you saying you never speed... ever !?!

I did not look at it from HCTRA's side, and i agree with most of what you say except i do want to point out that not everyone would turn them in. Some people need the tollroads every day and their eztags would become necessary evils. But.. taking HCTRA out of the equation, the possibility of escalation still stands. What if this arizona company, or any other company, comes up with a system that does the same thing without the need for EZtags. If we allow one small-fine big brother intrusion in the name of safety and needed revenue, I don't see why we would pass up on any opportunity for bigger-fine auto ticketing if the technology came along... and the technology will come along eventually. I didn't realize we had so many cameras downtown... just wait till they figure out how to tie in an auto-ticketing system when those cameras catch you jaywalking or illegally parking.

I'm more arguing against the fact that Big Brother was ever installed in the first place.. I do understand the city is a bind, and i too don't want them to take a 20m hit from a bad contract, but i'm certainly glad they're still fighting this in court as well. Some of my examples were overboard on purpose to show what opening the door could lead to in theory, but it's not all hysterical. Speeding is no less dangerous than running red lights. Having Transtar team with CoH to issue speeding tickets... Why is that unfathomable? Why is that hysterical? It would be safer. It would be massive revenue for the city. The hardware is already in place. By your previous statement - "We turn it on, we don't have to go to court, we will receive badly needed income, and can move officers to more needed areas." , I have to assume you would gladly welcome this big brother addition to the family.

It could be that slippery of a slope. We don't even need a contract with an arizona company.. The capability to use Transtar to fine speeders is in place now.. tweak to the software.. and bam, it's possible. Would it be safer.... Check. Would it be a massive revenue stream for the city... Check. Only the political will to propose and implement this is missing. But it's not just tickets for red-light running... That I can understand. It's also ticket for not coming to a 100% stop when making a right on red. That's ridiculous. I'm an adult, I'm an alert driver. When I'm approaching a red, I'm checking out the pedestrian signals and looking for pedestrians 50' out. Most of the time, I can easily ascertain before coming to a 100% stop if there are any pedestrians or other vehicular traffic that I should yield too. And if I can't ascertain, I stop till I'm sure. If i slightly roll through a red, and get caught by a cop.. that's my bad luck, but I can stomach it. But having a camera catch you every time !!! And not coming to a complete stop isn't that dangerous.. you're going 1 mph at that point. That's certainly not more dangerous than every driver on the freeway speeding.

Recycling camera catches you throwing cardboard in the trashcan instead of the green box... ticket in the mail. Your GMC Onstar notifies HPD when you don't buckle your seatbelt.... ticket in the mail. Transtar traffic camera's get upgraded.... You change lanes without signaling... ticket in the mail. You pull into the full grocery store parking and see 1 spot left. The truck to your left does a crappy parking job forcing you to poorly park, and your rear right tire goes over the line into the next spot. Good thing the store has their "double parking cams" activated.... Ticket. In. The. Mail. Any big brother sucks. Removal of observation and discretion of a human law enforcer is not a good thing.

It's big brother, that's the gripe. Do you want fines mailed to you when a machine catches you jaywalking? Do you want fines mailed to you when you return to the parking meter 5 minutes too late? Do you ever speed ? You know how Transtar works, right ? Reads your EZtag and determines how long it takes you to get from one sensor to the next, multiplied and averaged out for every car on the freeway. If they can send you a ticket in the mail for not paying a toll, what's to stop big brother from sending you a fine in the mail every time you speed on the freeway ? On your typical Houston freeway, non rush-hour, 99% of the cars are going at least slightly over the speed limit. We are a city of speeders. Guess we all should get auto-ticketed since speeding is dangerous, right ? Late for a job interview, pregnant wife to the hospital, kid with a broken arm... none of that matters.. cuz you're breaking the law and deserve that $200 fine in the mail. And every Houstonian does it every day. You sign off on big brother in the name of safety in one place, you open the door for worse !! Oh, but the revenue stream for the city would be marvelous, and we wouldn't have to have cops doing this job anymore, so I guess it's alright.. right ?

sunuvabizcuit @#$%R@% http://www.houstongovnewsroom.org/go/doc/2155/1130827/

That leaves you with two options - either require all the customers that arrive by car to walk around the building to access the store from the new wide sidewalk or require the stores to have two entrances, front and back. Where would a retailer's BoH, Back of House / storage, go? Where would delivery trucks and garbage trucks come? You want dumpsters and loading docks in the parking lot that the majority of their customers would use ? By suggesting a back entrance, you are suggesting a store with no back. This works in some places for some retailers, and there are places in Houston that do just this, but its certainly not a fit-all solution in a car-centric city. Think grocery stores wanna have 10 checkouts in front and in back? Think retailers want to double their public access points and needed security ? What you're gaining in aesthetics from the street, you'd be losing in practicability for most retailers and leasing flexibility for developers.

I had a 3/3.5 townhome in the Galleria area for 1800 in 07..... no 2/2 is worth that much. You should look away from apts, esp newer ones; their prices are ridiculous. http://houston.craig...2467093036.html $1360 for a 2/1 in midtown..... and i doubt adding an extra bathroom is gonna increase it by $700.. i'd check out that complex since they're one of the older ones in midtown. - http://metromidtown-apartments.com/floorplans2.asp?plan=4

If you go by avg height of buildings in the Top 100, we do slip to 4th, but we'd actually be higher up than NYC, so I'm not sure how useful a stat that is. Chicago............1,026 Atlanta...............1,024 Los Angeles........998 Houston...............963 New York City.......958 Philadelphia........950 I found a list that ranks cities by number of buildings over 12 stories where we don't fare as well... but at some point I think that transitions from measuring & comparing heights of a city's skylines to breadth of skyline. New York City.......5,891 Chicago................1,117 Los Angeles...........505 Honolulu.................449 San Francisco....... 415 Houston...................355 Philadelphia............324 DC...........................313 Miami...................... 295 Dallas .....................239 Boston ....................229 Arlington .................226 Atlanta......................225

While I agree that there are plenty ways to measure "tallest city", I don't there's any question that Houston is the 3rd tallest. Atlanta and LA may each have 1 in the top 10, unlike us... but those 1 buildings each are all they have in the top 25... and they have significantly less in the top 100. By your argument, Chicago could claim the tallest city in the US by virtue of having the single tallest building... I just think you're decreasing the sample size to unusable by sticking at top 10. And i think setting arbitrary limits and definitions like "supertall" and over 300 meters is exactly that..arbitrary. Ya just need to go by the rankings. I set my limit at top100 because that's what's available. And maybe my sample size by sticking to top 100 is too small, but unless you can find a top 200, 500, 1000... we work with what we have. If you were to add up the cumulative heights of every building in the US top 100 and sort by city, this is what you would have. We are the solid 3rd.

These are Current.. not planned, under construction, or demolished. I would say with these numbers that nothing remotely compares with NYC and Chicago, but that yes we are in distant 3rd, and that Miami is no where close to overtaking us. In the US top 10... Chicago has 4 NYC has 4 Atlanta and LA each have 1. In the US top 25... Chicago has 7 NYC has has 7 Houston has 3 Philly has 2 Dallas has 2 Cleveland, Seattle, Atlanta, LA have 1 In the top 100.. (The current approx cut off is 725' to join this club) NYC 33 Chicago 19 Houston 9 LA 6 Philly 5 Atlanta / Dallas 4 Seattle / Minneapolis 3 Boston / Charlotte / Miami / Pittsburgh / SF 2 Cleveland / Detroit / Indianapolis / Vegas / Jersey City / & Mobile, AL 1 Source - http://en.wikipedia....e_United_States Even if the Miami booster is counting by building heights and not number of buildings.. We have 9 over 725'... They have 2. That's a difference of 5075' . Unless by 700'+, that poster means 1450'.. those 3 buildings aren't going to nearly catch them up.