004n063

This may be true of 11th. Not remotely true of Austin or Lamar. You're unlikely to go more than two blocks without passing another bike, and based on clothing, it looks to be about 50-50 recreational vs. transport. And while I am the only teacher at my school who uses a bike for commuting, there are several who take the bus, and plenty if students who bike, use a scooter, or walk. If the argument is bike infrastructure versus pedestrian infrastructure (it shouldn't be, for obvious reasons), then of course I choose pedestrian. But I think it would be totally irresponsible to prioritize pedestrian infrastructure to the point of neglecting bicycle infrastructure, for the following reasons: While a lot of pedestrian infrasfructure in the city is indefensibly bad, what really kills the walkability is the massive distances that exponential parking allotment creates. I live in "walkable" Midtown, and the two nearest businesses to me (Retrospect and Rado) are both about a 10-minute walk. The rest of Midtown - including the red line - is at least a 15min walk, and Montrose, Downtown, Museum, and EaDo are all far enough to require exercise clothes. That's pretty standard for most of the inner loop, with a handful of pockets making up the exceptions. We are decades of radically different development patterns away from anything resembling a true convenience-level walkability. Bikes are a totally different ballgame, however. Biking within Midtown, even as bike-unfriendly as it can be, is not noticeably less convenient than driving was. Biking to Montrose is comparable, depending on how far into Montrose I'm going. EaDo is a slightly longer trip by bike, but then I don't have to worry about parking. Biking within both Montrose and EaDo feels considerably more convenient and less stressful than driving ever did, and obviously it's much more convenient (and much less sweaty) than walking. All of that is to say, I think the city of Houston could lean into bikeability in a much more effective way (in terms of modeshare shift) than it could walkability. The key is to approach the issue at the level of the intra-neighborhood trip. We're not trying to ger the Med Center or Uptown worker living on 24th Street in the Heights to abandon his car and bike to work every day all year. We're trying to make the bike a better way of getting to school, to the dentist, to the bar, to brunch, and, eventually, as cargo bikes and/or smaller-load grocery trips become more popular, to the grocery store. And then, if there's a fast, frequent bus or rail line that used to be a 25min walk away, now you're thinking about making the 7min bike ride to the stop and taking that line in instead of paying for parking and sittinf in traffic every day. Are protected lanes on 11th St. specifically integral to that system? No, I don't really think so. But that's because 11th was one of only a couple of bad east-west stroads in the Heights, so there have always been alternatives. But they do seem to have curbed bad driving and even made driving a little less appealing of an option. I mean, let's say it's yesterday and you and a few friends are meeting up at Loro for an early dinner. You managed to get off work a little early, so you had a chance to go home - say, on Beverly between 9th and 10th. Three years ago, you would have driven without thinking about it - just pop up to 11th and zoom on down. But now...

Shoutout to chlorophyll

Love parking garages with big, front-facing surface parking lots.

Was this formerly Louis' Lunch or something?

My rich friends refuse to go to Whole Foods on principle because they think it's too expensive. Meanwhile, my too-broke-for-an-apartment ass never had an issue. I choose my grocery store based on 1) what they have vs. what I'm looking for, 2) distance 3) safe bike routes and bike parking. Do about 80% of my grocery shopping at Phoenicia now, maybe 10% at La Michoacana and 10% at the Montrose HEB. I'd go to the MacGregor HEB more often (I'm pretty much at the midpoint between there and Phoenicia) if they'd do something about the crossing from the Brays trail. It's just annoying enough to choose Montrose.

Oh I've been emailing him. Guy's gotta be sick of me by now. and school!

Interesting. This is an essential route and I really hope it moves forward, but I'm curious about the Preston Street section, particularly between Main and Austin. Given the current geometry, I'd assume that the most sensible route would be to upcurb the current onstreer parking spots to make the ped/bike right of way continuous from its widest points. But I imagine that that would be contentious. If they took that approach, though, they could do one-way paved bike paths on either side, which would make it easier to navigate around the trees. I think any plan to cut down the trees would doom this project, but I'm curious about whether the city would rather go on-street or off-street with the bikeway there. I assume Commerce will be on-street à la Austin, at least for this section. (I think Harrisburg Trail-Navigation may be off-street, with just a wide, smooth sidewalk like Cleburne, though I base that on nothing.)

As a bike-commuting teacher, this kind of statement really makes me want to walk into the ocean

I don't think I'm making excuses. I simply explained why nobody with any transit knowledge would have expected the Silver Line to be a high-ridership line. Anyone with high expectations was kidding themselves. The University Line would be a replacement and upgrade for the heavily used #25 Richmond line in conjunction with the 153 Harwin express bus. It's also a line that seems much more likely to experience a significant increase in ridership after its introduction than the Silver Line, due to the high-value corridor from Greenway to Wheeler. A bus that comes every six minutes, doesn't get stuck in traffic, and connects to the Red line has much more appeal to the general population along the corridor than the current bus, which already gets a lot of riders.

There's no question that the Silver Line was not a great choice of route for a flagship service (though my recollection is that the project was more of a TIRZ-led project than a METRO brainchild?), and they flubbed plenty of details when it came to things like stop location/spacing, signal priority, and frequency. Combined, they made the paltry ridership numbers unsurprising to those of us who are deeply interested in transit functionality. But that's a very small number of people, and @j.33's concern is spot-on: as the University Line gets ready to begin the years-long, expensive, highly visible, and traffic-slowing process of constructing the line, it's almost impossible to imagine Whitmire not trying to intervene, and an underperforming Silver Line is an easy tool for that objective.

All I want is CDMX-style carts in all of the parks. Not sure if it's a demand problem or a regulation problem, but dammit I want a torta with salsa from a bucket.

I so want to believe that the University Line won't get axed...

🤦

"Exposed" brick on the inside. This whole building is so slightly weird.

Birria being a famously car-friendly food. Then again, Salads-2-Go or whatever is is springing up all over, so what do I know.

Still far too many parking lots throughout the district, but there are some nice residential pockets (the area that stretches a few blocks north and west of Elizabeth Baldwin Park is really lovely) and mixed-use pockets (Mid-Main and its more oil-bro cousin, Bagby), but there's just too much wasteland in between. That, combined with the highway-lite designs (and accompanying vehicular speeds) of Crawford, San Jacinto, Fannin, Travis, Milam, Louisiana, Smith, and Brazos, and the unpleasant stroadiness of McGowan, Elgin, and Alabama, makes Midtown's continued listlessness unsurprising to me. Throw in a high concentration of shelters and recovery centers and you've got a recipe for a place that's hard to dynamize. Housing is generally affordable, but I would personally prefer that as a consequence of oversupply, rather than suppressed demand.

Corner of Preston and Caroline

I've been without a car for a year and a half now, and while I'd never consider buying one again, I think it's silly to scold people for using cars in a city that consistently makes cars the easiest option for many tasks. The goal should be to consistently cut into the overall automotive modeshare by making alternatives viable and appealing. If people who used to drive for everything now drive to the grocery store, home depot, and work, but bike to coffee, the bookstore, and school, and walk to the park and the bar, then that's a win. More importantly, though, like another commenter said, this has nothing to do with the 11th street bike lanes.

As a general rule, I'm against fare-free transit. While I think transit should be heavily subsidized, and people who need free rides should be able to get them via some kind of process, I think transit agencies need revenue streams that aren't subject to mayoral whims.

Hard to imagine a worse land usage to front a rail stop than a car dealership, so I'm pretty optimistic that whatever comes next will be an improvement.

I'm not ultra-close to the 11th project, but this statement - along with similar ones about the Montrose Boulevard project - is deeply frustrating to me. Do people not realize how insanely hard it is to get anything done for non-drivers in this city? It took six 311 calls to get the knocked-over school speed limit sign outside of my school moved a few inches off of the three-foot sidewalk. Not fixed, not even cleared away. Moved a foot and a half. I know that's a pretty stretched anecdote, but my point is this: every piece of infrastructure built for pedestrians and cyclists is the product of years - usually over a decade - of begging, clawing, fundraising, desperate (and mostly ignored) public outreach, and compromise with the twelve angry NIMBYs who default to opposition on everything. It may or may not be true in this instance, but the paradigm of bending over backwards to appease every opposing voice has been strangling this city (the whole country, really) for too damn long.

Update on one of those: Definitely doing that field trip again next year.

Considering that the teeth of Houston's Vision Zero was basically that we don't super love it when pedestrians die, it would be a pretty wild move to abandon it.

It's a 10-15min walk from TMCTC, and not a terribly comfortable one as of now.

I remember at one point the renderings had only the area within the Helix as parkland, with buildings lining the full way. Now I see a surface parking lot and two parcels of landscaped park where buildings had once been planned. Is this the new permanent vision? Or are they placeholders until they get organic demand for the other parcels? I'm sure the additional park areas will be nice (can't say the same for the surface lot), but there's a lot to be said for an enclosed park, especially in a city as sweltering as ours. Would be really cool to see residential over GFR eventually fill in those three parcels.