Reefmonkey

I'd just caution against giving that article more weight that it deserves. It's from a little quasi-professional suburban community online newspaper and it seems to have a serious axe to grind. To wit:

Quote

The recent passage of Senate Bill 6 has gotten little publicity, perhaps because the Houston based media likes the control their city has over millions of us who live in the suburbs.

(emphasis mine)

Pretty unprofessional tone there. From my perspective it seems the reporter is taking everything Meyers said and shoehorning it into the reporter's agenda. The reporter says "Meyers is basically the staff of unincorporated Fort Bend County. There is no other expert to send to vital meetings." Meyers is a CPA and real estate broker, and according to the article "much of [his] time is spent planning the next road that fixes the problem of roadway congestion."  I don't think that makes one an expert on emergency management. But county commissioners are elected officials, and like to make sure they are included in big newsworthy events, whether their input is valuable or not.

And while Meyers is pushing for Fort Bend residents to vote themselves out of Houston's ETJ, he is never actually shown to explicitly support the area self-incorporating.The reporter intersperses paragraphs with hypotheticals about cities self-incorporating among paragraphs reporting what Meyers said, and I can see how that might give the impression of Meyers advocating for self-incorporation, if you look more closely, he never really does.  Even the line about Meyers "pointing out" that "if unincorporated areas were incorporated as their own cities and towns, there would be municipal staff available to go to emergency meetings. If you look closely, there is no direct quote of Meyers saying that, and no context around his supposedly "pointing out". It's very possible that the reporter asked ""if unincorporated areas were incorporated as their own cities and towns, would there be municipal staff available to go to emergency meetings?" and Meyers might have simply answered "yes, that's probably true," but that in no way would be Meyers saying that these areas should incorporate. Given this reporter's already-demonstrated journalistic unprofessionalism and bias, it's not unreasonable to suspect that the reporter may have made such a distortion.

A quick search shows that Meyers is pushing hard for an amendment to the Open Meetings Act that would create an exemption for meetings held during a declared disaster like Harvey, so that's obviously what he sees as the solution to dealing with OMA hamstringing communication during disasters, not incorporation.

I don't know one way or another, but from what the article didn't say and from I learned about Meyers from sources outside the article, it's still very possible that Meyers is one of those conservative small-government type exurbanites who wouldn't favor an additional layer of municipal government on top of his unincorporated county government.

Also, individual small cities voting for more local drainage "improvements" independently and without regional coordination is one of those areas I'm talking about where incorporation could possibly make flood control worse. Katy is upstream of Houston in the Buffalo Bayou watershed. Surface water that leaves Katy comes downstream to Houston. Moving stormwater more quickly out of Katy can make flooding worse in Houston, without Katy knowing or caring. And if Katy makes drainage improvements that benefit it, this could open more land in Katy that is currently not feasible to build on because of water to development (remember, Katy is an area that used to be primarily rice fields), which would make the overall stormwater runoff problem worse, affecting those of us who live downstream of Katy.

1 hour ago, Trae said:

 

I read about some of the flood issues from this article. Maybe you know something different since you're also closely involved:

 

Another problem that came up during the flooding of Hurricane Harvey was that county commissioners could not have emergency meetings as one single group.

“We could not all meet with the county judge because of the open meetings act,” Meyers said.

The open meetings act requires a government meeting to be announced to the public three days before it takes place.

Meyers pointed out that if unincorporated areas were incorporated as their own cities and towns, there would be municipal staff available to go to emergency meetings. Right now, Meyers is basically the staff of unincorporated Fort Bend County. There is no other expert to send to vital meetings. He has a very small staff that represents more residents than many cities in Texas.

“It made it difficult to get quality information during the flooding,” Myers said.

Meyers says the Houston area has a problem with ETJs that are not found in other parts of the state. He says Houston has a very high population that lives in its ETJs. Most major cities in Texas, he says, only have a small percentage of people who live in their ETJs, he said.

He notes that they are taking tax money that’s needed to serve millions of people, and spending that money in Houston instead of the unincorporated areas.

https://coveringkaty.com/local-news/commissioner-meyers-talks-annexation-and-houstons-ability-to-tax-katy-residents/

 

And with separate cities then maybe one that floods more often passes a law that requires higher elevation for homes or requires more detention ponds, etc. You see it now with the City of Katy passing its flood control bond last year that was in addition to the county wide one. What if that was more widespread? That would only happen with cities. The MUDs and ETJ of Houston does the bare minimum for almost everything.

 

And definitely a guy lol

I’ve read the article and I actually agree with it, the taxation without representation issue, etc, I’m not sure I understand where you’re going with your focus on the Open Meetings Act and emergency meetings among county commissioners. I’m talking about long term planning being paramount, so emergency meetings don’t apply to that. I’m also talking about a hypothetical regional flood control district, that yes, meetings of its board of commissioners would be subject to OMA, but the day to day operations of its staff wouldn’t be. Even with existing organizations, during Harvey Ed Emmett didn’t have to give advance notice and convene a quorum of the county commissioners every time he talked with the Office of Emergency Management about how to handle the ongoing situation. I’m not sure how having more meetings with municipal staff from multiple cities braving flood waters to attend them would have helped in the middle of Harvey .  But maybe I’m not understanding what you’re getting at. 

A Texas legislature-chartered regional flood and land use management authority would supersede HArris’s flood district. 

I’m sure there would be a group response to to another Harvey like disaster, but responses to disasters are too little to late, preventing Harvey-like and non-Harvey-like disasters disasters takes decades of coordinated regional planning 

 From my professional perspective, I can imagine worse happening if people take the attitude that separate municipal authorities is the answer.  Houston, Harris County, FEMA, Corps of Engineers, the Texas Legislature, had all been asleep on the job when it came to recognizing and managing the intensive growth in Southeast Texas for the last 50 years, but that doesn’t mean smaller authorities taking separate responsibility for land use management is the answer. A small town of 5,000-10,000 carved out of some suburbs with realtors and soccer moms serving part time on a city council with little if any full time city staff isn’t going to have the expertise to consider how city growth in their boundaries, and the boundaries of the cities neighboring them, will affect people downstream of them.

I’m not making an argument against splitting into smaller municipalities, but this is an argument against Trae’s idea that splitting into smaller municipalities will be better for Harvey like events. My concern is an attitude like Trae’s (not to pick on her) would lead to complacency which would stall impetus for the trans-County regional land use planning that is actually needed, and again this is coming from 20 years of working closely with flood control authorities in several counties in the region. 

1 hour ago, IronTiger said:

 

I disagree with the "balkanization of Harris County is bad" rhetoric because Houston is already sprawling enough in terms of sheer square miles, enough that with minimal cutting and trimming, you could fit Chicago, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Manhattan, Washington DC, and Boston all inside the city limits. 

I only talked about balkanization in terms of regional disaster response and flood control planning, that I don't agree that a bunch of new cities incorporating would help this. Again, regional disasters, even normal rain event water flows are no respectors of political boundaries. We need more consolidation of land use planning to deal with this at not just the county, but transcounty regional level. Again, I give the Harris Galveston Subsidence District as an example, just on an even bigger scale. A bunch of little municipalities with their own city planning and land use rules is the opposite of this. I'm not saying that the new cities all coordinating their land use planning under the kind of regional body I'm proposing wouldn't work out just fine, just that new little cities popping up isn't by itself automatically going to make emergency response to regional events like Harvey better, or land use planning to premptively mitigate the impacts of such events better, as was suggested by Trae. Other than that, I'm all for new cities popping up, everything else probably would be better, I even think that breaking off parts of COH into independent municipalities would be a good idea  (like make the Westchase District its own city), I'm just doubtful either idea will ever go anywhere.

One "breaking up big jurisdictions" idea I think might actually be able to get some leverage, and which is sorely needed, is breaking up HISD into 2 to 4 new districts. HISD is geographically way too spread out (especially with the annexation of North Forest ISD), and is very poorly managed at the central level. The only hitch I can see is breaking it up would unavoidably change race ratios in several of the new districts, which would run it afoul of federal civil rights laws and court rulings. That's what happened when the western part of the district was tired of being neglected and tried to break off and form the Westheimer Independent School District back in the late 70s.

6 minutes ago, Houston19514 said:

 

Is this really anything more than the natural cycle that real estate (especially residential) goes through?  (Growth, Stability, Decline, Revitalization)   Are there really no comparable declining suburban areas in DFW or Austin?  (And is there really any reason to think the declining areas you see in Houston are truly in permanent decline?

It's a good point, I have a friend from college who grew up in Arlington in the DFW area, and makes some of the same flavor comments about its decline when he goes back to visit.

9 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

Echoing some of the comments on here, I tend to think that suburban self-governance provides advantages that Houston has missed out on. When I first moved to Dallas and then later to the suburbs of Austin, I thought the suburbs seemed sterile and less "real" than Houston, and I still think this is largely true. But as I have revisited Houston again and again over the years, I have noticed large swaths of the suburbs that have greatly sagged in appearance, places I remember as nice growing up (thinking particularly of the Spring/Klein area). Some places, like the area around Jones Road and FM 1960 where I was visiting family last Christmas, simply look terrible. Obviously places age and experience decline, but it doesn't need to be as sharp or as likely permanent as some of the places I'm seeing. 

 

Houston has restored and boosted its center city by targeted policies and revitalization projects, but apart from a few places like Sugarland, there are no local governments to boost and revitalize the suburbs, or create true town centers (not the fake retail-only kind) that combine retail, government offices, civic institutions, and parks in an attractive setting that generates local pride. A self-governing city takes care of itself much better than a management district or a M.U.D. or a county commissioner does. 

Can't quite say about Austin, but I think the sterility you noticed in the Dallas suburbs vs Houston back in the day may have been at least partly due to the fact that the area around Dallas is naturally mostly devoid of trees except along creeks and rivers, while much of Houston is naturally forested. However, go to Katy, plenty of suburbs as sterile as anything in Plano. And even in areas of Houston that used to be kind of pretty because of the trees, like up in the Klein area where I grew up, the new subdivisions get denuded of all existing trees and look pretty sterile.

FM 1960 has become Westheimer North, with all the problems you might imagine come along with that, and any subdivisions along that corridor, up to about about a mile north (even more depending on how far east your are - the once-nice Cypresswood subdivision and Ponderosa are really sad), and anything south, have definitely suffered.

I may have come across as "anti-incorporation" here, I'm really not. Though I grew up in an unincorporated area, I choose to live in the city limits, and I see the appeal of the Dallas suburbs. My position comes more from the position that talking about the problems in Harris County and incorporation as a solution is trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I also think that the kind of problems we're talking about in this thread are more complicated than incorporated/unincorporated. Lots of what is ugly sprawl now in Houston has been within city limits since it was still cow pastures, and being within the city limits hasn't necessarily done anything for those areas. Houston's lack of sensible zoning and city planning plays an outsize role. Also, due to my job, I've been pretty involved with the flood control professional community, have to be involved in emergency planning for plants I'm responsible for the wastewater and stormwater permitting for, have close relations with drainage/flood control district officials in Harris, Galveston, Fort Bend, Brazoria counties, as well as city officials in incorporated cities in these counties. Incorporation in Harris County probably wouldn't make flood control issues much worse, but it's going to have negligible impact on making things better. The thing that is going to fix that is to start seeing and managing regional flood control beyond county lines, beyond arbitrary political boundaries, and start managing land use in whole watersheds in an intracounty regional effort, similar to the way the Texas legislature created the Harris Galveston Subsidence District in the 70s, but on an even larger scale.

So, when people start boostering incorporation as a solution to Harris County's problems, especially flood control, I get cynical, and I apologize for that.

When was the last "supertall" greenlit in Houston, anyway? I wonder if September 11 didn't put a damper on a lot of peoples' enthusiasm for supertalls. Not that I think everyone thinks that planes flying into them is now more than an astronomical risk, but seeing quite graphically how difficult it is to rescue people high up in one of those towers if any kind of emergency occurs. But even before then, I've avoided working or staying in high floors of tall buildings on a regular basis (watched Towering Inferno on the Channel 13 Million Dollar Movie a few too many times as a kid), so that may just be my thing, and plenty of supertall buildings could have been built since then.

I have no stance one way or another on whether a supertall building should be built in Houston, but I do wonder why a passing observer would have much stake in wanting to see one built. Maybe it's a Freudian thing.

I kid, I kid.

1 hour ago, samagon said:

 

 - The novelty of scooters is a short term issue and has no real bearing on the long term outlook. 

 - There are docked bike rentals, and have been for a while. Depending on the location they are in far greater use than personal bikes.

 - Sheer. Shear is what you do to sheep.

 - Leaving rental scooters (as well as dockless bikes) anywhere is a short term problem that companies will overcome quickly by introducing policies that encourage (either with stick, or carrot) riders to put the conveyance (scooter or otherwise) in an appropriate location upon completion of use.

 - This too, I believe, is going to be a short term thing. Education on where they should/can be ridden isn't out there at all. If you asked 15 people, you'd get 15 different answers. and likely, if you asked 15 cops, there'd be a level of confusion there as well.

 

Aside from misused homonyms, most of the issues you have don't appear to be long term things, or will be things that can be fixed simply, either through company policy, or public education. 

 

so it would seem that if these are the only problems you have then give patience a chance, these things will sort themselves out.

The novelty of scooters means there is a distinct likelihood that they will have the staying power of Pokemon Go, or of Segways as the great mass mobility solution. But the problems they cause are here now. Your overall answer of "oh, things will work themselves out eventually" is not a legitimate public safety policy, and if (when) this fad fizzles out, there needs to be a discussion about how to manage the next "disruptive" business model that will appropriate public right-of-ways for the storage of their fleets/inventories.

Again, docked bikes are not scooters, they are not as likely to be used on sidewalks for the reasons I have already stated, and a bicycle requires a fairly long training period before someone learns to ride it proficiently, so no adult is going to just hop on a bike when they've never learned to ride before and immediately start riding it around a crowded city, and the fact that they have to be redocked to stop the meter from running up your credit card means they end up in designated locations and not littering sidewalks. You also overstate the numbers of docked bikes, or bikes from bike share programs in general, these programs have been hit or miss, and many large cities have been doing away with bike share programs that were never very successful (Seattle, Baltimore, eg).

The fact that scooters are too fast and dangerous for sidewalks but too slow and vulnerable for streets is not going to go away, and putting more and more of them out for use is only going to compound the problem.

Oh, and by the way, if you're going to be the kind of person who pedantically harps on single-letter typos to try to score cheap points in an internet discussion, better make sure you don't make any of your own from now on. The first letter of a sentence is capitalized, unless you're ee cummings, but you're not.

1 hour ago, samagon said:

 

so it would seem that if these are the only problems you have then give patience a chance, these things will sort themselves out.

That is correct, government employees end up getting paid for time they didn't work. Not that I begrudge the employees that, they're just pawns in a very, very stupid game that ends up costing the country even more than just agreeing to a budget would do. I still don't blame those employees who "sick out", even though they will get paid later. If enough of these "essential" employees who are forced to continue working without getting their paychecks did so, and essential services actually did grind to a standstill because of it, perhaps presidents and legislatures wouldn't get away with playing chicken with government employees' cash flow and the services we pay for as taxpayers to push their extreme agendas. Though I guess this thread should probably be moved to Way Off Topic forum.

Having lived in Dallas, I agree with both Intencity77 and Trae that independent municipalities makes for a prettier metro area, I'll take your words for it on better services, (though I disagree on Sugarland, Missouri City, etc either having better laid out or higher priced homes than unincorporated areas) I just think that in a region that has grown with suburbs in unincorporated areas for going on 70 years now, it's going to be a tough sell politically. Talking about Cypress, Klein, Katy, etc., these are all areas that grew through White Flight, making them dominated by a lot of white upper-middle-class small government Republicans. They aren't going to want to add municipal taxes onto their county taxes, aren't going to want to have to pull a city permit just to install a new water heater*, all the things that come from having a city government with city ordinances and permits to raise revenue, inspectors looking to something to fail in  every job the first time to justify their salaries, etc. So I agree that Harris County would probably be a prettier, more liveable, better managed place if the city of Houston had been kept smaller, hemmed in by tidy well run independent municipalities during the mid to late 20th Century, that ship had sailed.

Also, Trae said something about Harvey highlighting the issue of incorporated vs unincorporated areas. I disagree on two levels. First, I live in the city of limits, along Buffalo Bayou in a neighborhood that flooded, my parents live out in the Northwest unincorporated area in a neighborhood that flooded, being in an incorporated vs unincorporated area had no discernable effect on preparation for a disaster like this, or for reaction and recovery to it. Second, further balkanization of the jurisdictional makeup of the county isn't going to help us plan, both in development and emergency planning, to deal with events like this. If anything, we need further consolidation and coordination of land use planning, even beyond county lines. Having a county flood control district doesn't really do a lot of good when we live at the junction of multiple watersheds that extend across multiple counties.

*this comes from my dad being appalled when I was complaining about a COH inspector failing my Sears-installed water heater for a ridiculous reason, when he said he never had to install a water heater in 45 years of living in unincorporated Harris County.

1 hour ago, Trae said:

The most normal way seems to be that urbanized areas are incorporated into cities, while semi-rural/rural areas are unincorporated until development comes.

 Perhaps. Though just because it's the most common progression doesn't necessarily mean it's necessary or a good thing. If county-level government plus MUds and ISDs can provide the services people want/need, then why should they submit to annexation/incorporation just because "that's the way things are done"? Between my parents' two experiences and how things went down for both Clear Lake and Kingwood, annexation generally doesn't benefit the annexed, who end up paying higher taxes for lesser services, with a far lesser voice in how their community is run. Annexation is always just a tax-base grab for the city. That's why you don't see people clamoring to be annexed, and only see people pushing to incorporate when they see their area is threatened by annexation by the big city.

Harris County's "weird" situation, as you call it, came about precisely because of unchecked liberal annexation provisions that benefited big cities like Houston, at the expense of the people who were annexed. In the post-war period, when Houston was finally starting to grow, it was afraid it would be "boxed in" by neighboring cities (like Dallas and LA are), then-mayor Holcombe saying he had to prevent suburban communities from benefiting from Houston's economy without contributing to its taxbase. More than two dozen annexations took place between 1940 and 1960. In addition, after the Memorial Villages incorporated in the 50s to prevent Houston from swallowing them up, Houston moved to lock in a claim to all unincorporated areas of Harris county, to prevent them from self-incorporating or being annexed by other cities (eg Pasadena) so that Houston could annex them at its leisure. Houston's annexation efforts were so aggressive and contentious that the state legislature eventually changed the rules to prevent the enormous landgrabs Houston had been engaging in, limiting them to a 5 mile band around city limits and to 10% of a city's existing territory. Houston annexed Clear Lake in 1977 after a bill passed in the legislature that could have allowed Clear Lake to become its own city. The Kingwood annexation was so contentious that two years later the state legislature passed a bill that all but ended cities' ability to engage in similar forced annexations in the future.

So basically, Harris County is Harris County because Houston gobbled up communities before they could incorporate, and was able to prevent many of them from independently incorporating for a while, even though it wasn't ready to annex them yet (and some of those restrictions are still in place), and Houston is now limited in its ability to annex, and because of this and for other reasons, a lot of unincorporated areas don't feel a threat of annexation by Houston or any other need to self-incorporate, they feel they are doing just fine as they are.

4 hours ago, Trae said:

  Unincorporated Houston is very weird. I grew up in unincorporated Harris County and didn't realize how different it was until I moved to different places (DFW and now LA).

Harris County isn't really that anomalous. Yeah, Dallas County is mostly incorporated (with a lot of independent cities in addition to Dallas), but 65% of Los Angeles County is unincorporated. There are all sorts of different byzantine ways to deal with local jurisdiction across the country, up north you've got civil townships, parishes in Louisiana, in Florida you have the merger of the city of Miami and Dade County governments into a single government body, basically. There is no one "normal" way that Houston-Harris runs contrary to.

To answer the poll, I live in Houston city limits, so I don't have a dog in this hunt, but I've seen my parents deal with a city annexing their formerly unincorporated area, first in their main home in NW Harris County, and then their bay home on Galveston Island. In both cases getting annexed resulted in poorer services. The cities want the tax base, but don't want to have to extend services. So while I don't have any preference between options 1,2 and 4, I would strongly be opposed to option 3, for the residents' sake, so I will root for this initiative to at least buy unincorporated communities time, if not allow them some self-determination that the likes of Clear Lake never had.

On 12/24/2018 at 11:36 AM, Ross said:

Nope. There should be no further development West of the Seawall, and every effort made to remove existing development there. Behind the seawall, there should be no additional highrise development. In other words, let's not destroy Galveston by overbuilding crappy million dollar beach houses when there's no need for them.

Don't worry, thankfully, the City of Galveston is wiser than Elseed, after Ike they determined that investing any more money in infrastructure that would allow large-scale development beyond the seawall was irresponsible, and that (along with the economic downturn) cratered a proposed high rise development at Stewart Road and 12-Mile Road. The development had no business being there in the first place, as well as being environmentally unsustainable would have been a bad neighbor to surrounding neighborhoods that were already there. The developer had already broken ground (regrading and digging "lakes") and had presold some units, so certainly was out a bit of money when the project was cancelled, and in 10 years nobody has picked up where they left off because COG said they won't put in sewer and water to service the demand a highrise would create.

On 1/5/2019 at 10:17 PM, Elseed said:

Sorry bud but I'm right. Galveston should have a Hamptons type development. It'll be amazing. Oh, and Galveston should have a man made lagoon. It'll look amazing. It'll be breathtaking.

Well since I laid out very detailed reasons in both threads why your ideas for Galveston development are ill-considered, and all you could come up with in response was "no, I'm right, it would be amazing," it's pretty obvious to anyone who reads these threads that you are not right, and have no idea what you're talking about, as others have attempted to point out to you.

Well those were certainly compelling arguments. 🙄

I think it's "Rome wasn't built in a day." But still, Roman engineers were reknowned for their roadbuilding skill and the speed with which they could lay down good roads for the legions to march on. Oscar Renda Construction pretty much exemplifies the opposite of that, and the city has done a terrible job of managing its contractor.

The Memorial Drive reconstruction between Kirkwood and Eldridge has been a disaster. Oscar Renda has done a terrible job. I attended the most recent Superneighborhood meeting where all this was acknowledged by the city. They're far behind schedule and have repeatedly closed already completed and previously reopened sections. That section of Memorial just west of Kirkwood was one of the first sections supposedly finished, but then was shut down and reworked two more times. Even so, they can't seem to get things right - the Winter Oaks/Tully intersection was not supposed to be configured the way it is, and to "fix" it they had to install a light that routes people turning left through a small parking lot. They've also bottlenecked cross-streets. Ashford Forest northbound just south of Memorial was down to one lane for months in late 2017-early 2018, mostly just used as storage for construction equipment, and then reopened, only to be closed again for several weeks this late summer-fall. Both times it caused through traffic to cut through my neighborhood, resulting in people running stopsigns, speeding around loading/unloading school buses, etc., and nothing was done to stop it until people in my neighborhood mounted a phone campaign to harass the city council and police to post cops in the neighborhood to catch speeders, stopsign runners, etc.

Very occasionally there have been projects out in the field where I've worked 14 days straight, and long hours (sometimes even having to pull overnighters for technical reasons) but thankfully these have been very few and far between, and most of the time I'm a 5 day a week, 9 to 9.5 hours a day person, and I'm good about leaving work at work when I head home for the day. I know a lot of employers demand long hours, especially of younger employees, as "proof" of "committment", of "paying dues" and some people like to pride themselves on working long hours, but study after study has shown that longer hours leads to less efficiency, there are diminishing gains to longer hours, and at a certain point (~60 hours) a person actually gets less done than someone who works 40 hours.

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/crunchmode/econ-hours-productivity.html

https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies

12 hours ago, skooljunkie said:

That photo is of N Kirkwood at Memorial which is being rebuilt. The masts are new, as the road is nearly complete now. Google street view shows the history quite well. 

I'm well aware of the history of that particular intersection, as I live right there and have been dealing with the construction for well over two years now. I merely picked it to be a visual aid of the kind of setup I am talking about because it's by where I live so it was very convenient to take a picture of it. It is not, however, the only intersection I have seen like this, nor is the duration it has been in that configuration the longest I have seen an intersection left like that by a long shot. There are some I drive through frequently that have been that way for over a year.

1 hour ago, terra002 said:

Going to have to disagree with you on almost everything you said. 

Okay...

Usually if someone disagrees with someone else, they give cogent reasons why.

Except there is a sociological aspect to e-scooters there isn't with a bike. First, everyone is familiar with a bike, but there is a novelty aspect to scooters, and again, up until now at least, virtually 100% of the bikes on the streets have been ridden by people who owned them. That's limited the shear numbers of bikes and their impact on pedestrians, in a way that having fleets of scooters around for anyone to use already has. Also, bike owners have more invested in the bike, aren't just going to leave it anywhere when they stop riding it. Also as regular riders, they're more likely to comply with the laws. Furthermore, besides being illegal, trying to ride a big bulky bike on an even partially crowded city sidewalk is an exercise in frustration, which naturally deters people from trying to get away with it. Not so with scooters, which are much easier to zip through a crowd on. You simply can't say "well bikes haven't been a problem before, so fleets of rentable e-scooters lying around won't be either." It's apples and oranges.

Actually though, I've seen intersections where all of the signal lighting was removed during reconstruction, and then the mast arm lighting was installed, and then a short time later they go back and restring wire span lighting, so while I appreciate all of your attempts at explanation, it's not always the case. Sometimes the wire span lighting doesn't even look like the same lights that were up before, or at least are a reconfiguration.I wonder why, if they are taking the time to do that, they don't just commission the mast arm lights. And I still wonder why at several intersections I regularly drive through, the mast arm installations have been up for over a year at least, but the new lights have not been put into commission yet.

On 8/27/2018 at 3:04 PM, Luminare said:

 

While I appreciated the Vox article and video that I saw. I'm surprised at the lack of self-awareness that these kinds of groups have. For the past decade they have been advocating for more people using bikes and other forms of transit and then the market immediately finds an opportunity and fills that gap and then all the sudden its an issue and it seems to want to control the market. It just comes off as dense. A prime example of be careful what you wish for.

 

I agree with you though. A middle ground would be to provide more bike racks or zones for parking these things, but I'm honestly fine with the more chaotic nature as it currently exist. The mere fact that these things are just sitting anywhere on the street brings a bigger bike presence that just wasn't there before. Its almost a necessary evil to get to the point where we would like to get to which is people riding more bikes in more situations.

I'm a fan of scooters for the last mile transit problem, in fact, I use one myself, though a human-powered Razor A5 Lux, not an e-scooter, to get me to and from the bus stop, so that I can leave my car at home on nice days. I don't think, however, we should so quickly pooh-pooh peoples' concerns about e-scooter apps. I was in San Francisco a while back, and I saw the problem with these scooters littering sidewalks, I saw how they caused congestion and slowdown on the sidewalks of both pedestrian and wheeled traffic. That's not increasing mobility, that's reducing it. And some of these scooters get up to nearly 30 miles an hour. That's way too fast to be safe on sidewalks, especially with an inexperienced rider who just downloaded an app, but these things aren't great sharing the road with cars, either, where they can't necessarily keep up with the flow of traffic so can slow it down, and are low visibility, easy for a motorist to miss. And the problem is the very nature of the app business model is going to lean away from encouraging people to be courteous in their use of these things. When riders have no more commitment to the piece of hardware they're riding than the few minutes they are on it, and don't really care what happens to it when they stop riding it, a significant portion are going to just leave them anywhere, without any concern for whether it inconveniences or even injures someone. Unfortunately, there are just a lot of inconsiderate a-holes in this world. And this model also encourages a lot more casual, occasional, unskilled riders than people owning their own scooters would, which is going to put them and the pedestrians around them at greater risk.

I've recently noticed around the city intersections where stoplights attached to rigid steel pylons arching over the street have been installed, but these are nonfunctional, and the lights are covered in burlap. Instead, a second set of stoplights has been strung up, suspended by wire, and that's the set that it actually functional. Often times the nonfunctional set is fairly new, and by that I mean several months to a year old, so not some obsolete setup where it would make sense that it no longer works.

It seems like its a waste of taxpayers' money to have two sets of hardware, one of which is apparently not even hooked up, just sitting at intersections like this, not to mention it's an eyesore, makes the intersection look cluttered. Anyone else notice this and/or know why it's so common?

To provide the clarification some people may need, the following picture is to illustrate the physical setup I am talking about only. This intersection has not been in this setup very long, I only used it as a visual aid because it happens to be right by where I live and so was convenient to snap a picture of.

On 12/30/2018 at 10:44 PM, Elseed said:

 

Nah, thats limited thinking. Thats a very old school backwards texan type thinking.

Oh yeah, and pushing for spending large sums of money for intensive luxury developments on a low-lying, hurricane-prone barrier island in a time of rising sea levels is just so "forward thinking."🙄 You accuse me of “not being good at business,” but assessing risk is an important part of business you’re apparently completely clueless about.

Another point on your ridiculous "let's make Galveston a playground for the uber rich" premise, at the end of the canal my family's vacation home in Galveston is on, is a house that belonged to Ken Lay of Enron until his death. The next canal over, the house that Joe Jamail built in 1987 after he was the winning lawyer on the Texaco-Pennzoil lawsuit. The $10.5 billion dollar judgement was the largest in history to date, and the joke was that Jamail let Pennzoil keep some of the money. Galveston has been a playground for the uber rich of Houston for over 30 years (at least), even before it had the "crystal clear lagoon" (which it has now had in Palm Beach at Moody Gardens for over 20), and even without "Hamptons-type developments". Any uber-rich person who still finds Galveston lacking isn't going to be swayed into making the hour and a half drive to Galveston by the addition of another "crystal clear blue lagoon" chlorinated pool or more Beachtown-like developments, he's going to hop in his G6 and either go to the real Hamptons or the Caribbean in 2 and a half hours. Anyone who is "good at business" would tell you that suggestiong Galveston try to capture that market is idiotic.

On 12/23/2018 at 9:45 PM, Elseed said:

 

You're probably not very good in business. Nor do you have an imagination; pity.

 Seems you're the one without any imagination as you seem to need every beach town to be some artificial Disneyfied simulacrum of another place in order for you to be able to enjoy it. And it's obvious from your other "make it like the Hamptons" post in the other thread, you actually have very little knowledge of what Galveston actually has to offer, as you were completely unaware of Beachtown until someone else brought it up, and your calls for a "crystal clear blue lagoon", which can only be accomplished via chlorination, are already available on the island at Moody Garden's Palm Beach and Schlitterbahn. I'd say that you should spend more time on the island so that you actually know what the island has to offer before you start dictating what it "needs", but it would be better if you just stayed away. Since Galveston in 2016 brought in nearly 3 times the visitors of the Florida Keys, it doesn't need visitors like you to "discover" what the rest of us already know and appreciate about it.