Reefmonkey

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.

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.

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. 🙄

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.

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.

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.

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.

You've just repeated what you have said, without any clarification or attempt to operationally define what you mean. I've been to the Hamptons before. The public beaches are crowded and not really all that much more picturesque than Galveston, plus parking is expensive and kind of a nightmare, as is even getting to the Hamptons from New York City on a summer weekend. The hip restaurants and bars are expensive and difficult to get into - even difficult to get a reservation at, unless you're "somebody" (ie, famous or well-known to be rich). A lot of the best shoreline is inaccessible to the hoi polloi, can't even be seen behind high privacy walls. On the "crystal clear blue lagoon" are you saying you want a large sheltered body of water, in which the water has no turbidity from suspended sediments or phytoplankton? First, you're going to have to have a sealed bottom, like concrete or gunnite, to replace the natural silt that makes up Galveston Island which gets stirred up and causes much of the turbidity in Galveston bay and beach water. Then, whatever water you fill this impoundment with is going to have to be continually filtered to prevent the impoundment from becoming a stagnant algae-choked swamp. One way to go would be to filter seawater through a semi-closed system. You'd have to have pretty good retention time on the water to eventually get rid of the finest suspended solids, but you'd also need to bring in new water periodically to keep your nutrient load low to reduce algae growth, and to replace water lost to evaporation. It would be a constant balancing act, and pretty energy and maintenance-intensive (read: expensive) for an impoundment of any size to handle the kinds of crowds who might be interested in it. It would never be "crystal clear", but could be significantly clearer than the bay or the beachwater. And it's never going to be blue, because you're going to have algae growth on your hard artificial bottom, so it's going to be green, not blue, plus that algae growth will make that hard bottom slippery, as anyone who has ever waded on a boat ramp knows. The only option that would actually give you "crystal clear blue" water would be to chlorinate, which would give you a giant swimming pool, which Galveston already has in Palm Beach at Moody Gardens, and at Schlitterbahn, for that matter. Seems you're the one who might have the problem with vision, Elseed, since you apparently overlooked these two attractions. Just like you overlooked Beachtown on the Hamptons side of your wish list. It appears your impression of Galveston being a "pretty crappy experience" stems from being ill-informed about what the island actually has to offer. In 2016 6.5 million visitors spent $780 million dollars in Galveston, which generated $1.1 billion in total business sales, including indirect and induced impacts. Compare that to the 2.25 million people who visited the Florida Keys, which have a more year-round vacation climate, that same year. Seems Galveston is doing pretty well attracting visitors, despite your opinion of it. Why don't you go to the Hamptons and see how far you'd get on the same amount of money it takes to have a nice summer weekend down in Galveston? Or maybe since you seem partial to artificial manufactured simulacra of some "ideal" destination, you'd be more comfortable at Disneyworld?

Enough with wanting Galveston to be the Hamptons. Why is Galveston "supposed" to be like the Hamptons instead of just being Galveston? Should every beach resort town near a major metropolitan area be transformed into a soulless Hamptons clone for the "uber rich" and "uber rich" wannabes?

What exactly do you mean by “crystal blue lagoon development “? And what do you mean by “Hampton’s type development?” The Hamptons are a bunch of 200-300 year old towns, how do we recreate that artificially and why should we want to try to become an inferior wannabe clone of a NY East Coast experience instead of the authentic Gulf Coast town we already are?

It seems unconscionable to me that the more we learn about CTE and it’s effects later in life, the more doctors are starting to see structural changes in the brain in younger and younger players, that there are still parents who enthusiastically sign their elementary age boys up for tackle football. Yet “Tully Bowl mania” seems even stronger this year. Memorial Drive from Gessner to Eldridge is littered with bandit signs supporting this or that team modeled after either an NFL or Division 1 college team. (And we had just gotten rid of all the political campaign signs). Parents have been driving around for over a week now with their SUVs bedecked with team flags and messages scribbled on their rear windows. When I did youth sports in elementary school I don’t remember the parents taking it so seriously or encouraging us to take it so seriously. Of course us Gen Xers weren’t raised by helicopter parents, and I wasn’t raised in the Memorial area, where even a high school homecoming dance is treated like a prom in importance and expense, and a prom is treated like a wedding. I wonder what will be worse for these young football players, the long term cerebral effects of tackling at a young age, or the effects on their egos of having their pee wee games given the importance of an Olympiad by their parents.

My annual bump of this topic for Halloween.

I don't know about how having a mediocre theme park would affect our chances of getting a decent one, though I'll take your word for it, but I do agree with you that the plans for the park kinda suck. For one thing, beating the whole "Texas" theme to death. I think about all the successful theme parks out there, from Magic Kingdom to the various Six Flags, Animal Kingdom, the Universals, etc, a big part of what makes them successful is the theming that transports you somewhere other than the place you are. I've been all around Texas, and if I want to see it again, I can get in my car and go see the real thing, so I'm not interested in a cheesy facsimile of it. Considering how poorly managed the planning and development and marketing of this park has been, I think it's pretty safe to assume that they didn't do their due diligence on planning the theming to make sure it would create a sustainable draw of visitors, and you know the execution is going to suck, too.

Good grief, looking at the Grand Texas website's projections for opening the actual theme park part, it's going to happen (if they can be believed after all this time) pretty much exactly ten years after this thread was started. Remember, it was originally supposed to open in 2010. Then 2012. Then 2013, then 2015.

I can’t imagine purposefully consuming something you have to take a prophylactic dose of medication before drinking. That seems like nature telling you you’re not supposed to drink it. With fermented food and drink, there is a thin line between transformed and just spoiled.

So since we're on the topic, does anyone here do any homebrewing? I don't brew any beer, but I do make muscadine wine from vines in my backyard, and in early summer I go blackberry picking and make both a dry and a sweet blackberry wine. In early september I tried my hand at hard cider for the first time. I'm not such a fan of the superdry pale yellow clear ciders with no apple flavor, or the sweet pale yellow clear alcopop grocery store ciders. Crispin makes some varieties I like - hazy, just enough sweetness, and lingering apple flavor. I used a gallon of pasteurized unfiltered organic apple juice from Whole Foods, added brown sugar, and a cider yeast. When I first tasted it, I was disappointed, but now that it's bottle-aged about a month, it's really grown on me. Despite the addition of brown sugar, its not sweet, it's just slightly off-dry (initially I considered back-sweetening, but glad I didn't), the increased sugar mostly just drove up the ABV. Now I wish I had made more, I'm down to my last few bottles.

That's great if you're intrepid enough to wade through all the choices and market duplication, I'm just not sure it's the best thing for the longterm health of the industry. There is a lot of psychological research on this, including a book from about 10 or so years ago called "The Paradox of Choice", that studied consumer choice and found that consumer happiness is related to choice in kind of a bell curve, that consumer happiness increases with increased choice only to a point, after which happiness starts to decrease with increased choice. As choice increases beyond that point, consumers tend to "choose not to choose", most often by falling back on their previous choices, what they are comfortable with, rather than trying new things. I'll be interested to see what the survival rate of all these craft breweries is. Personally, I think it would be awesome if there were a bunch of local breweries that served their immediate neighborhood, I'd love to while away a lazy saturday afternoon in the beer garden of a neighborhood brewery down the street from me, very European. There is a newer brewery not far from me in Spring Branch I want to try called 4J, I like their stated philosophy about beer, about keeping it simple and not overhopping: Problem is brewing is high overhead, you need economies of scale to survive. It's hard enough for a bar to survive as it is, then put a small scale manufacturing facility to produce what the bar serves on top of that. You just don't get the economies of scale you need trying to be a neighborhood brewpub (it was tried and failed in the 90s, see the HBJ article from 1998 I posted earlier), which means you need distribution beyond your home turf, which means you run into being more white noise in the craft brew marketplace, and invariably quality control suffers.

Check out the graph of the growth of Houston's craft brewery industry in this website: https://www.chron.com/business/real-estate/article/Houston-s-craft-breweries-have-quadrupled-in-five-13196392.php

I think Karbach has their share of milder beers, I'm a fan of their Weissversa. Now their Hopdilla, a few sips of that were enough to tell me that was not the beer for me. Still not as hoppy as St. Arnold's Elissa, though, but I'm not going to condemn a whole brewery for having one beer in its lineup. What does bug me though (and I am probably going to ruffle a few feathers here), is that there are just too many craft breweries out there (both nationwide and Houston-based), and each craft brewery produces too many different varieties. I think we've reached Peak Craft Brew. Several years ago, just here in Houston, we passed a threshold after which any new brewery is just white noise. It seems like the business model for new breweries is to try to get big enough that they get bought out by a big national brand, the way Karbach did with AB InBev. That's soulless. Houston now has 52 craft breweries. 52. We're a big city, but we're not that big that we need that many. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that every craft brewery has a whole slew of varieties, so that the varieties themselves become white noise. They're doing very little to differentiate themselves from each other, so they're stepping all over each other's toes. Practically everyone makes a pale ale, a pils, some kind of wheat beer, oh, yeah, and now most of them have to do a Kolsche (and I've had real Kolsche in Cologne, sorry US breweries, none of you match the likes of Fruh), etc. Every craft brewery tries to be everything to every beer drinker. Jack of all trades is master of none. It would have been better if the breweries had each carved out a niche, stay focused on one style of brewing do one thing very well, have maybe 4 varieties that are available all year, max, plus one seasonal at a time. St. Arnold offers 12 year round beers, THREE of which are IPAs, and two amberish English style ales that aren't that different from each other. And that's not including the 7 seasonals they put out, or the limited releases (Divine reserves, Icon, Bishop's Barrel). And I've noticed, as they grow, their quality is starting to slip.

I like the " and numerous aggressively-hopped and alcoholic domestic ales that recently styled beer aficionados are quick to champion " comment. Touches on an issue I have with a lot of craft beer (and craft beer drinkers) these days, who seem to think everything is supposed to have IPA-level hop. It's like when they were seniors in college they had their first beer that wasn't Natural Light, and was an IPA, and they decide that's what "good" beer is supposed to taste like. my hypothesis is the extra hop covers a lot of brewing defects, which is why so many craft brewers start out with this style. I also think that we long ago reached "Peak Craft Beer", and we have a lot of craft breweries resorting to gimmicks to sell beer - pithy names (both for the brewery and their different beers), wierd experimental hybrids of styles, uses of odd ingredients, and oh yes, hop hop, and more hop. I think it's part that a lot of hop can cover up a failed experiment and they can still sell it, but also it's appealing to a macho thing, like flavoring food with habanero and ghost peppers so they're actually painful to eat, but you always get some bro who claims he loves them and "it's not that hot" even as he's turning purple and drenched in sweat in a 70 degree room. Same kind of bro loves to talk about how much he loves mouth-puckeringly overhopped beer, "so much better than that watery macrobrew you guys drink."

Here's an article from 1998 announcing the closure of the Village Brewery, also gives a "time capsule" view of the Houston brewpub scene just as it was sputtering out in the late 90s https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/1998/09/14/story5.html " Now the city can count only six brew- pubs on tap, after a short-lived trend during the first half of the 1990s in which Houstonians clamored for custom ales. After the Village Brewery closes, Bank Draft Brewing Co., Two Rows Restaurant & Brew Pub, Huey's, Houston Brewery, Bradley's Restaurant & Brewery in Clear Lake and Bay Brewery Steaks & Seafood in Seabrook remain. Galveston has the Strand Brewery. " "When the Texas Legislature lifted a 1994 ban that prohibited brewpubs, entrepreneurs were foaming to erect buildings. Most of the brewpubs in existence now were built within the first two years after the ban was lifted. " "So, the distinctly 1990s brewpub phenomenon is slowly being replaced by retro clubs, which happens to be the future in entertainment. " Apparently that one was Huey's. From the article: " Greg Schepens, brewmaster for Huey's on the North Freeway. Schepens, who was a brewmaster at Rock Bottom during its tenure here "

I had forgotten about the Vault, that takes me back. What is in that spot now?

This got me thinking about when the whole craft beer movement really started to gain traction in Houston in the early 90s, before there was a Karbach or No Label or Southern Star, and St. Arnold's was just getting started and nobody had heard of it yet - back when Texas craft beer was Shiner. This was back when brewpubs were a novel thing, breweries that were eating and drinking establishments first and the onsite brewing was for onsite consumption only. There are a few I remember that are no more: There was Two Rows (the Houston expansion location of a Dallas concept) upstairs in Rice Village. I'm not sure when they first opened here in Houston, I think it was sometime in the mid 90s when I was away for college, they were here when I moved back in 1998, and I think they survived to about 2008? There was an independent brewpub nearby, I think it was called either the Rice Brewery or the Rice Village Brewery. I don't think it lasted all that long. Then down in Galveston, on the Strand, I remember there being the Strand Brewery, or Strand Street Brewery. Its location was taken over by the Fuddruckers. Any other 1990s Houston-area brewpubs?