AcresMansions

SJL wouldn't have had time to tear up Turner's legacy with all the photo ops 🥲

way to fixate on a fraction of one part of a whole rant that really didn't require a response. especially from simple folk who think the president controls the inflation lever in between staff debriefs or that Houston's energy capital moniker is anything other than marketing for a pretty unremarkable town.

Imagine still trying to market yourself as the Energy Capital of the world but the lights don't even stay on during a light drizzle and we don't have high speed driverless electric rail zigzagging across the Texas triangle

thousand dollars cars and the entire car lobby, Spain and Japan are beating down the door to invest in this but we're too dumb to do some common sense checkers. Why when hicks out in the sticks want to demolish communities in our urban wealth generating centers to widen their preferred commute route everything goes according to plan, but when the cities want something any idiot with half an acre of tax-dodging "farmland" can hold up everything until inflation makes the project infeasible.

very smart investment I think

With conservation districts, Houston could have a new path to preserve neighborhoods | Kinder Institute for Urban Research | Rice University

They're doing public hearings this Wednesday the 22nd. 

Personally I'm against the whole idea, it seems to me like a huge handout to entrenched interests in some of the more popular neighborhoods in Houston. This is just going to codify Nimbyism and will effectively bring zoning to the city of no zoning. It seems like the opposite of what the Livable Places Action committee's stated goals are, and will lead to further shortage of housing for Newstonians.
 

Metro CEO Tom Lambert retiring at the end of the year (houstonchronicle.com)

I would've preferred for them to promote from within, I think Sanjay Ramabhadran would bring dedicated leadership, but they've decided to hire a firm to find a new CEO.

Idk anything about Tom, but maybe a change in leadership would impulse more investment into METRO.

On 12/19/2022 at 8:04 PM, steve1363 said:

Very late to the party but to me Houston is the INNOVATION city.  In no particular order…

1. Dredged Buffalo Bayou to become the Port of Houston

2. Built the first domed stadium

3. First heart transplant

4. First city to create Life Flight

5. First city to put a man on the moon

I’m sure I’m forgetting something…

first permanent breast implant

Houston is the city of all things to all peoples

2 minutes ago, Houston19514 said:

Not sure what you are talking about... curb the trenches?

hell maybe i don't even know what I'm talking about. I thought that's what it was called when you build a curb and sidewalk over the trench and convert it to in-ground drainage as opposed to an open ditch. 

what's that called? 

bc as it stands many streets in Acres Home have very narrow streets and in cases where perhaps you might want to put in a sidewalk where there isn't one, you would have to build it over the trench, instead of narrowing the street even more. 

On 1/11/2023 at 1:58 PM, BeerNut said:

but we still have parking minimums. 

at BARS too. this is Looney Tunes. 

We have codified induced demand-generating parking structures for people who prefer to drink and drive.

On 1/11/2023 at 2:19 AM, Skyboxdweller said:

Houston is fortunate in that it has no natural barriers to development

no APPARENT natural barriers. 

The flood maps on ArcGIS say otherwise. All available land that won't flood catastrophically is already taken. We're going to end up with houses built on floating platforms able to adjust to the height of the tides in about 20 years if we don't change our ways.

4 hours ago, j_cuevas713 said:

Yep because all that's going to happen is developers are going to make excuses not to build sidewalks

The more common excuses shared by Lindsey from Houston Planning & Development is that it was going to be very expensive for them to curb the trenches, but why would the city be able to do it in say, 4 years, cheaper than the developer can do it now? Inflation remains high, the Fed is going to continue to normalize rates, and this small window of opportunity while people sit around and wait to be pikachu-faced after the next fed meeting when they hike is all anyone is going to get.

6 hours ago, j_cuevas713 said:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/houston/article/houston-sidewalk-construction-fee-developers-17735966.php

 

The sidewalk in lieu fee received a heated reaction from me and the rest during the October meeting of the Acres Home mobility study. Acres Homes' south side is rapidly filling up with 16-piece townhome developments on acre lots where previously there was only one ranch-style home. I'm not against more housing of any kind, but I'm very upset the developers think they can plop down as many of these gated multi-family developments and not even put in a sidewalk. Acres Home is not that kind of community, we take care of our own. Historically Acres home was sort of a black Wall Street-esque town before it was annexed and things went to shit.

Further, I think it's stupid that in the age of hyperinflation the city thinks it can manage a common fund and leverage economies of scale to get a sidewalk built "somewhere down the line" when a developer decides it's prohibitively expensive for them. We all told the planning department they need to make it mandatory, Acres Home needs sidewalks, bicycle lanes and the developers need to give something back when they come in and take up sub 100k lots to build 1.5mm+ in shoddy cookie-cutter townhomes.

Really Hope the politicians that made that little excursion got some  ideas about some of the ways the japanese build their train stations. I dream of a future with dense, mixed-use, train stations all over the city, with the piece de resistance being the Northwest Station, terminus of the Texas Central HSR.

I think Bcycle was doing okay, but I'm excited as this could lead to more Bcycle stations outside of the loop!

On 9/18/2022 at 12:07 PM, BEES?! said:

New transportation app released the other day, it’s called Houston ConnectSmart

https://www.houstonconnectsmart.com

I’ve been playing around with it. I really like the carpool group feature.

You can see traffic cameras on the map. 

It lists all BCycle stations and how many bikes are available at each one. The bike route comfort levels is a neat feature too, and is nice for a less-confident cyclist like myself. 

I think it would be nice if they had a layer that made bus route info a bit easier to understand. You can see the names of the stops, but it’s not immediately clear to which numbered route they belong. If they could fix that somehow, that would be very helpful. 

I've been using it exclusively for a couple months now because of the rewards system. I want to make it my ONE transportation app but there's currently a few issues I have with it. 

-changing the walking speed settings does nothing to the estimated travel times and this makes the application offer me weird routes because it thinks i walk slower than a senior citizen with a walker and I won't make it to the bus stop on time to take a more common-sense route. 

-for that matter changing the prefered cycling speed also does nothing to the estimated travel times and that also feeds into the issue of suggesting bus routes i could reach on bicycle. 

Have you had the same or similar issues, and is this still an app you use or have you reverted to another app, i'm curious.