ToryGattis

It took my girlfriend a *full hour* around 4pm today (a Saturday!) to get from just west of the Galleria area to Max's Wine Dive on Washington - a trip that would normally be 15-20 mins. Crazy traffic. Is this really all attributable to the All-Star game? Are that many people really here? The Toyota Center only holds around 20,000, right?

My second submission: "Welcoming opportunity, easy living, eat well"

KUHF/NPR: Define Houston in Six Words and/or a Photo Houston. It's a city that's hard to contain or sum up in a pithy way. But here at KUHF News, we're sure that you can capture the essence of Houston in six words or in a photo. We've been talking internally about launching a new Houston-centered radio show. Some of your six words on Houston, we'll use in the late Spring in the inaugural episodes of the show. And the photos? We won't air those, but we'll post many of them to the web. Click on the links below, and if you're inspired, challenge your friends to come up with photos and six-word phrases too. In six words, you can describe Houston, as one KUHF News staffer did, as a 'sprawling city spills into the ocean." Or in a photo, you can capture a thousand words in an image that makes you (perhaps) smile and call this city home. Six words: http://www.publicinsightnetwork.org/form/houston-public-media/c8f538b580a3/houston-in-six-words Photo: http://www.publicinsightnetwork.org/form/houston-public-media/5e53591867f2/houston-in-a-photo My submission was "Global Village, American Dream, Texas Spirit" from my blog post: http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2006/07/houstons-identity-global-village.html Looking forward to seeing some of the other submissions here.

Looks like they've got a glitch there: it's on the satellite footage, but when you zoom in enough that it switches to aerial photography, it goes back to being an empty field. They need to try to sync up their aerial and satellite updates... Zoom from here: http://goo.gl/maps/kypMW

You're right, but that's the problem: very few stores are unique enough that people will clearly pick them over a competitor with easier parking. And even if a store does have a loyal customer base, it may still lose the marginal/less-loyal customer, which can make all the difference. He didn't say.

I agree with the parking in back, but think Houstonians need "teaser" parking in front, ideally diagonal street parking if the RoW is available. Think about University Blvd in the Rice Village for something similar. Ed Wulfe talked about this once. If you have the teaser parking in front, people will drive to that store thinking they will get it, and once they're there but it's full, they'll drive around back. When a place has no parking in front, or just one or two parallel spaces, people just pick a destination/competitor with easier parking.

Street sidewalk/retail vibrancy requires people which requires parking (apartments on top are never enough people to fully support the street retail). Better to have vibrancy and parking than pretty but deserted landscaping.

Joel Kotkin has described to me whole streets in LA with block after block of empty retail with absolutely packed apartments on top of them. The Post restaurants seem to do quite well, but the non-restaurant retail seems to be struggling, and the retail space next to Christian's Tailgate has been perpetually empty. I think these places would have more of a chance if there was diagonal street parking in front, which I sorta wish the Bagby St reconstruction had included instead of the somewhat overdone landscaping, IMHO.

When you think about it, the competitive perspective doesn't really make sense. TAMU *is* going to expand and draw in 14,000 more engineering students from all over the state, country, and globe. They can be based in College Station, or based in Houston. I would argue it's better for Houston to have them based here. It should also help TAMU attract those students, since Houston is probably a more attractive city for students than College Station. Win for the city, and win for TAMU. Impact on Rice/UH/TSU would be minimal. In fact, it might be synergistic, with opportunities for collaboration, like what happens in the Medical Center. The tax reduction would be trivial compared to the economic development benefits of a major engineering campus in the city, and it would absolutely transform that east end neighborhood.

It certainly is possible, it's just lower priority than the Universities and Uptown lines which were approved in the referendum, so it won't even be considered until those lines are complete.

In the very original concept maps, the line did continue up Washington and into The Heights out to the Northwest Transit Center. I believe there was immediate pushback by the Heights, and it disappeared from future maps. I think in the very, very long-term, it might be considered again (after Universities and Uptown lines are done), but I definitely wouldn't hold your breath. My best guess would be mid to late 2020s or into the 2030s, if ever.

As luck would have it, I got inside info on this very item today. It is indeed for the new SE/E rail line. Current plans do not call for a stop on the west side of the bayou, but they're looking at changing that and creating a stop at the courthouses and police station.

Puncture and Tree of Life (as mentioned before) are the two that jump to mind. You can review all the movies filmed in Houston here: http://www.imdb.com/search/title?locations=Houston,%20Texas,%20USA&sort=year,desc Crazy Heart has scenes that are supposedly set in Houston, but were not actually filmed here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1263670/locations

I'll repeat again the same point from previously in this thread: 30-45 is the average net speed after including stops.

I disagree. Consider the Galveston rail from Clear Lake they were considering a while back. The diesel train would have stopped every few miles to pick up commuters going downtown. 40mph net seems reasonable. The existing P&R service gets in an HOV lane and doesn't stop until it's downtown. Thinner routes just require smaller, less frequent vehicles to ensure sufficient ridership. Yes, the bus will obviously be going much slower once it exits and circulates in the job center, but the rail certainly doesn't drop you off anywhere near your building. Of course, you could run express trains. But now you're talking about completely filling a train in one or two stops and then sending it downtown - not easy to do. Probably would require very infrequent trains. Certainly much lower frequency than buses.

Net speed including stops. They of course go much faster than that between stops. The advantage of the express buses is they don't stop until they are circulating inside the job center. This says they average 35-45mph. It's all about how many stops you have, how long you stop, and different accelerations of diesel vs. electric. http://www.nefrla.com/What_is_Commuter_Rail.pdf

The future model is round-the-clock HOT lanes like the Katy Tollway. But, yes, they way they are now they are not fully utilized. No reason they couldn't be, though, if Metro was willing to keep them open. The per rider cost of bus vs. rail is a little misleading for two reasons. One is that ignores the very high capital cost of the rail. And two is that transit agencies have an obligation to serve a geographic area with buses. That means lots of very underutilized routes just to serve remote areas with little demand. Rail is (usually) only built where there is strong demand - the Main St. line being a great example. And that demand is enhanced by plugging in local bus routes with transfers.

The op-ed has actually gotten a lot of positive feedback, including from the Mayor. Buses wouldn't run empty. If there's little demand on a route, don't run the route, or use a smaller vehicle with less frequent service. That's why the private market needs to be involved - to figure out where there is demand and meet it. The HOT lanes, run correctly, should provide pretty solid reliability. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Employers are not going to suddenly re-centralize. Focusing transit on downtown (whether Houston, Dallas, or others) has not moved much if any employment growth downtown. "Build it and they will come" doesn't work.

Slow - 65mph nonstop in the HOV/HOT lanes vs. ~30mph commuter rail with stops. Then there's the transfers and walking with commuter rail vs. circulation among buildings by buses. Loud - have you been on commuter rail? Uncomfortable - have you been on commuter rail when it's full? People standing in the aisles strap-hanging? Or, God forbid, what happens in Tokyo with the train cramming? Pollute - see earlier points about diesel and coal-based electricity for trains. Buses can run on hybrid drivetrains and natural gas. No RoW - that's what an HOV/HOT lane is And that doesn't even get into the astronomical costs of commuter rail. As a compliment to the op-ed I linked to before, check out my TEDx talk starting at minute 8. It explains where commuter rail works and where it doesn't. http://houstonstrategies.blogspot.com/2011/11/my-tedx-houston-talk-mostly-about.html

No, actually, that's exactly why I said "*taxpayer* cost per user". Private costs are private costs. You can choose to drive a Prius or a Hummer, or ride a bus, vanpool, or carpool. Government's job is to move the most people at the lowest expenditure of taxpayer dollars. Government's job is not minimizing total costs. If it was, it could also minimize housing costs by building nothing but concrete apartment towers and forcing us all to live in them, but that approach has been tried elsewhere in the world and failed pretty spectacularly. Here's my argument for the right commuter transit solution for Houston, and it's most definitely not commuter rail. http://www.chron.com...tro-4139396.php

Main St. line is a local LRT, not commuter rail. You are correct that it gets great utilization, although it's a little misleading because much of the passenger traffic is forced transfers from local bus lines as well as a parking shuttle for the TMC Smithlands. Still a worthwhile investment overall, IMHO. I am quite concerned the new lines will not perform anywhere near as well.

I would dispute that. I don't have hard numbers, but it definitely costs less to maintain a strip of concrete than a track *and* many dozen rolling stock rail cars. And it would get even worse if you look at the taxpayer cost per user (since that concrete moves a lot more people). Road projects have plenty of informational meetings for public input from the earliest design stages. Part of the reason for lack of conflict regarding roads is that everybody knows they will get plenty of use. White elephant roads are very rare. Toll roads can also generate enough $ to pay for themselves. Rail generates conflict because it is an extremely intensive use of taxpayer dollars (over the entire life of the line, not just construction) with a very uncertain utilization. The environmental benefits are only if the trains run very full around the clock. I've seen data in the past that the typical commuter rail line, with normal utilization patterns, actually can emit more overall per rider because of all the semi-empty trains running around and the diesel or coal-based power plants driving them.

Trains serving downtown are pretty much only going to get much utilization at rush hour. Freeway lanes can be used by anybody going anywhere at any time of day - which gets back to my original point about the RoW moving many more people as freeway lanes rather than commuter rail.

Not shut down - just riding mostly empty. Buses in HOT lanes also take pressure off, and can be used by cars the rest of the day too.

No, two lanes (and that RoW probably added more lanes than that) moves more people than commuter rail, most especially if those are HOT lanes with buses, vanpools, and carpools. Remember also that the lanes move people 24 hours a day. Commuter rail is only full a handful of hours each day, and even that's a big assumption given that less than 7% of jobs are downtown and the rail would have dropped people off north of the bayou!