innerloop

They left the lights on last night so I was able to get a picture of the new trail segment. It looks very far along, most of the curbing is in, there's gravel down everywhere that I could see and the bridges are coming along. And the lights work.

It looks like they may have started on the bridge railings of the SL trail reroute. Here is a not-very-clear photo of what may be the start of the new railings. The best that I could tell, it is horizontal metal bars/tubes. I couldn't really tell what was going on with the vertical supports. They've also installed a lot of the trail curbing and filled some of the trail with crushed granite.

Here are the results of the weekend closure of Memorial Drive. They lifted in the spans for the three bridges necessary for the rerouting of the SL jogging trail. These photos are of the longest spans where the trail will cross the big gulley. I was disappointed at first that they used such generic looking concrete spans, but then I realized that a) once the trail is rerouted no one will be able to see them from this vantage point and b) the trail users will be above the decking so they won't be able to see them either. So now I'm just hoping that they pick nice materials for the decking and the bridge rails. Based on how nice that the Eastern Glades turned out, I'm not really worried. 

Work is well underway on the next re-route of the Seymour-Lieberman running trail. It looks like they are going to replace those last few hundred meters of the trail that run right up next to Memorial Drive just east of the land bridges. The trail is going to be moved north into the park 20 or 30 meters, but that means that the trail will now have to cross that big gulley. Most of the trees have been cleared so they can start working on the bridge that will be needed.

I vote to excavate the entire plaza down to bayou level and have a bayou spur run under the street and come up to the front of the building like the San Antonio Convention Center.

A little progress on the bike trail/new park downtown.

They opened the jogging trail reroute. This new section runs about 100 m north of the old trail that is directly adjacent to Memorial Drive. The old trail is going to need to be extensively modified or eliminated because it must be in the way of the downslope of the bridge. The new section is nice. It runs though the woods instead of right next to the street with the sounds of the cars, the exhaust and the general unnerving feeling of being that close to the fast moving cars on Memorial.

Unfortunately it doesn't totally eliminate all of that section. There is still a part right by the road where it will be difficult to move the trail because of a gulley and where the golf course comes pretty far south. But it is way better than it used to be.

They started on the retaining walls over the tunnel ends. This was the far east end of the eastbound lane. They were pouring concrete on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving.

The tunnel end transitions are progressing slowly. They've installed six of the eight with the two most westwardly left to do.

And there hasn't been any visible progress on the reroute of the jogging trail along that part of Memorial. 

They finally started installing the end transition sections on the eastern most ends of the tunnels.

The dirt has reached the top of the easterly tunnels.

The dirt is getting higher on the north side of the tunnels.  And they are installing that black covering on the outside of the concrete.

I haven't seen any progress on the end of the tunnel transitions yet.  

Daylight Saving Time allowed enough light for me to see all of the dirt that they've piled up on the south side of the tunnels.  It's a lot more than shown here.

And they're using a fleet of dump trucks to get the job done.

Just to add to the photo above, they've started on the westbound tunnel.