IronTiger

Wasn't part of the idea that they WOULDN'T take lots of ROW, and that was one of the pro-HSR arguments?

345 trenched with attractive bridges wouldn't be all that bad in terms of traffic feasibility and aesthetics, plus no flooding problems like in Houston.

What money would it bring anyway? There would be no station there probably for years, and it won't produce dollar bills as it whizzes by.

I see that part of the plan as they see it includes adding a highway to the southeast.

I can't believe that the brick and walls would be removed but the floor was not. It's what, 100 years old? Must have been built awfully sturdily...concrete floors of that age tend to be compromised more easily, especially to renovations and heavy equipment.

For an example, check this out: Scroll up to the last picture in the "modern pictures" post. It's clearly the same angle, but count the differences.

The problem, though, is that they've known about this problem for years and nothing has fully worked. Home lives are a huge largely uncorrectable issue, great teachers and pristine schools are ineffective if a child can't work and eat at home properly. Bussing kids across town was largely a failure, sending excess tax money to needier schools ends up being wasted (Texas tried that in the early 2000s/late 1990s), and "school choice" opportunities like in Houston end up overcrowding "better" schools while the local school ends up being closed due to lack of attendance, which ends up killing land values and thus, tax dollars. Does your book actually have a real, innovative solution or does it just bring up an old problem with the failed ideas that have tried to deal with it?

I can find recent pictures of the building from the same angle and the placement and size of the windows isn't even the same.

If there's ONE station in Houston, there's going to be a segment of the population that gets screwed out of easy access, no matter how you cut it, even if you place it in downtown.

If I recall correctly, from the south, it comes into view just inside the Outer Loop.

I seem to recall reading that the old walls were removed because they were soaked with urine

If we're looking at 2021, that's less than a decade away. Spoiler alert: the change between 2008 and 2015 is about the same time, and what's changed since then? Not much. Sure, restaurants have come and gone, some new trails have been added, old buildings have been wrecked for new ones, and the Astroworld site remains vacant. And that was considered a boom! See a bust and those changes slow down further. Besides, if the train does stop at the NW Mall site, it wouldn't be a decrepit mall anymore, it would be transformed into something, at the very least, something new. Meanwhile, real opposition is building and all you guys can do is just use flippant insults "ah, the NIMBYs/anyone with a smidge of resistance or questioning is just a backwards thinker" or shrug it off "no, since you live next to a freight line anyway, just let the guys take care of this".

The H-E-B did start as a "Pantry Foods" concept, which were small and generally lacked most supermarket standards (deli, bakery, pharmacy). The Randalls was, IIRC, a Safeway (then AppleTree) originally. The buyout should put more control of Randalls in local hands (and they were going to keep the division), but at best is an uphill battle to compete at this rate. I'm guessing that they'll flatten their existing store (along with adjacent space) for a newer, larger building.

Much of the earlier comments on this thread how it will snipe a lot of potential airline travelers to and fro Dallas, and now suddenly it's some key to an anti-suburban shift? Give me a break. The parking issue may not even "demand" a certain number of parking spaces, but it has to be cost-effective, especially in areas where parking is a premium. Unless you want a shuttle from a parking lot.

Sorry, but to make a transit system work, you have to make everything mostly compatible. That's why the park and rides (or suburban light rail, like Dallas has) features large parking lots to park and go on another system. This isn't necessarily an argument to put it somewhere with sufficient parking (in fact, that's why I think that the NW Mall is a bad idea, simply because of access problems) EDIT: this was in response to Luminare's "HSR is pedestrian oriented" comment

Parking and access need to be priorities. A downtown location may look cool, but it'll need to have decent parking for long range and short range travel (much like the airport), good security, and so on. Access too: it needs to be convenient to existing highways.

I'm looking at the top rendering and switching back and forth Google Maps and Safari to see if anything's different. Six buildings, a pool, water tower. What's new? These are all there.

The scariest thing about "traditional" bike lanes is the gap between the concrete curb and the asphalt, often creating a gap for the tire to get in and cause an accident, as if getting cut off wasn't enough to worry about. I STILL have scars on my knee from biking accidents.

I measured out the size of the Montrose H-E-B in a maps program and hovered it around the Heights area looking for the right area to drop it. If it were to say, replace Foodarama, it would take up most of the lot, and require both that the Philips 66 be torn down and there to be basement parking. A replacement of the H-E-B's shopping center would work but you'll never find a place to park...maybe evict and extensively renovate the old K-Mart/Restaurant Depot space. Or maybe that could be the home of a new-school, post-merger Randalls in an attempt to gain back trust and market share.

You're still avoiding the question.

That's really cynical but probably also realistic. I wouldn't support a removal of the Pierce until they figure out how to better integrate the 288/59/45 switching, since that seems to be another confusing mess altogether. Edit to say that rendering post looks a lot like Klyde Warren.

I think that the affected neighborhoods at least ought to get schematics of what the HSR would look like and how it would work with the ROW it has. Personally, I agree about Slick's hypocrisy. He'll whine and whinge about elevated highways and neighborhoods nearby, and then take the opposite side for rail-based projects. Hilarious.

The HEB Pantry is still on the west side of the Heights. And Randalls should be getting better.

So, with the merger having concluded, are there any little differences that are appearing?

HCAD I know can be a finicky beast with addresses. One time I couldn't find the Midtown Randalls because the store address was different than the HCAD address.