IronTiger

Sprouts, Goody Goody Liquor, and Five Below. But that's #20 and opened in the early to mid 1980s. We're talking about stores much earlier than that.

That was listed. It is #7.

My theory is #5 and #9 weren't in the Houston area directly. I'm forming a theory that #5 was in Rosenberg (an old Randalls was in the strip center pre-1980s, and the strip center was built in 1970 per FBCAD) and #9 was similar (possibly an older store in Galveston that pre-dated its current location).

Your 1976 directory sounds right. The phone book (1974 I think) had the "new" address, which was about when the NW Plaza strip center opened. They must have moved about that time. In any case, those do line up. The second Minimax was #2 at 5550 North Freeway, and the third store that Randalls did open was on Katy Freeway. Long Point was #4, I drove by the store often and you can tell it has a larger awning than the stores around it. Half of it (left half I believe) is a restaurant called Seoul Garden, and it probably closed in the late 1980s when the store further down Blalock opened (#39, now Super H Mart). So in any case, it was indeed at 43rd and Mangum and not a misprint. Interesting! But if there is a misprint there, AND the Randalls "Super Valu" stores (I thought they were in Pasadena...?) then maybe it is somewhat out of date. I've yet to find Randalls #5 and #9, which were not listed with the 1976 stores. Maybe they weren't in the Houston phone book coverage at all. As I was telling SpaceGhost, the pre-Safeway numbering (for the Houston-area stores) was all chronological, so #1-#10 were before 1980, #11-14 are former Handy Andy stores, #15-#49 were all progressing through the 1980s, #50-62 were all early 1990s stores (New Generation stores and/or stores that did really badly and closed within a few years), #63-65 were former AppleTree stores, and the ones heading into the 70s were late 1990s ones before Safeway bought them and switched the numbering system.

A while back, I started researching old Randalls locations more closely. It's fascinating...some really questionable locations in their history (mostly early 1990s--did you know that there was a Fiesta near FM 1960 and US-59 that Randalls bought but only ran for a few years?) but the mystery of Randalls #1 is still out there. Randalls began with renaming two Minimax stores with a third opening off Katy Freeway soon after (unsurprisingly, none operate as grocery stores today). From at least 1974 as per city directory to shortly after 2001, Randalls #1 was at 11071 Northwest Freeway. Problem was, Randalls did not recycle store numbers, but the strip center there did not exist in 1966 (the freeway definitely didn't, and it faces NW Freeway, not Hempstead Hwy.). An old article mentions it was really at "43rd and Mangum", which I think they meant 34th and Mangum, and there is indeed a small grocery store there. HCAD is no help here, but if my calculations are correct, was there actually a Minimax here prior to 1966 and a Randalls for a few years afterward?

I'm sure 290 wouldn't be an issue if they had right of way ready to go from day one. Or if they didn't have to rebuild the entire highway as part of the project. Or if while doing that they also had to keep 7 lanes or so open for the freeway. Or if the highway was sunken and they didn't have to build new overpasses. Or if.........you see where I'm going, right?

Of course there's not "zero room to assume" (why do YOU assume otherwise?), and there IS oversight and public interest, so if you don't like what newspapers tell you, just specifically request an Open Records Act inquiry about where that money is going. Open a text editor or get out a piece of paper that says something like "Dear HCTRA, I am concerned about the amount of money going into toll road projects, per the Texas Public Information Act of 1973, I am requesting further budget information on where the surplus of HCTRA's budget is going, whether it is toll road projects like the 249 tollway and the Grand Parkway, or non-toll projects... ...Signed, Vinyard Vincent III" (or whatever your real name is) and send it off.

The HCTRA is a division of the Harris County Public Infrastructure Department so I would assume that a real budget summary could be acquired through the Texas Open Records Act, so if you were truly convinced that HCTRA is up to something shifty, you can try to write to HCTRA asking about the budget and be sure to mention the law. No guarantees it will work (they'll at least mail you a denial if nothing else), but you might find your answers that way.

The express lanes were originally designed to be free, as per Houston Freeways. Remember, 288 was the very last urban freeway TxDOT was able to do until budget restraints and environmental overhead put the nails in the coffin of highways of that magnitude. I'm not sure when it was switched over from "free future planned" to "toll future planned" though I would say there's an 85% chance it happened under the Perry Administration.

http://www.chron.com/business/real-estate/article/Randalls-to-expand-Midtown-store-7378514.php

Does COH have a page where you can look at PDFs/TIFFs of new development plans? I'd love to see a plan (or a picture, if anyone's in the area) of the "green wall" they're proposing (or have already built?) for the Midtown Randalls store.

Before you start to drag this topic away, that's not "way off in the future" or "their eventual goal". They're not talking about taking existing freeways and adding arbitrary stoplights to make them toll roads, they take existing non-controlled access highways, which often have driveways, small roads, and (sometimes) stoplights on them already, and then converting them to freeways, but the freeway part is toll, and the stoplights aren't added until they need to be. There's no stoplights at say, Antioch Drive and Beltway 8 because that's a tiny stub road because it only provides access to a recycling center and the back entrance to a subdivision. (Stoplights cost money) As it turns out, there are few highways like that outside of Harris County, because everything is already a freeway, except 288 south of Manvel, 90 east of Crosby, 290 west of Hempstead, and 249 north of Tomball, all of which (except for maybe Tomball) are safely outside of the core Houston commuter patterns.

I would never speed in downtown Houston though, because a) pedestrians are literally everywhere, light or not, and b, I don't want to get stuck in an intersection that has a train rolling down the tracks. But this "solution" just makes the problems worse, I think...

Why would they do that? In my area, crossing down countdowns are the main way I can accurately predict when lights turn yellow (when driving) and how many more seconds I have to wait until the lights turn yellow (when walking).

The Midtown Sears survived this round...might be gone in six months, might last until the very end of the line.

Lower Westheimer is narrow enough. The 4 lanes to 3 lanes set-up is good because the four lane set-up is/was useless in several cases (buses and larger trucks cannot stay in one lane). A turn lane would really help there.

There were two buildings on that lot. The smaller building in the grassy area facing Richmond (closer to the shopping center) was demolished between the late 1970s and the late 1980s. The larger building sat flush on the corner of McCue and Richmond and still had cars in the parking lot (meaning it was either not the building or was occupied past the mid-1980s), and was demolished by 1995. I might be able to pull up something via newspaper archives.

Yeah, they sometimes do that, and I can name at least two other retail projects that did the same thing, one of which never came to fruition.

The last time I was driving through this part of 59, I just felt like it felt really run-down and not at all the neat highway it was designed to be. The sunken section of Beltway 8 south of Interstate 10 has aged better than this! Give me a break.

I think Austin does, not sure about San Antonio. Either way, would you trade in the entire stock of H-E-B stores for a handful of Central Markets, and then have Randalls and Kroger to fight over the rest? That's the situation in Dallas.

The weekend closures of the Pierce Elevated are a giant PITA (repairing a bridge), really messed up a commute to the central library when I was in Pearland last week. I still can't get over the massive curves that would be installed in the proposed re-do would slow down traffic on northbound I-45 South even more, as part of the reason for Pierce's congestion is that people naturally want to slow down for curves (this is also why five-stacks get locked up around rush hour, which isn't entirely a bad idea...flying off an ~80 foot ramp at 70 MPH will be the ride of your life).

I would assume the structure is so deteriorated that it would only damage the structure, and it would be uneconomically expensive to save the building, as they would have to go inside, gut the building, maintain (most) of the facade presumably by steel bracers. Back when I went to campus, they had recently rebuilt and renovated the YMCA Building. Turns out that about 7 years prior they had to close off the rear part of the building due to structural concerns, and part of those structural concerns was because it had been damaged by machines doing numerous renovations in the past, and the rear part had been completely rebuilt. Likewise, by the late 1940s, the Executive Mansion portion of the White House was in danger of collapse, essentially being a wooden-structure building from the early 19th century with also some numerous renovations done that compromised the original structure, so during the Truman Administration, they had the building totally gutted and rebuilt from scratch, with the distinct facade held up by bracers. The price when all was said and done? $5 million in 1950 dollars, which is about $50 million today. In addition to being built so you can't take bulldozers and heavy machinery through the back, there was absolutely no way to save the building. The school can't afford it (the White House had nicer fixtures obviously and was slightly larger, but even half of that would be far too much), and there was no way they could get enough support for a third party like the city to help save it...between right-wingers thinking it's a waste of taxpayer money and left-wingers crying about the separation of church and state. The best case scenario would be if they knocked a hole through the front, braced the remaining wall, and rebuilt it like it was. But even then, it would be still visible that it was knocked out, far more expensive than originally planned, and likely smaller than what they wanted, unless they wanted the taller gray building "growing" out of the top or adding three basements (ha!)

For the most part, that's correct. Cities are built certain ways and infrastructure develops certain ways, and trying to patch in different transit systems isn't going to work. If you put in wide American-style highways into European cities, it won't magically resemble the urban/suburban divide like it does in the United States, nor will trains result in denser, anti-suburb development that fundamentally changes how we live and get around. In the early 1970s, Paris built the Boulevard Périphérique, which is a loop highway not too dissimilar from U.S. highways...but due to the way Paris is built, trains still rule.

I wouldn't say "no one is proposing to abolish cars" with that much confidence, as some far-left publications really DO seem to support the "They hate private automobiles and force us to ride public transportation" fear that some train opponents have. However, I agree that is not the view of the majority. While rejecting trains on a purely ideological basis is wrong, it's equally just as wrong to push trains on an ideological basis. Sometimes I have this sneaking suspicion that the only people who really like trains as public transportation (besides the fringe anti-car wingnuts, that is) are a grown version of the wide-eyed kid from a small town (or at least a city that lacks rail) riding the trains in the "big city" (or Europe) for the first time (or at least the first time in a while), and holding to ideals of public transportation instead of the realities that go along with it. I'd be lying if I said that this sort of thinking didn't influence me on rail. So on 288, would rail be awesome? HELL YEAH! But is it practical and pragmatic? That's a harder question...

Sounds like you're implying veiled racism to me, but then following that same logic, are you seriously arguing that "If you don't like trains, you must be racist"? While I'm glad for you that you don't have any questions about who you're voting for, falling back on an argument like that just proves August's point...managed lanes are better and more efficient for transportation and transit.