ADCS

Just take them over the bridges. If the rail line is 40 ft over the road bed, that gives 20 ft over the cross bridges.

On top of the trenched I-10. You could cantilever the tracks or post them on pylons centered in the middle of the highway. Not sure the best way of getting them downtown. It would be really hard to hit the Post Office site going that way without some residential takings.

So the Montgomery County conversation has become completely moot.

The one thing about The Woodlands is that they don't see themselves as a suburb or edge city. They see themselves as the emerging second city of the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land MSA. In their minds, this would be as if a high speed line were being constructed between Minneapolis and Chicago, and didn't go through St. Paul (imperfect an analogy though that may be).

It isn't even that - for people who live next to the proposed route, it's more about city folk disrupting their lives without them having say-so in it. For people near The Woodlands (read: O&G managers who would use the line fairly frequently, along with land developers), it's about having to drive all the way to Downtown to take the train, and the lack of TOD opportunities. You wouldn't be seeing such strong opposition from Montgomery County state/federal politicians if it weren't for that latter constituency.

I'd like to think so, but with ExxonMobil being up there, they've got a very powerful political ally at their disposal. They managed to get the dead-in-the-water Grand Parkway pushed through, after all.

Don't think it would - Atlanta's Downtown Connector is much longer, mixes traffic, and has several more major intersections than what currently exists in Downtown Houston. From the posted schematics, it appears that traffic on 45 would stay separate from 59/69 traffic.

They want a station in The Woodlands, and if they don't get one, they want to derail (sorry) the whole project as a show of political strength. Sort of the same way Fort Worth gets all in a tizzy when Dallas gets some cool project and Tarrant County's left out. It's parochial politics at its dullest.

As many as were needed to handle long-distance connections and maintain enough redundancy in case of Soviet attack in the 1960s. Those were designed to survive nuclear war, after all.

That's not the scope of what they're doing - it's to serve a very particular market, which is essentially the only way to profit with rail infrastructure. Its bread and butter will be business travelers who now have the convenience of starting and ending the day at their offices in Downtown, Greenway Plaza and Uptown Houston, along with their counterparts in Dallas. Commuter rail does not serve a purpose for this company, because commuter rail has almost never been profitable (with few exceptions in particularly dense cities like London or New York). Even during the rail era, commuter routes were run as public services in exchange for various benefits given to them by the state and municipal government, along with kickbacks from land developers, or because they were developing the land themselves. TCR is already incurring an enormous amount of debt to put the high-speed line into place - it's considerably unlikely that they will be able to secure more capital to build out a system that will almost certainly lose money. Like it or not, the only agencies who have a shot of building commuter rail in Houston are TxDOT or Metro.

Just sounds like that was for scale. Since the meeting was in Tomball, everyone would know how long it takes to get to Houston.

I don't think that's the question here. It's where you can get the greatest benefit for an acceptable cost, not just the lowest. Capital costs are already high enough that the normal dynamics of operating a business are relatively skewed - a critical mass of ridership is by far the most important goal here, much more than marginal reductions in those capital costs.

You could also post large wayfinding signs, as is done for every other major transportation terminal, such as the airports. This would also likely factor into the developing Pierce Elevated plans.

Never quite understood this argument. Short and medium-range transportation projects almost always work best when they respond to existing demand, and serve to enhance and entrench that existing demand. If you put a transportation terminal in a run-down area, it's not going to revitalize it - instead, people will avoid it in preference to existing options. A perfect example of this is the NJ Transit River Line, running between Camden, NJ and Trenton, NJ, two particularly undesirable areas. Even though tickets are a fraction of taking SEPTA Regional Rail between Philadelphia and Trenton, and the time in transit is fairly equivalent, the latter route gets far higher ridership for two reasons - first, that most riders are trying to get to Center City Philadelphia or the transit links that can be found there, and second, most people would prefer to avoid Camden. While Lazybrook and Timbergrove are improving in esteem, Spring Branch East is not. Northwest Mall is more associated with Spring Branch East than the other two, and combined with the access difficulties that Luminare described, could make a terminal there a difficult proposition for success.

I wonder if they'll be changing their whole visual identity soon. The current logo is over 20 years old at this point, and the overall visual identity has looked dated for some time.

It would be the Southern Pacific Grand Central Station reborn. We'd have to call it GCS, wouldn't we?

There's no reason that you couldn't have solely express train service during the peak hours, say at 6:30-9am and 4:30-7pm, then have intermediate stop service during non-peak hours. With B/CS being a college town, schedules are likely to be more flexible than those of the business travelers between Houston and Dallas.

On the dallashoustonhsr.com site, you see that it's following a high-voltage line after turning north from 290 around Hockley. Both routes intersect near Shiro (this was brought up at the scoping meeting), which is why that location is getting a lot of attention for a station that would serve B/CS.

This is true, which is why that suit will hinge on the neighborhood(s)' standing in court. If the court finds that there is no potential injury to be remedied (very possible, given that we're talking about an existing rail corridor), then legal costs for TCR will be very much attenuated, and most likely already factored into the costs of construction. On the other hand, if the court does find that the residents have standing, then that will almost certainly guarantee that the station would be at NW Mall, unless the legal budget is relatively high already.

Given that scoping was for environmental concerns, and as mentioned, was completed a while ago, this is all about sound and fury signifying nothing. If the residents had legitimate environmental impact concerns, there might be interference with the project. However, pure NIMBYism isn't going to derail (sorry) much of anything. I'm sure the residents will be going to court soon; however, I don't see how they have much standing to contest the process.

IMO it would make more sense to upgrade SH 71 between Bergstrom Airport and Columbus to Interstate standard, and designate the corridor as a spur of I-10.

Are there any plans or efforts around to replace this bridge? It's fairly insufficient for shipping purposes, and it is nearing the end of its serviceable life at 41. Seems that the replacement of this bridge would be a prime candidate to give Houston an architectural landmark.

Proximity, decent sized port, historical connections, good connections to the rail system. Tampa's port system is much larger than Miami's and will likely stay that way, owing to geography. It would be the port of focus for any high-speed containerized transport (via rail) to the East Coast or Midwest, while Elizabeth, NJ would likely be the port of focus for less time-critical goods. Houston could see an uptick of containerized goods going west on rails, though.

I'd guess Tampa serves to benefit more than anyone, but I'm also guessing there would be more petrochemicals exported to Cuba as a result.

^^ Agreed. Bypassing 450k to better serve 14 million makes a lot of sense, especially when you're having to consider the feasibility constraints involved with private funds. When the Texas T-bone was being proposed, the political bias that Texas has towards rural interests had to be taken into account. Without those political considerations, the direct connection between two megacities makes much more sense.