ADCS

2 hours ago, IronTiger said:

Something else occurred to me...it looks like the proposed re-route will add about a full mile to Interstate 45's length. Now, disregarding all the other problems about this (I'm sure the "phantom congestion" problem will become worse with all the twists and turns in the new plan), but wouldn't adding an extra mile throw off the mileage on mile markers and exit numbers?

They'd just find some way to fudge the numbers, likely at the start in Galveston, and perhaps update them to the new numbers as sign replacement projects come along. Not that huge of a problem.

MLB has a target audience. The Rangers do a very good job of pulling in this target audience, and much of that has to do with the stadium being close to the mid-cities suburbs.

This target audience is also the same one that prompted the move of FC Dallas to Frisco, and the Atlanta Braves to Smyrna.

How long until the land is condemned then?

3 minutes ago, mollusk said:

As much as I dislike the Chain O' Freeways circling downtown, an alternative that ends up more or less recreating Atlanta's I-75/85 cluster flock or Boston's not so free flowing Central Artery.

This does neither. 75-85 merges all lanes into one facility, while this plan keeps those lanes separated. The Big Dig was similar in concept, but had much more complexity owing to existing underground rail facilities, along with being constructed primarily through landfill.

TxDOT studies these things for a living. They know what they're doing.

1 minute ago, IronTiger said:

The user mentioned 45 North, not 45 South.

If we're going to be pedantic, let's get it right - he talked about coming in from North 45, not traveling on 45 going north.

36 minutes ago, IronTiger said:

I'm pretty sure I mentioned the same thing, and you said something like, "Well, you can enjoy it from street level" or something along those lines.

The freeway west of Downtown, where you pass under BOA and Heritage Plaza, will remain where it is according to the current plans. That's the whole "Downtown Connector" concept.

8 hours ago, scarface said:

Yes, I do not care too much for the proposed design. For one thing, that will definitely erase the breathtaking view coming into downtown from North 45 going below the towering BOA and Heritage Plaza skyscrapers. It will be sorely missed.

 

 

That's simply not true.

5 hours ago, BigFootsSocks said:

Where'd you get that cost proposal from? I've read that it's only (lol) $1 billion for the cost from 610/290 into downtown, which is still a lot of money.

Something I remember from one of the open houses, but I could be remembering incorrectly.

1 minute ago, IronTiger said:

If it cost as much as half of the line, then we're talking billions of dollars, and if we're talking "local, state, or federal funding" then you just gave the "No HSR in Texas" crowd a whole lot of ammo to work with.

Yes to both. This is why I believe TCR is staying away from a Downtown station, unless funding for Downtown is a fait accompli.

There are mostly Bush-era Republicans in charge of TCR. They know exactly how the political situation in this state works.

11 hours ago, IronTiger said:

How would that go about, really? Not talking about why it would even go to downtown to begin with (I don't want to start that argument again) or if TxDOT would even give up even the inner shoulders, but let's say they did. Basically, you would have to build a two-level elevated superstructure above the overpasses during the sunken parts (and not only would it be a bit unsightly, but it would have to be built much stronger than traditional highway structures, due to the weight limits--if you remember, METRO contributed money to over-engineer the Katy Tollway so it could support trains. On the above-ground portions, it would be also have to be higher, and in the end, it would probably be just as costly if not more so between giant superstructures and wrangling with TxDOT.

You're right about the increased cost, which is why TCR prefers the NW Mall area. Apparently, an inner loop segment could cost as much as half of the line between Dallas and Houston, owing to design constraints. Any access to Downtown would likely require municipal, METRO, state or federal assistance in funding.

It's not impossible, though - it's an engineering problem through-and-through, and Houston tends to be good at solving those. Hell, if we agreed to call it the Aggie Express between Downtown and Shiro, you'd probably find plenty of engineers willing to work for free 

45 will get wrapped around the east side of Downtown, adjacent and parallel to 69/59. The current Pierce corridor would likely be developed.

That's not exactly a theory - if you've been to any of TCR's events, you would have seen a handful of Rice Military folks who are extremely vocal about their opposition to the line. However, that's mostly likely why a downtown route would follow I-10. It's still too early to tell if that opposition would permanently sink its chances if it's not directly impacting the neighborhood.

Define "unnecessary".

We already know you're against big infrastructure projects, Ross. Where's your support?

IT, ever thought about coming up with a legitimate argument for removing the Pierce? It might help with your arguments being perceived as hot takes.

4 hours ago, sdotwill84 said:

 

Unfortunately, a young lady passed early monday morning as she went around the barricades on her way home. Sad story.

We can only do so much. Sadly, there's no getting around human ingenuity past a certain point. Still, I think larger steel barriers would be much more difficult to defeat than the plastic temporary ones that Public Works uses.

The sorts of barriers that I'm thinking of are commonly used in the Mountain West and Plains states to shut down Interstates for blizzards. There is no reason these can't be installed here for heavy floods.

In which case you install gates at exits before the depressed section, and activate the gates when either rainfall hits a certain intensity, or standing water in the depressed section reaches a certain height. These are engineering problems that can be easily solved.

10 hours ago, IronTiger said:

The recent floods have made me wonder if entirely sunken highways around downtown are that much of a good idea, and especially the idea of the deck park over a 59/45, making it impossible to air-rescue anyone unfortunate enough to get stuck down there. Dallas' "tunnel" under Klyde Warren Park doesn't have that same problem due to the Trinity River having a wide "right of way" so to speak, to flood over, but Houston doesn't have that luxury. 

 

The current set-up allows 45 to access 59 and remain elevated (as the Pierce Elevated drops below to Dallas), whereas the TxDOT plan basically paralyzes the inner loop highway system by having all highways going in and out of downtown remaining completely inaccessible during a flooding event.

 

Just something to think about.

Flooded freeways are a feature, not a bug. Like it or not, they're a critical part of the retention strategy in our flood control plan. Saving lives and homes is far more important than ensuring your commute is the exact same in extreme weather.

The trick is convincing people to get off the freeways just before they flood, but Houstonians tend to be pathologically stubborn about that sort of thing. I even tried to take Memorial across the park to work on Monday morning, until realizing that it wasn't going to work.

I think the suggestion of automatic flood gates, similar to snow gates in Colorado, is a good one.

Ultimately, the Pierce was an interesting idea from the '50s that just didn't work out in the execution. No need to double down on it when we have a much better idea of what helps cities thrive, and what holds them back with 60+ years of freeway-era experience.

12 hours ago, IronTiger said:

The second thing I noticed that sinking all the highways will completely hide downtown from most angles.

From the highways, maybe - from the city streets, they'll be just as visible as before, just without an elevated freeway in front of them.

1 hour ago, samagon said:

2. that area wasn't parks when 45 was 'forced' to go that way. that area was unused bayou.

3. I agree, it's way too much what if. But it's an interesting question. if the east end was as built up as midtown is now, what would the discussion be? obviously, when 45 was built, no one said, what will the use of this bayou be in 50 years? If they had, they may have reconsidered putting a freeway there and built out the park immediately. The question we should be asking now is how will we be using freeways in 50 years and does this make sense?

2. From Houston Freeways:

Another possible roadblock to freeway construction was the parkland along Buffalo Bayou just west of downtown, adjacent to the Houston Civic Center. A web of elevated structures and connection ramps was envisioned for IH 45 through that section of downtown. In a 1979 interview, Ralph Ellifrit remarked that “there was considerable discussion” about building a freeway at that location, but “there was just no way” to build the downtown freeway system without routing the freeway there.

There was enough parkland in that area to be worthy of consideration during route planning.

3. The question we need to be asking now is what we want our city to look like in 50 years. Do we want it to be dominated by freeway structures as it currently is, or do we want our freeways to seamlessly reintegrate with the urban fabric?

This has the ability to be as significant to Houston as Haussmann's renovations were to Paris. 

13 hours ago, IronTiger said:

Well, no, it's not exactly the same thing. 

For starters, the depressed freeway will be twice as wide as that part of 59 (at least). If 59 was widened to Katy Freeway-style widths and required demolition on one or both sides of the freeway, I guarantee you that it would not be nearly as beneficial to the area or as well-liked.

Actually, the Pierce Elevated seems to have been built to avoid downtown (this crying about Pierce Elevated "cutting through" the area is highly overstated), and was built as an elevated to allow traffic to continue unabated underneath (highway planning at the time considered elevated to be the least disruptive style of highway.

 

You bring up a good point, admittedly...as apartments get older, the neighborhoods usually change too. What if Midtown is no longer (or less) trendy and EaDo is the place to be, as build-up makes it politically impossible? What if developers wanted 59 to be redirected around the north and west parts of town, and a giant canyon separated Midtown and Downtown so the elevated portion of 59 could be removed?

1. It might be a little more than 1.5 times as wide. I maintain that 59 would have still been as liked, even if it were unnecessarily wider - because it got rid of an unsightly, elevated freeway that impacted land values.

2. I'm not talking about the Pierce Elevated specifically - I'm talking about why 45 was forced through the park areas of western Downtown, and then splitting off a quarter of Freedmen's Town from the rest of the neighborhood. In the context of late Jim Crow-era Houston, I can't help but think there was just a tinge of urban renewal and population dispersal taken into mind.

3. This argument is a bit specious, as it is taken into account both by depressing 59/45 through EaDo, and having a park cap included in the master plan. It's even possible with the right kind of capital investment for property to be built on top of the depressed 59/45, such as with the I-95 towers in north Manhattan.

On a separate note, does anyone have a sense of why 45 on the west side of downtown was insisted upon? I checked Houston Freeways, but it didn't delve too deeply into this beyond a mention of "slum clearance". Seems to me that cutting off the east end of Freedmen's Town to be redeveloped into Houston Center might have been a major purpose of that section's construction.

2 minutes ago, samagon said:

So here is everything that in my estimation is a negative about the system:

• taking 19 blocks of east downtown (over 10% of the localized area).
  • which includes a very nice apartment complex
  • the best Vietnamese restaurant in town
  • many small businesses
  • a very young, yet vibrant nightlife area
  • homeless aid centers
• displacing an entire low income community (clayton homes).
• removing one major arterial road for the east end that currently crosses 59 (signifies a reduction in connectivity of over 10%, and only 1 of 4 major arterial roads that crosses 59)
• St. Emanuel is turned into a feeder road which will encourage high speed driving.
• There is so much connectivity removed between the 527 spur and 288. 4 streets of the 10 will be removed:
  • Caroline
  • Crawford
  • Cleburne
  • Eagle 

These are all absolutely going to happen, and all bad. Taking land, displacing people, reducing connectivity. It's never good.

For the record, I think on the north side along I-10 it doesn't matter as much, and it isn't all that bad, I mean the area is already at odds with railroads, bayous, and all other contrivances to disconnect the area (and it was already so disconnected anyway with all the above), what is adding a few more freeway lanes and such? They are adding more land to the south of I-10, which will be good for that specific area. I think this area hinges more on how the hardy yards is developed than how the freeway system is adjusted.

Don't get me wrong, I see the good in it. They're straightening the freeways. Adding a lane or two here and there, implementing plans that are based on many years worth of experience observing traffic patterns and how to make it safer. Good stuff.

Once you get beyond that you're into a realm of we just don't know, and we hope it has this affect.

We hope it bridges midtown and downtown in a way that is more than just a way for people who are already insanely rich to get even richer. We hope it makes the area along the bayou more inviting. We hope it doesn't remove the gains from east downtown and take 20+ years after completion for east downtown to recover. We hope it doesn't remove the small gains that have been seen between midtown and the museum district.

You may disagree, but I see a lot more absolute negative, and I see a lot more potential negative. All this while we have a freeway that is very under utilized right now (go to google maps and turn on traffic at any time during the day, 610 on the east and north of the city is empty). Most of the traffic created on the pierce elevated is from through travel, people not going to downtown, but going through it. Encourage them to take 610, as someone mentioned, it only adds 3 miles (12 miles vs 15 miles) but it saves you up to 5 minutes in rush hour.

It's my estimation that txdot is wasting our money and needlessly ripping up fragile neighborhoods if they do this when there is a cheaper alternative in educating drivers. Make 45 through town a 'business 45' and make 610 on the east side of town 'i-45'. How much does signage cost, update the ramps? How hard would it be? All for an alternative that will better utilize existing freeways and not have the negative psychological impact on a majority of residents.

And here's where we get all Spacely Sprockets: We're doing all of this for a mode of travel that is going to dramatically change in the next 20 years. Driverless cars aren't a pipe dream like flying cars of the 60s, they're real, they're taking over now. You can buy cars right now that drive for you in traffic and in a steady state on the freeway. There is rigorous testing being done in other environments. Yeah, we're probably about 3-5 years from seeing fully autonomous vehicles for purchase (but then, we're probably 3-5 years, maybe more, from this project turning dirt), but within 20 years they will be as common as the cell phone. The cell phone is a good example of the type of paradigm shift, and the time it will take to make that shift. Think back to the late 80s, you knew a few people who would pay a few hundred dollars a month for 30 minutes of talk time. by the 00s, everyone had a cell phone. They were widespread enough to have made a shift to where payphones were a thing of legend in Houston. Driverless cars are coming, they will change our lives in ways we can't imagine. It's a potential that pierce elevated, 59 and i10 could become useless and demolished around downtown as a result of driverless vehicles and how habits shift with that. Driverless vehicles is a fascinating subject and may not be directly related, but as this change to the inner workings of all freeways for the next 50 years, shouldn't we talk about the coming uses and technology that will be used on those freeways as well as the immediate impact?

There are a few things to dispute about this characterization:

1. The Lofts at the Ballpark will be 20-25 years old by the time construction starts, and 25-30 years old by the time the demolition ball comes around. It's not going to be considered a "very nice" apartment complex at that point, more one that's targeted toward budget-minded professionals. However, given the current state of oversupply that we have, there will be several buildings in that market segment at that time. It's not a critical loss.

2. Businesses can move, even if it involves temporary difficulty. Nightlife invariably does move - and the current urban integration problems of EaDo (namely, the 59 elevated) ensure that its time as a hotspot will stay temporary. I say this as someone who prefers to go to EaDo when I'm going out.

3. The demolition of Clayton Homes, as planned, suggests that HHA does not want to maintain the facility anymore. 

4. The reduced connectivity is temporary, and will be relieved once the park cap is constructed. I regularly walk through that area, and traffic on Polk isn't particularly heavy. Regardless, I am sure that TxDOT engineers have looked at traffic studies to see if removal is feasible, and found that it is so.

5. St. Emanuel does not have to be a high-speed feeder road. It all depends on the street design. If it gets built out like Bagby currently is, then design will induce slower speeds.

6. Is that connectivity around 59/288 really utilized nowadays? I see streets that do not serve an arterial purpose, nor do they have any walkable integration. Those possibilities are mitigated by the existing elevated freeway.

I do agree about rerouting 45 around the East Loop - but I think it should be done in conjunction with this project, not in place of it.

Finally, we're going to have to agree to disagree about driverless cars. I see them more as a social problem than a technical problem, one that will take 50-70 years to work out effectively. We will still need manual infrastructure in the interim.

31 minutes ago, H-Town Man said:

Great question. To me, I think that if you remove the freeway going over Buffalo Bayou and replace it with something small and preferably at grade, this becomes the most desirable part of Houston to live in, play in, be in. Everyone in the city who ever comes downtown will benefit from this. You have the Buffalo Bayou park converging with the most photographed side of downtown. This becomes the city's front lawn, in a way that Discovery Green could only dream of being. Already most photos of Houston that you see are of this area, but the area is severely compromised by the massive freeway running through it.

It's sort of like, imagine if a freeway had been built between downtown Austin and Town Lake, and it turned and headed north along Lamar Street. You'd still have a nice lake with joggers and you'd still have a nice downtown, but neither would be nearly as great as they are together, synergistically, where people downtown can casually walk along or across the lake, and lake-goers can head into downtown for a drink or a bite.

And as for downtown's connection with Midtown, you go from having a sort of stigmatized zone that divides and reduces the two, to an area where development can be unbridled, and you can have a gradual leveling off of the business district into vibrant residential areas, the way you have on the west side of downtown Austin, the south and west sides of downtown Boston, or the north side of downtown Chicago.

All-in-all, I would go as far as to say that Houston's one best chance to someday evolve into a tourist city is to put all the freeways on one side of downtown and let the other side take off in a way that it never has before. The logical sides for this, based on geography and existing layout, would be the north side or the west side, so if the west side is possible, I think we need to do it.

Thanks for reading.

 

It's also tilling the soil for greater integration of the east side with Downtown. In the short term, it would be disruptive, but far less in the long term than maintaining an elevated freeway there.

I just don't understand how anyone who has seen the positive effects of depressing 59 beneath Graustark and Montrose can be opposed to granting the same benefits to East Downtown. It certainly comes with a cost, but one that will pay dividends for future generations.

30 minutes ago, IronTiger said:

Ideally, there should ALWAYS be alternate routes, because predictability and regularity is a moving target. For example, yesterday evening, a stalled truck in the center lanes of Katy Freeway near Eldridge caused a backup on the main lanes all the way back to 610. 

Transtar does a fairly poor job utilizing the VMS network set up around the city. For example, there is no reason you could not use them to redirect non-truck traffic to Westview/Memorial/Briar Forest/Westheimer, and coordinate with police to ticket any through trucks that peel off the National System. "MAJOR ACCIDENT" does nothing but inform you that your day is going to get that much worse.