august948

Five residential driveways? That will not have moving traffic 99% of the time? The existing lot looks to have been commercial with the five existing driveways composing more than 50% of the total curb. Sounds like an upgrade for pedestrians, especially if they plant some trees. Just pointing out that the walkability isn't significantly impaired by this. In fact, it's probably going to be improved.

Are they going to destroy the sidewalks then?

They might be able to make a case if you create a completely separated bikeway, bridges and all. If the new path featured views of the grounds it might stimulate more paying visits considering how many people will be riding by each day. Plus the virtue signaling, which orgs like MFAH just eat up.

Sounds like BCycle couldn't survive without heavy subsidization. In that case putting a government agency like Metro in charge is going to be the only way it will happen.

What would make it even cooler is to connect all this to Terry Hershey. Katy to Downtown ride anyone?

Without the freeways bringing in a lot of the nearly 7 million people, and their money, who live outside the loop every day the 500k who live inside the loop wouldn't have nearly as much fun stuff as they do now. First world problems anyone?

That's just a link from an article complaining about how big the beltway is.

Google maps has a scale in the lower right corner. I zoomed in on the beltway until the scale was a half inch (in this case the half inch showed as 2 miles). Then I measured the north-south and east-west with a ruler on my monitor. Like I said, it's a rough estimate, but I couldn't find an official measurement anywhere.

Just a rough estimate. Google maps shows the beltway to be somewhat of a square 22 miles by 22 miles. That gets us 484 square miles.

....no you just missed my point entirely.

IKR, they need at least four of them to be toll lanes to extend the katy tollway all the way to downtown. Maybe we need 6 or 8 new lanes total.

Considering that the land area inside the Beltway is almost 500 square miles, I think we'll be fine. How much urbanity do you really need?

Better get your shots before eating there 😆

I'm a real hoot all the time, brother.😜 Cold war 2.0. The US has four strategic enemies, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. There are others that don't like us that much, Venezuela comes to mind, but the rest are all bark and no bite. Iran and North Korea are a pain the the nether regions, but they are only regional powers at best. That leaves us with Russia and China. Until early March 2022, we thought the Russians were still a great power (so do they, btw, which is the root of this problem). They had a couple of weeks window to overrun Ukraine and establish a puppet government and failed spectacularly. At that point we realized, institutionally, that the Russians are a paper tiger and have been grinding them down ever since. That will continue into the near future until they are no longer any more than a regional power. This is the unspoken reason why we've been drip feeding them weapons instead of rushing them in. We need maximum grind on their military age population and the massive stockpiles of soviet-era munitions. They are already in a demographic decline and we're helping that along. On the other side of the planet, we've been building up a ring of allies and bases to strangle China, if necessary. China's also got a major demographic issue. One of two things will happen there. Either they'll strike out at Taiwan, run wild for a few months and then get crushed by blockade and sanctions or they'll slowly rot on the vine as we pull our trade away from them. They have to have imports and exports in order to survive.

Are we taking Russian proclamations seriously now? Relax, by the time the next US president is inaugurated Ukraine will have most, if not all of it's territory back and the ring around China will be ever tightening. There's a bigger game afoot now, one that's going to dominate the coming decades. Also one that is bigger than any US president, Trump or otherwise. Politicians say all kinds of flurf, but when push comes to shove US dominance will be the agenda. Is Musk Derangement Syndrome a thing now? Asking for a friend.

And no matter how much we raz each other on our favorite Texas teams, when it's Texas vs the world...

No need. The long term plan is to absorb the UT system and rebrand it's flagship as UH - Austin.😛

Wait, wasn't the Hunter Biden laptop thing all just a Russian hoax?

Not at all. What I'm saying is if there is really a case, an actual legal case not media/political hyperbole case, they should have brought it well before now. They've already got convictions on Jan 6 rioters. Not suggesting extortion...just making a prediction, one that applies to both sides. Surely you're not going to tell us that Democratic led investigations are always good-faith and Republican led ones are always bad-faith? Even if you are right and the timing of the prosecution and court date is just a 'coincidence', the optics will strongly suggest otherwise. The ball is already in play now on this one and we'll see how it affects the election, as it surely will one way or the other. Bookmark this discussion and come back to it after the next presidential election or two and we'll see how things go.

And from here on out it will be completely legit to actually try to "lock her/him/them up" during an election instead of just blathering about it at political rallies. Pandora, meet your new box. We'll see how this turns out in the coming years.

So why wait until the start of primary season to charge him and then set the court date the day before Super Tuesday? If it's an open and shut case, why didn't they just go ahead and do it earlier? Or, alternately, why not just let the majority of voters who don't want him to be president do their thing and deny him office? My point here is we're dangerously close to having impeachments, rioting, and prosecution of political opponents become the norm. Surely you're not in favor of that just so you can "get" Trump?

Given the massive nature of the federal code, not to mention state codes, it's not that hard to find something to charge someone with if the prosecutor has the inclination. But why did they wait until an election was coming up to charge him? Why did they get a court date the day before Super Tuesday? It's all just a coincidence? You can pretend this isn't a political prosecution intended to influence the election all you want but the evidence begs to differ.

You missed my point entirely.

Think of it as the booby prize for them losing out to us on pretty much everything else that matters. 😛

TxDOT, sweetie, go start the grill. Papa's going to throw on a big juicy steak for this one. 'Bout time they expanded the Katy inside the loop. 🥂