samagon

19 hours ago, JLWM8609 said:

Hmm. At this rate, he might be first one term mayor since Neal Pickett.

depends on whether SJL runs again.

hooray for having to pick the least worst candidate. 

22 hours ago, Valhalla said:

They're going to cap the park through most of downtown, so in effect they're not widening the highway.. they're getting rid of it

it'd be good to split out the i35 discussion from the i45 discussion. someone might mistake a statement like this about the i35 cap park with the Houston project, which the cap park isn't guaranteed, and it won't be capped through most of downtown.

so the same project they are currently doing on wayside north of the Gulf freeway.

be interesting to see if our traffic engineer mayor tries to butt his head into TXDoT projects?

what does HGAC have to do with Montrose?

On 4/19/2024 at 5:23 PM, trymahjong said:

I have a 3 wheeled electric bike - one of the grandkids has tiny pedal bike  with train8ng wheels, but you can't forget the double wide stroller that usually comes along to sort of act as guard on the other side for pedal bike........if we all go side by side we take up more than 6 feet wide-- at 10 feet wide, there is possibility of someone else either going in our direction or the opposite direction can also use sidewalk.

This seems to be a hard concept for people to understand.

your scenario is while valid, seems to be a bit of an edge case.

3' sidewalks are unacceptable, they do not even allow for people walking to even pass each other and stay on the sidewalk without getting into personal space. they are far too narrow.

10' is great to provide complete coverage for almost every situation possible, including yours.

5' provides for the most common scenarios, while perhaps still causing issue for the edge cases. people are able to walk on the sidewalk without stepping off to pass people going the other way, and also for groups to walk 2 wide going the same direction. 

3' encourages people to not walk, 5' provides a solution for most who might want to walk and won't discourage people from choosing a walk instead of a drive. 10' is great where there is ROW, but I'd submit if the ROW can support 10' sidewalks on both sides, maybe there should be 5' sidewalk, and 5' bike path, rather than a 10' sidewalk.

2 hours ago, 004n063 said:

Hmmph

I was expecting that.

sucks that there isn't a real easy way to get from one side to the other without taking your life into your hands and going around the blockade.

On 4/20/2024 at 8:25 AM, Houston19514 said:

Already divided by the railroad tracks, (which I believe are actually the western boundary of the 5th Ward).

I came here to say this. there is a railroad track.

there are already only 6 cross streets from one side of the tracks to the other, which I assume would be preserved, and in this case, local residents probably have the same issues with the crossings in that area as we do on the east side, in that trains make frequent stops blocking the crossings. taking that into account, there's only 2 reliable paths from one side of the tracks to the other between i10 and 610.

there's plenty of reasons that this shouldn't happen, but saying that this is going to divide a neighborhood isn't it.

so work seems to have stopped, or is going slower than the Mobile on McKinney/York. 

and there was even more hate towards the i35 experiment than our experiment.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/john-whitmire-mayor-houston/

On 4/6/2024 at 12:59 PM, editor said:

Need the parking lot for the customers.  The parking garage?  It's been my observation that downtown area parking garages are mostly used by suburban teens to drink beer, smoke pot, and make more Texans.

don't forget they're also good for some high speed downhill on whatever wheeled contrivance you prefer.

not that I ever participated in any dangerous events in my youth.

and more Texans are good, so long as they grow up to be contributing members to the social security pyramid scheme.

On 4/6/2024 at 7:36 PM, steve1363 said:

Honestly, the mayor is not wrong.   Even though @004n063 might ride his bike to work.  I'll guess he's the only one at his school. Most of you cyclists likely use the bike lanes for recreation.  There might be a few exceptions on this website.   Let's face it, the bike lanes are empty 90% of the time.  If there were more bike traffic the mayor would not be able to uphold his stance so easily. That's "real-talk" and I know unpopular on this forum.

anecdotal evidence doesn't count for much when people are doing traffic studies. 

however, your anecdotal evidence (and the similar anecdotal mental notes that other people take) is what drives your opinion, no matter how misguided it might be.

all the while, if someone is choosing to commute via their bicycle and there isn't a protected space for them? you have to move over a lane to pass them, or are 'stuck' behind them for 15 seconds, you are probably the first to wish they were somewhere else than inconveniencing you.

and you can't have it both ways, you can't wish cyclists to not commute on the same roads you travel, if you aren't willing to see some of 'your' roads be more appropriately sized for the amount of vehicular traffic they carry, and then safely separated for use of people who choose to commute in a different manner.

at the end of the day, you have an opinion, and that's great, I respect that, even if I don't agree with it. the problem is that when you want a street like 11th to be returned to 2 lanes in each direction, the vehicle traffic it carries does not warrant that amount of space for cars, and that's empirical evidence. it was a smart and careful decision to right size the vehicular lanes, and to use the opportunity to add more space for safe commuting by other forms of vehicles.

empirical evidence may not be public opinion, where anecdotal is, but it is measured and scientific.

I am a skeptical, but I emailed.

this is going to have such an amazing view from the rooftop patio of the back of the GRB. 😍

On 3/30/2024 at 12:31 PM, j_cuevas713 said:

Of course. You have a rail line right in front and plenty of street parking but let's destroy housing for cars. 

on the other side of the spoon, imagine if this wasn't built in a TOD, how much parking they'd need. 

On 4/2/2024 at 12:10 PM, steve1363 said:

That’s a swell idea, but I’m not aware of any museums that do this.  I suppose it is cost prohibitive from a security standpoint.  No doubt museums want their masterpieces where they can be safeguarded.  The Dallas Museum of Art was vandalized recently.  The intruder just busted the glass door and destroyed some works of art!
 

Your idea could work for “starving artist” exhibits?

maybe if it's an extension of the modern art museum? 

is anyone going to vandalize a rope that's been rolled up, painted bright yellow, and called "coiled".

no recipe attached, but an ugly brisket photo is included.

https://www.chron.com/food/article/john-cornyn-beef-brisket-19378918.php

11 hours ago, j_cuevas713 said:

The point is the Feds told them they can't start construction yet and they're acting as though this drainage project isn't part of the bigger 45 reroute when it is. At the end of the day TxDOT doesn't care. Even the rep they had at the Baker Institute Transit Forum didn't hold back in letting everyone know that TxDOT's only priority is moving people fast. 

my understanding is that the reason is because the expansion project is only permitted to proceed after a mandated air monitoring for an entire year, since TXDoT isn't classifying this as part of the i45 expansion, they didn't do the air monitoring, the people who are protesting state that it is.

TXDoT's priority isn't moving people fast, their priority is making freeways so people can move themselves. if TXDoT were interested in moving people fast, we'd have bullet trains everywhere, and plenty of commuter rail, as well as more localized rail projects that focused on moving the highest volume of people as quickly as possible.

10 hours ago, staresatmaps said:

If you can't handle people parking on the public street in front of your house, you need to move to the suburbs.

there absolutely are people who get all angry about it, weirdly. I mean, it's a public street, they treat it as an extension of their home and they get all passive aggressive, growing shrubs close to the curb so passengers can't open doors, or putting big boulders on the side of their property. 

on a different subject, but the same subject, as @steve1363 describes, there are plenty of people who don't respect the laws when they park. parking the wrong way, parking within 20' of a crosswalk/intersection, blocking a private driveway, not parking close enough to the curb.

and yeah, I get peeved when people don't park correctly on neighborhood streets. especially blocking driveways, or too close to intersections, both of these are huge safety issues. I'll even go as far as narcing on them to park Houston. whether this gets them a ticket or not, I'm unsure, but I like to think it does, and maybe they learn from it?

41 minutes ago, __nevii said:

Meanwhile, the relative "slowness" of the Green and Purple lines ties back to the problems of the minimum mandates that I mentioned prior. Until the reformed TOD guidelines came in 2020, the stations on those areas weren't doing the best of job since the old TOD was opt-in, and not necessarily evenly applied: and all those areas that haven't gotten under Walkable Place and/or TOD exemptions suffer under the onerous parking and setback codes.

I don't know enough about the purple and north red lines, but since I have lived near the location of the green line for nearly 15 years now, I have watched development happen before and after along the corridor.

the development that happened on Lockwood and Harrisburg didn't get funding, or start building until after the LRT was announced and was already under construction even. I don't think that would have happened without the green line, farther in near Milby and Sampson the activity there is I think in part related (if not directly) to the LRT.

and now with the TOD stuff, as you mention? I think this will do even more to strengthen that corridor.

midtown, I had friends that lived there, and at the time, I basically lived there too, so I have seen the density that has happened directly as a result of the red line, the success of the developments around any of those lines isn't due to events or formatting, it's the same as with freeways, induced demand isn't just a concept that works for freeways.

anyway, we're in year 9 of the green line operation, in another 11 years, perhaps the density around it (and the purple line) will be on the same track as the red line. I hope so, and I hope TOD helps push that.

for the purple line, I do know that all of the apartments that have been built with the intention of being for students are all within a single crosswalk of a LRT stop. not that there's a lot of other options near UH for off campus housing.

On 3/28/2024 at 9:58 PM, MaxConcrete said:

The pollution issue is greatly over-exaggerated. Going forward there will be more electric cars (no pollution) and hybrids (much less pollution) in the vehicle fleet. This tollway will have minimal or negligible trucks, which pollute much more than cars.

even if every new car sale in the next 10 years is fully BEV, or even just PHEV, there's still our existing fleet, which will take a while to cycle out of use. so even on a super aggressive timescale, we're looking at at least 20 years. considering the uptake of BEV has slowed recently, 10 years is super duper stupid aggressive assumption, we're probably looking at 20 years, or more before you can't go into a dealer and buy an ICE vehicle, which means 30 years before vehicle emissions is negligible. 

it's a worthless discussion to talk about what may be. what is, now that's a different thing. where emissions related pollution on the hardy is already miles better than either 45, or 59 is congestion. at all times of the day, every day, 45 is slow, and 59 isn't much better. from downtown to BW8 you can go between 30 and 45mph and call it a good day. on hardy, there are other vehicles, but you can set your cruise at 70, and just steer all the way from start to finish. that's where the negligible pollution comes from.

but at the end of the day, adding a tollway will add vehicle miles, once they make the downtown connection, it may end up being as heavily used as the westpark tollway, and that will increase pollution significantly. even if there isn't a huge influx of traffic, the pollution will increase. and that's the point, and the problem.

On 3/28/2024 at 9:58 PM, MaxConcrete said:

I recently lived alongside the Sam Houston Tollway for several years near an overpass and my opinion is that pollution from a freeway is a non-issue. Noise was also a non-issue except during usual wind conditions, although the tollway has a low-noise asphalt overlay in that area (Jersey Village).

yeah, your place in JV probably had double paned windows, and plenty of insulation. I am about 1000ft from the gulf freeway in a home that was built at about the same time as the homes along the hardy corridor, but with updates to insulation, and stuff that they probably don't have. I hear the freeway well enough.

On 3/28/2024 at 8:09 PM, Ross said:

We live inside the loop.. We have a 1/4 acre lot and live within a few blocks of Kroger. We still use the car to shop for groceries.  Anything to do with the yard is going to require a car. I've known a few people who tried to live without a car in Houston. One managed pretty well, but he was a coworker who was literally a rocket scientist, but was absent minded. He never learned to drive. All the other gave up after a month or so. The other issue is getting to and from work. Unless your office is downtown, public transport is tough. When we lived in Midtown, I had to take the bus to Bellaire for work for 6 weeks after TS Allison flooded my car. 6 block walk to the bus and it dropped off across the street from my office. It turned a 10 to 15 minute commute into 45 minutes or longer. Why would I not use a car for that?

that is exceedingly rare though. the overwhelming majority of single family, detached homes in Houston (even within BW8) are on 5000sf lots for the specific reason that at one point in time, that was the minimum lot size. if the city had allowed for 2500sf lots, then that would be the primary size.

when I lived in one of these common sized homes (1250sf home built in the 1930s, on a 5000sf lot) I could cut my yard with one of those EGO mowers and the smallest battery. but then, it was also just me living there, I could ride my bike to Fiesta, grab what I needed for a few days, it would all fit in a single pannier on the back of the bike.

now with 2 kids, a wife, and 8500sf lot (and bigger house that comes with that bigger lot), it's impossible to go grocery shopping on the bike. but then, the trade off is that my office is remote, so I am steps away from my office desk, vs driving/biking from the near east end into downtown depending on weather.

Houston is car centric, there's not really any way to get around it.

On 3/28/2024 at 5:16 PM, __nevii said:

As mentioned before, there are negative externalities in car-dependent policies like parking minimums, large setbacks and lot sizes, etc that don't exist in the other (more denser) way: whether it is environmental sustainability/flooding, or rising prices/city finances, or traffic, all of it is worse with car-centric policies compared to denser urbanity. In that respect, there is no "both sides" to it:

There are no principled justifications for parking minimums in anywhere, even when factoring in transit options/lackthereof.

In fact, most stuff in US zoning codes (setbacks, residential density limits, etc) have no principled justification.

Most of the complaining is irrelevant: just a bunch of shooting the messenger, poisoning the well, affirming the consequent, and other fallacious, misdirected ire that misses the core causal connections (i.e. and, hence, important keys to true problem solving).

without other transit options than personal cars, I don't think there is an option to not require parking. but then, I've also not ever seen anywhere that doesn't have public transit not have parking minimums, so I can't imagine how it would be without.

I will say that Houston is properly screwing itself, we need to be more aggressive with building BRT, LRT, whatever. we need fixed guideway transit. the facts are Houston gets most of the money from property taxes, private cars as the transit solution only allow for a specific density. fixed guideway transit (LRT, BRT, and beyond) is a long term investment, and commitment by a city to move a lot of humans along that specific corridor.

developers see that signal and build properties that provide density to match the fixed transit. all one has to do is look at the red line corridor in the 20 years since it was put in.  the corridor of the green line started densifying before the line was completed, and the density is getting higher with every year that passes. density on the purple line is increasing, as well as along the north extension of the red line. the uptown BRT already had density, but it is getting even more dense. and all this density happened without the city doing their walkable places and reducing parking minimums near these fixed guideway transit options.

each time higher density goes in, that means higher property taxes, and more money for the city. the state cannot raise property tax rates, so property values/density is the only possible way for Houston, or any city in Texas to increase their income. 

and yeah, wasting money to satisfy outer suburbs that aren't in Houston city limits is a huge burden on the city, and anyone who lives here and wants roads without potholes, or more officers on the street, less crime, we should be yelling from every rooftop for more transit options that will increase density.

anyway, weren't we talking bike lanes?

18 minutes ago, __nevii said:

 

There are loads of negative externality effects regarding parking minimums. It isn't just about the pleasantness of the urban environment, it goes all the way to the issues of affordability, gentrification/"pricing out", that lots of people keep complaining about.

When parking minimums are too excessive (hint: they always are) for what would otherwise be a neighborhood-level business:

1. That is suddenly a lot of overhead that an aspiring business owner must account for (land area + pavement for parking spaces).
    
2. Which means that the business must draw a larger market area in order to recoup the costs of all the infrastructure...
    
3. And what happens with drawing from a larger area? More busy, hectic traffic into the neighborhood that people are turned off with (especially if vehicular).

In other words, there are no principled justifications for parking minimums whatsoever: those minimums create all the problems that people complain about.

no doubt, there's all sorts of sides to the subject, and no one way to do it is the right way. the thing of it is, it needs to be understood that there are trade-offs both ways. in some scenarios the business owner suffers, in others, the local homeowners suffer. 

if you have less requirements for parking minimums because it's a neighborhood level business, when the store/restaurant/coffee shop that is opened with every intention of being used by locals becomes popular and people who aren't local want to come, so now, if they don't have appropriate parking in a city like Houston where driving is the only option provided by government, we are stuck with people parking on neighborhood streets. the locals that once sang the praises of that amazing local business are now cursing everyone that goes to it.

as an example, you want to go to Permission? if you don't grab one of the 10 slots shared by it and Pho Binh, you are either paying for parking in the lot formerly known as Fitzgeralds, or you are parking on a neighborhood street. and that's the case for any place on White Oak.

if only we had a real public transit option, then the minimum parking discussions kind of just disappear. 

there's nothing politically motivated in any of the things you suggest that would be reasons for putting a bike lane on one street vs another. you've been watching either CNN, or Fox News way too much. just unplug for a minute and stop presuming that everything is politically motivated.

parking minimums are a lot more complex than just living somewhere within walking distance of a restaurant, bar, retail, or coffee shop. many people who frequent those places (most specifically the restaurants, bars, and retail) are coming in from a place that makes the destination not walkable. now, when they arrive, maybe walking from a restaurant to a bar (or vice versa), or walking from shop to shop, in which case a nice parking garage should be considered, rather than forcing the tourists to park on neighborhood streets, or offer better public transit.

even still, the probability of anyone in the Heights choosing to walk to any specific destination (depending on time of year and time of day) is probably restricted to .5 miles. maybe more on a nice March morning like today, but probably a lot less on an August afternoon.

anyway, you're assuming that the bicycle rider is only interested in destinations on 11th street. and even if the destination is something on 11th, most people who use a bicycle as their preferred transportation are very used to, if there is even infrastructure for bicycles, we are used to having to do the last portion of whatever journey without even having a bicycle lane.

a completely different subject, but regarding the parking, whatever TIRZ collects taxes from businesses in the area should consider building a parking garage near 19th street, 11th street, and then also on White Oak, or maybe some big parking garage somewhere with a circulator bus that hits stops at major retail/restaurant hubs. not sure they can do a circulator though, I know a TIRZ can build parking structures though.