samagon

I don't think the city can be selective like this. what they should do is increase the requirement of ALL parking lots for shade trees being put in. I think they have a specific amount of trees per SF right now, but they should just increase it across the board for everyone. maybe update it within the guise of renewable energy and say you can skip trees if you put in solar panels.

and the highest level of irony is that statistically, trucks/SUVs are far more dangerous than cars. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-dangers-of-big-trucks/

European cities aren't even designed like European cities. if you do any small amount of research you can see that in the 50s, 60s and even into the 70s and 80s as they rebuilt Europe (after a war completely bombed out a fair number of big cities) they favored a very car centric design philosophy. and then they changed their philosophy as they saw cars killing pedestrians (children walking to school usually), and then the cost of oil/gas started to skyrocket, so public opinion forced change. they've been working for 40+ years to revert the scars created by huge roads. we all visit now and presume that because a church in the middle of town is 400 years old that the city itself and the way it was designed is held over from 400 years ago. anyway, they have focused for the past 40 or more years on creating walkable cities, which has come from the people pushing for it, where we have focused on driveable cities, which came from car and oil companies wanting to sell more stuff, so in that regard, you are very right, we have not designed cities like they have in Europe. as far as a European lifestyle, nope, it's all marketing from car manufacturers, the same marketing that has been convincing people that trucks and SUVs are safer than cars because they give you a better view, when in fact, there are more deaths associated with truck/SUVs in accidents. you've been convinced that the American way is driving, and it's simply not true. that's what the car companies want us to believe so we keep buying their cars to keep them in business. imagine living in a world where you don't have to spend $100 a week on gas, $200 a month on insurance, and $500 a month on a car payment. yeah, $1000 a month so you can use the transit infrastructure the state/city built. talk about subsidized transit!!! and yet, you've been convinced that paying a few dollars a month in taxes is too high of a subsidy for mass transit. but hey, at least you own a depreciating asset that you'll trade in few years for a new one, or maybe you lease, which is paying all the subsidy without having any ownership. well then, we should look at Manilla, that is a city with super cheap cost of living, and great public transit. anyway, to consider cost of living without also considering the kinds of wages people make is kind of only looking at half the equation, and without stating that, people are going to naturally try and equate their own wage, which is worse than not equitable. heck, even cost of living in San Diego vs Houston is silly. any which way you look at it though, they have roughly $1000 extra in disposable income that they aren't putting towards a car, so they can afford to put more into their housing needs. anyway, the cost to maintain an infrastructure for pedestrians is monumentally lower than it is for roads. like an order of magnitude monumentally. we're talking hundreds of thousands for a mile of sidewalk vs multiple millions for a mile of roadway. that's cost to build, maintain should be even less. and our city doesn't even maintain sidewalks, it dumps that on landowners! it'd be great if whatever entity you want to pin it on would provide equitably funded options so everyone isn't forced into paying the $1000 a month subsidy that we all are forced to pay to use roads. heck, even if you own a car outright not making payments, you still pay $100 a week for gas, and even with minimal coverage, $100 in insurance. so at least $500 a month subsidy you have to pay to enjoy a road you paid for. sure the subsidy goes to for profit companies, but isn't that who builds trains, and who is contracted out to make the steel for the tracks, or concrete for the roads? the only difference is the subsidy is paid directly by you into the oil company, rather than through taxes into the concrete company. true enough, TXDoT's job needs to be changed to include all forms of transportation, not just the one that lobbying oil companies, and car companies get them to fund.

there's one of the new shelters on spur 5 near UH, at least I presume that's what it is, I need to take a picture of it for this thread. I laugh every time I see it.

indeed, and as the average price of a car continues to go up, the access to a car will be harder and harder. I wish more people would start pushing to increase the quality of the other options, cars absolutely need to be part of the solution, but they cannot continue to be the only solution. it's a benefit to everyone. if you can move a percentage of people into pedestrian, cycling, and mass transit, that's a cumulative percentage of fewer people driving. something like that would be a huge win for the drivers in this town. instead, we build more freeway capacity, which only serves to create more suburban sprawl, which chews up the added capacity within years, and we're right back where we started, only with more cars.

worse than decimated. I know when my office was in downtown, commuting from Lawndale and Telephone, I'd jog up to McKinney at York/Samson to make my commute into downtown. quick and easy access. according to my mom, both of my grandparents chose to commute down McKinney as well, they had a house near Lawndale and Dismuke and both worked for SP. kind of interesting to me that I would have naturally gravitated towards the same route they chose for their commute. McKinney was so good because it is relatively unused, wide, and also has very few intersections with stoplights.

yes, the bolded part is probably because drivers were jumping up onto the curb where pedestrians were standing and waiting for the bus. so yes, very unsafe to allow pedestrians to stand where people are driving recklessly over curbs. they just said it in a way that makes entitled car drivers feel like it wasn't entirely their fault.

very true, I recall at one point there was a discussion of a boardwalk like bridge structure to connect Memorial park and BB park, it was probably some architecture student's project that was published. not a bad idea, and perhaps for the portion of path that would be on the south bank, that could all be elevated/boardwalk so that it is separated enough.

oh yeah, no doubt, even the places I've been in Europe (and worldwide, indeed) come to a crashing halt without infrastructure for single occupant vehicles. all I'm saying is that the city/state should be investing equitably in other methods of transportation.

the key to my statement was "equitably maintained". you can give whatever reasons you want beyond that, but if the city/state doesn't put enough effort into providing these methods of moving as solutions, they will never be solutions for exactly the reasons you state.

if that's the case, the they don't even need to worry about Brenners, just jog over the bayou to get to the Hogg side, follow that till you get to the pedestrian bridge that's part of the Hogg grounds, jog back over, and follow the bank the rest of the way to Memorial park, or to get into the neighborhood street that gets you into Memorial park... as an aside, I hope they don't replace the current pedestrian bridge over the bayou to Hogg land, I love bouncing on that thing :)

funny. when I am a visitor to any city in Europe: Amsterdam, Paris, Munich, etc, I love the fact that I can park my rental vehicle at the hotel and not have to get back in it again until I'm moving on to the next place. I can walk to any mass transit location, hop on, hop off at my destination, drink, be merry, do some shopping, drink, be merry, and so long as I can remain alert enough to figure out mass transit in another language, I can get back to my hotel without any issue, and likely make new friends along the way. but I'm sure, just as with the 'freedom' that comes with some visitor being able to just 'hop in the car and go' all of that would wash away with every day use, same with my experience with using transit as a tourist. luckily, I have relatives that live in/around various large cities in the Netherlands, one of these is a city planner, so we do end up talking about traffic, transit, and all the fun stuff, how they live with it over there, vs how we live with our reality. end of the day, nothing is a panacea, but for their system, at least they have the ability to choose between 4 very effective, and equitably maintained methods of transportation: pedestrian bicycle train single occupant vehicle usually, it's going to be some mix of any of the above. with us, our only real option is 4 because infrastructure for any of the other methods doesn't exist in any real capacity as to make it equitable to driving. so yeah, we call it freedom to get in the car and go, but the reality is, we are chained to our cars with no real freedom at all, and all of the sudden the cost of living includes the cost of owning a car (and insuring, and whatever other costs come with it) for every adult in the household.

it's not the cities addiction to lanes, it is TXDoT relying on input from sources like HGAC, the members of which represent interests of the surrounding areas of Houston more than Houston. which kind of sucks because Houston has a majority of the population, yet we end up under represented by that committee, which holds a lot of sway. even still, there are a lot of people who live in Houston that still think more lanes of traffic is the only solution to transit issues.

if the process for doing permits hasn't changed since the covid work from home stuff happened, it's not that they don't have the capacity, it's that for some reason, when the people doing permits aren't in the same office all hell breaks loose. from my experience (simply adding a doorway between two commercial spaces) it's not just that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing, it's more along the lines of a full orchestra, each person is intended to read the same music, however, they all seem to have different writings of the same song, and everyone is doing their music study in their own house. and then the conductor (inspector) comes around and tells me when I'm listening to the music, that the music is wrong and I have to go back to each person in the orchestra to get them to use a specific piece of music. it took fully every bit of an entire year from getting an approved permit, through the process of the inspector not liking what was approved, to having to get director level approval for a completely different solution. and that was using a fixer to help with the process. I wish the best of luck to anyone trying to do permitting without a fixer in today's COH permitting office. if I were to guess, there's enough people doing work, the problem is the work they are doing, most of their time seems to be spent not approving new permits, but fixing what they screwed up on earlier permits.

maybe I'm not giving METRO, or this city enough credit, but I don't see below grade as something that would happen.

the green line extension will be a bit nightmarish around Milby HS. there's a rail crossing at Broadway right there, which means grade separation for the LR, and with the HW3 split from Broadway so close to the rail line, the grade separation will include an overpass for that intersection. basically, there's no way to do a LR in front of Milby on Broadway without grade separation in front of the school. I don't see that happening without a fight. not that there isn't really a better way, unless they turn on HW3, take that down to Park Place (which allows for a stop right in front of the Botanical Garden), toss in the railway overpass somewhere along HW3, which only adds .6 miles of track, but will surely avoid a costly political fight. another nightmare for METRO will be 45/Broadway/Park Place, no matter how they align, it's going to go across there, and suck.

it held a 76 unit, 2 story apartment complex before this, so yeah, it is big.

not at all believable though, T-Rex skeletons have never been discovered in the Houston area.

I wouldn't say converted, Joe V's is a HEB brand, just more of a Costco style experience. it's not a great opportunity for a full on grocery store, and certainly not a Costco type experience. the parking setup is a primary reason.. if any grocery were to go in I'd suspect something more Trader Joe's like that's intended for picking up provisions for that day, rather than stocking up for an entire week. imagine shopping bascarts being pushed around this, or any other "City Center" style development. although, I do chuckle at the thought of trendy moms with their kids doing their instagram on a green event space with someone in the background pushing a bascart from the grocery store to the parking garage that is loaded down with a months supply of toilet paper.

I went last weekend. pretty sure they are spending a lot of money on water. the garden area is fine, there's actually bits you can see are still recovering from the freeze. a lot of the young trees that they have planted along the path that takes you over Sims Bayou appear to be ok. incidentally, probably not at all related to new CEO, they had someone at the gate for the first time this summer when I arrived.

youtube.com/watch?v=3w3QCcItxTo the most interesting thing, when a building is built, they have to replace 100% of the footprint as landscape.

we can rest assured the polo club already is spending plenty of money to keep from losing any land. and maybe a mod can make a new I-10 expansion thread to move some of these posts.

I can't remember who I was talking to, or maybe it was farther up this thread. but someone had chatted and they are asking a lot for this space, especially for the location, which might be why it's sitting a bit empty. I wonder if their update might also include a lower PSF cost? anyway, if I had the ability, this would be an awesome place for a pizza/coffee type thing.

so the same as the Democratic party. you do realize that both parties have the same goals, which is to maintain their power over us the citizens, while they do whatever they can for big business which helps them maintain that power as the individuals who run the parties get richer and richer, and we get poorer and poorer for it. none of us should be simping for them. I quiet quit national elections and politics a long time ago, I do apologize for having un-quit, I'll go back to being completely pessimistic of everyone and everything in our government.

probably maintenance costs. I agree though, if a point of the city is to make cooler, then you'd think things like this would be a perfect opportunity for green.