Intermodality

In 2004, I wrote an article, “Down the Line,” for Cite in which I looked at the future of urban development along the nearly open Main Street light rail line. Three and a half years later, where are we?

Some parts of the Main Street corridor have changed dramatically. Others are still works in progress. The […]

Walkscore.com tries to quantify something that I’ve known about everywhere I’ve lived: how walkable is it? They measure how far it would be to walk to various essentials and amenities like stores, restaurants, libraries, and parks and come up with a score. 100 means you can get almost anything you’d need within walking distance; 0 […]

In a post on Monday, I noted that TxDOT had not put schematics for 290 online:

TxDOT has not posted its schematics of the project on the internet. To see them, you need to go to a public meeting (there are no further ones scheduled right now), visit the project field office between 8:00 and 5:00 […]

20 U.S. cities have commuter rail lines. Should Houston be number 21? The best way to answer that question is to figure out what commuter rail does well. Those other cities can give us a good idea of why successful commuter rail systems are successful.

Here are eight criteria for the perfect commuter rail line. […]

If you thought the Katy Freeway expansion was big, wait until you see 290. That’s a proposed cross section above, of 610 just south of 290. From left to right: a reserved transitway, 3 frontage road lanes, 1 ramp, a 4-lane direct connect ramp from 290 to I-10, an HOV/toll lane, 8 mainlanes, HOV/toll, 4-lane […]

We’ve all seen freight trains. Many of us have them in our neighborhoods. But where are they coming from? Where are they going? And why do they spend so much time sitting still? These are important questions, since the state and local governments are getting ready to spend a lot of money on freight rail. […]

Trip planners, like maps, are an essential part of making transit easy to use. METRO was late in this regard; they finally got theirs online in 2005. That’s a big improvement. But it’s not enough to have a planner; it needs to be easy to use and give good results.

The state of the art in […]

A minute after I took this picture, an officer of the Maryland Transit Police stopped me. He told me that I was not allowed to take photos of the trains. He called for backup. They arrived a few minutes later, blocking the tracks with their cruiser: 3 uniformed, armed men to deal with one photographer. […]

Ask Google Maps for directions. Hold and drag the green marker to elsewhere on the map. Let go. Watch the directions update. Hold and drag any point along the route. Let go. Watch the directions update. Wait a year or two. Wonder how you did without this.

I had a rant all ready to go about the METRO system map. Then METRO fixed the map — not just what I was going to complain about but a lot more — without me saying anything. You can look in the forums see my original post. But now I’m going to talk about the […]