50 years waiting at a railroad crossing
I just read a 1953 report (2.7mb PDF) commissioned by the long defunct Houston Railroad Crossing Committee. It has 16 pages of recommendations for reducing the impacts of trains on neighborhoods and traffic. Some (the abandonment of the rail line that was where 59 now cuts through Neartown) happened; others (the relocation of Union Station) became irrelevant.
But it’s remarkable how many 1953 recommendations still hold. The report prioritizes some intersections for grade separations; Griggs-Long-Mykawa was on that list; in 2004, the same intersection, still not fixed, was prioritized for grade separation by a Harris County study. Perhaps the best recommendation in the report: “Require that all future subdivision developments under the jurisdiction of the city to provide, at each crossing of a major street or thoroughfare across a main line railroad track, sufficient right of way which will permit the construction of a future grade separation structure together with suitable service drives for vehicular access to the properties abutting the grade separation location.” Had we started doing that in the 1950s — when places like FM1960 and Post Oak were still rural — we’d be a lot better off today.
Today is the first meeting of the Gulf Coast Freight Rail District, and I hold out hope that it will finally do what we’ve been talking about for 50 years. The district is chartered by the state to improve the freight rail system in Harris County and Fort Bend County. Itsboard is appointed by local jurisdictions. Harris County appointed Max Castillo, president of UH-Downtown, Ronald Beeson, a freight and distribution manager for Lubrizol Corp., and Nancy R. Edmondson, former mayor of Shoreacres. Fort Bend County appointed Bill Jameson. Houston appointed Jessica Castillo-Hulsey of the Eastwood Park Advisory Council, attorney Lance Lubel, and Robert Muhammad of the Greater Southeast Management District. Cities in Fort Bend appointed Leonard Scarcella, mayor of Stafford. The chair is former Houston city council member Mark Ellis. The District has no funding source of its own, but it can pool railroad money, federal money, state money, city money, county money, and port money.
What’s ahead is a process of prioritizing. TxDOT’s Houston Freight Rail Study has proposed hundreds of individual projects: grade separations, street closings, added track, relocated yards. We do not have the money to do all of them; the hardest task will be to figure out which to do first. Equally important is doing them right; some of the projects in the Study make sense, but others could damage neighborhoods rather than help them. And all this needs to happen in coordination with other agencies: TxDOT’s highway plans, METRO’s light rail and BRT lines, and the county’s commuter rail proposals.
We’ll only get good results here if the public is involved. It’s absolutely critical that the District keep the public informed and seek neighborhood input on overall goals and on specific projects. And it’s important that neighborhoods that are living with freight rail lines pay attention.
The good news is that this could be a win-win. It’s possible to design projects that will make neighborhoods quieter, safer, and easier to get around in, reduce traffic jams at railroad crossings, and take trucks off the roads by reducing railroad congestion.
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