Intermodality

(photo: Deutsche Bahn)
This Friday, the Texas High Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation (THSRTC) is holding an event (by invite, booked full) to discuss high speed passenger rail between Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because a very similar idea was studied in the early 1990s. Ultimately, the Texas TGV project failed [...]

The draft Regional Transportation Plan issued on Friday neatly sorts projects into modes: a highway project here, a pedestrian project over here, and transit project there.
No wonder we have such a hard time building good streets.
In Houston, most planners are still working under the idea that a street is a pathway for cars. A good [...]

I grew up in a town — Pinole, California — that was served by no less than three fixed route bus operators. The San Francisco Bay Area as whole has over 50 transit operators. From a passenger standpoint, it can be a mess. Schedules are uncoordinated, transfer stations are confusing, every system has their own [...]

What is the capital of Texas? Austin. But only politically. Texas has no true capital in the sense of London or Paris — we have several major metro areas, and no single one dominates.
What is the center of Houston? Downtown, perhaps. But not really. There’s more retail in the Galleria, more health care in the [...]

Houston’s sense of the city’s geography is shaped by freeways. We know them by heart. But there are kinds of traffic that flow along entirely different paths. This week in the Chronicle, Rad Sallee stumbles upon one.
Let me introduce you to the Terminal Subdivision.
In railroad geography, the only path into Houston from the west runs [...]