Intermodality

In 1992, the Texas Department of Transportation bought a 28-mile rail line stretching from Katy to Downtown Houston. TxDOT was after the section outside of 610, which they then used (along with a lot of private property) to widen the Katy Freeway. The section inside 610 came as part of the package. Ever since, there’s [...]

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) [...]

I have heard many times that transit in Houston won’t work, and that there’s no point in building good sidewalks in Houston, because Houstonians won’t venture outside the air conditioning.
So the who are these people? This isn’t the height of rush hour — it’s after 7:00 on a Thursday night. And it isn’t a [...]

One of the things that isn’t new in the University Line DEIS (part 1, part 2) is the location of stations. They’re in the same places they were in January. But don’t expect them to stay there. I met several people at the open house yesterday who wanted stations in different places. The METRO people [...]

The purpose of a Draft Environmental Impact statement is to identify what effects a project will have on businesses and neighborhoods. But that’s not enough; the next step is to figure out how to mitigate those effects.
It seems to me that transportation agencies should look at mitigation more expansively than the law requires. The goal [...]

Last Saturday, I summarized METRO’s DEIS for the west end of the University Line. In some ways, the east end of the line is the forgotten end: while the disputes over the west end alignment have been played out in the media, the discussion of the east end has been more quiet and less public. [...]

A lot of people are looking at the wreckage of I-35 in Minneapolis and seeing their own agenda.
An anti-globalization site says the the bridge collapse was caused by foreign trucks:
Evidence of increasing international trade truck traffic on Interstate 35 through Minnesota raises concerns that NAFTA Superhighway traffic contributed to last week’s collapse of the freeway [...]

On Friday, METRO released the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the University Line. This is what we’ve been waiting for for a year and a half: two thick books (or some big PDF files) of data, outlining the options for the project and the benefits and impacts of each.
There’s a lot of stuff in [...]

On Monday, we saw four years of development along the Main Street light rail line. Today, a year’s worth on a transit line that hasn’t even been located yet. From Main Street to Greenway Plaza, I count 2,600 new apartments under construction or completed in the last year.
What we see here is the result [...]