Intermodality

From the Chronicle:

Texas Department of Transportation Executive Director Amadeo Saenz said the state is working on a plan in order to meet the federal government’s September 2009 deadline for proposals. He said high-speed rail needs to be a part of the state’s transportation mix.
“We need the flexibility to solve our transportation problems with the right [...]

Transit, like any other fields, has trends. And today’s hot trend is the streetcar. Portland opened a modern streetcar line in 2001, Tacoma followed in 2003, and Seattle’s Lake Union Streetcar opened last year. Austin, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Dallas, Oakland, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Northern Virginia, and others are studying new lines. In San Francisco [...]

David Kaplan asks 15 Houstonians to “offer ideas that would either benefit Houston or get the U.S. economy rolling again.” Some transportation-related responses, including mine:
JAMES D. CALAWAY, CEO of Calaway Interests and former president of the Center for Houston’s Future:
One of America’s greatest opportunities is to transform itself from a society dependent on dirty fossil [...]

METRO reports that massive police presence and retimed signals downtown has reduced light rail accidents. 30 days, though, is not much data, and the police deployment obviously can’t be permanent.
The notable thing here is the signal change, which would be implemented on all the new light rail lines as well. The train gets its [...]

(By historical standards, our recent snow was nothing: see the excellent Houston Electric for photos of Houston streetcars plowing 22 inches of snow in February 1895.)

The Chronicle notes that METRO’s buses are only on time 61% of the time, and asks why. That’s easy. Yes, there are some avoidable reasons why buses can be late. Once, on the number 9, the bus driver actually got lost. But there are two major reasons why buses times are unpredictable: traffic and passengers. [...]

By now, we were supposed to be riding light rail to Northline Mall.
The original schedule for the METRO Solutions light rail expansion looked like this. These schedules were not included in the referendum language, but they were published by METRO in 2004:

The North and Southeast Lines, for which a public design process had already [...]

Barack Obama is proposing a massive economic stimulus package including speding on “roads and bridges.” So naturally, cities and states are writing up wish lists. The Texas Department of Tranportation has one (pdf), totalling $6.2 billion, including $670 million in Houston-area projects. The City of Houston put $587 million in projects on the Conference of [...]