Intermodality

I’ve seen a lot of commuter rail (and I mean a lot: 15 of 18 systems in the United States), so it’s not that easy to impress me. But I rode New Mexico’s Rail Runner for the first time last week, and I was blown away. I’d go as far as to call it the [...]

Friday was a beautiful place to be in Memorial Park. But the mayor was there for a different reason: the start of construction on a new bridge, funded by the Memorial Park Conservancy, that will be open later this year. It will link the north and south sides of Memorial Drive just east of the [...]

Worth watching tomorrow night: HOUSTON- A partnership of community and media groups is back in action to get the public talking about where the rapidly growing Houston region is headed in the future. At 7 p.m. Thursday, January 29, HoustonPBS, in partnership with The Center for Houston’s Future, Houston Community Newspapers, and Houston Public Radio [...]

Google maps has now added a graphical depiction of transit lines in some cities. Google maps has already added walking directions. They’ve also added transit directions and bus/rail stop locations in cities where the transit agency provided them with that data. That makes Google the most intermodal online mapping service (though they need to add [...]

Charles Kuffner posts ideas for two light rail lines — the already-in-the-long-term-plan Inner Katy Line and a line on Kirby — on Off the Kuff. It’s worth a read, and, more importantly, some thought. I believe that the best transit planning comes not from depp within the bowels of the agencies but from a well-informed, [...]

Just when you though the parking on lawns ordinance was dead, it reappears: Nettled by neighbors who clutter up their front yards with parked vehicles? You could work to outlaw this practice in your Houston neighborhood if the City Council approves a yard-parking ordinance on Wednesday’s agenda. The proposed law would allow civic associations to [...]

(Houston, 1912: Library of Congress.) This is post three of a three-post series. Post one discussed modern streetcars in general. Post two discussed the idea of rapid streetcar. So the question is: should Houston have electric streetcars? We’ve answered that question once before, in 1889, and the answer was “yes.” That turned out the be [...]

The Texas Department of Transportation announced today that the Trans Texas Corridor program “no longer exists” and has been replaced by the “Innovative Connectivity Plan,” which was described as “a series of individual transportation projects, tailored to the needs of the regions where they are located, and connected to the rest of the state.” What’s [...]

This is post two of a three-post series. Post one discussed modern streetcars in general. We’ve already the disadvantaged of streetcars sharing traffic lanes with cars: it results in slower and less reliable streetcar service. That’s not an inherent problem with streetcar technology; it’s a result of how that technology is implemented. Streetcars can also [...]

The Main Street Line opened 5 years today to a strange mix of high and low expectations. On one hand, it was the long-overdue product of nearly 25 years of planning since METRO was created, with an explicit voter mandate to build rail, in 1979. In a way that the HOV lanes never did, it [...]