Intermodality

The deal for the new soccer stadium appears to be coming together. But one fundamental problem remains: the stadium, as planned, will be a significant obstacle to traffic between Downtown and the East End. But there’s a way to fix that. If you’re headed west on Harrisburg towards Downtown today, the street ends at Bastrop. [...]

Perhaps the most anticipated words in the world of rail transit are “full funding grant agreement:” the Federal Transit Authority’s promise to pay a share of a transit project. Two of Houston’s new rail lines have now moved tantalizing close to that milestone. As part of the federal budget process, the FTA releases a “Annual [...]

Houston METRO Light Rail from NC3D.com on Vimeo. The Overhead Wire has uncovered a video of visualizations of the new METRORail lines. The video shows, in order: The Third Ward on the University Line. Edloe Station (in Greenway Plaza) on the University Line. Moody Park Station on the North Line. MacGregor Park Station on the [...]

Ad banners on the Houston Chronicle website are announcing the opening of the Katy Freeway managed lanes. We’ve known the physical shape of these lanes for some time now: 2 lanes in each direction, with on/off ramps just outside 610, just inside BW, at Dairy Ashford, and at Highway 6, in addition to direct connector [...]

Our latest update of the CTC map takes us into an alternate universe where Houston transit history unfolded differently. In 1983, METRO (which had been formed 8 years earlier) proposed a $2.1 billion, 18.5 mile heavy rail system, using the same technology as BART, Washington METRO, and Atlanta’s MARTA. That plan was rejected by voters. [...]

Last week, I noted that the Federal Transit Administration was refusing to let METRO use any stimulus money to start work on the North and Southeast lines. That picture seems to have changed: Sheila Jackson Lee is saying that she has convinced the FTA to let METRO use the money. As I noted in my [...]

So what’s the difference between highways and transit? No, it’s not that transit gets subsidies. Highways do, too. In fact, every mode of transportation but pipelines and freight rail does. Federal and state highways are funded by gas tax. But freeways, expressways, and major arterials — the kinds of roads which are federal and state [...]

Intermodality isn’t the only place I write. I’ve been on the editorial committee of Cite magazine for 9 years, and we’ve been talking about getting Cite onto the internet for nearly that long. Now, at long last, we have a Cite blog, which can cover architecture and design news much faster than a quarterly magazine [...]

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood visited Houston on Friday. He took the chance to talk up the stimulus bill, signed into law a month ago. Stimulus money has started flowing to transportation projects. While transportation makes up only 6% of the $787 million bill, that $45 billion will make a significant impact: it’s nearly [...]

(pdf file) METRO’s 2012 map is settling down. This update to CTC’s transit map shows only a few changes since my last update in April 2008: The University Line got realigned in the Third Ward. This is unfortunate; Texas Southern University now has no stop alongside campus. There is a station called “TSU,” but it’s [...]

(TUSSAM) The METRO blog offers more details on the new light rail cars: “This is a 100 %, low-floor model. And this is the first time it will be in the United States,” said Jitendra S. Tomar, vice president of marketing and business development at CAF USA Inc. “Other cars, you have 70 percent low [...]

The Chronicle figures they didn’t quite finish their first story on the METRO light rail contract, so here’s part two: Metro’s newly-approved $1.46 billion contract to build four new light rail lines does not include a couple of things: $830 million and the controversial University line. Both of these things were annnounced by METRO on [...]

(http://flickr.com/photos/torchondo/489927544/, via Wikipedia) Today, the METRO board approved a design-build-operate contract for 4 of the 5 new light rail lines. At the same time, the board gave its chosen contractor, a group lead by Parsons, notice to proceed on the first part of that contract: the East End Line, 29 light rail vehicles, and preparatory [...]

Metro flyer at Main Street Square Station. The trains seems as full as ever, regardless of what Joe Biden said.\n

View Larger Map Ian notes in the forums that METRO is finally on Google Transit. In fact, METRO features that prominently on their web site. I looked through the list of problems with METRO’s trip planner that I posted in July of 2007, and the new Google implementation fixes nearly all of them. Riding transit [...]

It’s easy to think of the stimulus bill as some abstract thing: the total dollars amount involved is so big that it’s hard to visualize, and the funding pots it’s going into are abstract enough that we don;t know what they really mean, either. But, as the Chronicle reports, we’re taling about real projects in [...]

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 [...]