IronTiger

Texas A&M has over 50,000 people enrolled in it. There's a daily traffic jam, apartment complexes, and several bus lines, but it doesn't justify a light rail, and the surrounding area isn't all that dense.

Two different things here: 1) The bus example was to show mostly that mass transit is not a preferable alternative if you already own a car (and can afford it). This is partly because there are some people who not only like the idea of mass transit but are anti-automobile but I believe (hope?) these are part of a slim minority. 2) Transfers are bad and should be avoided. There are some who say "But that's not how the EAST COAST does it, we need to be just like them!" but I disagree. Since places like Houston and Dallas are substantially newer than New York. In the year 1900, New York had 3 million people. Houston had 45,000 people. We have the opportunity to do things differently, and that means creating a transit system that doesn't involve very many transfers.

Estimations are less a proven statistic with number grinding (though numbers work is part of it), it's also like a card game. You want to go high to get more federal funding (or a fast track to federal numbers), but you don't want to bullshit too much or you won't get it (100,000 weekday boardings on a Houston-Galveston line is absurd, for instance if you were to argue for that)

That's not "disproved", that's an estimation. Estimations don't "disprove" anything.

I'm sure that while submerged (or even partially submerged) University Line would be quite expensive, it wouldn't be $20 billion. And my comment about townhomes and density is that while they do bring up density, they're cheap and installed on areas that really don't support them (streets, neighborhoods). And most of them are quite ugly (neighborhoods deserve better). The reason I think "subway should interface with light rail" is because I am of the opinion that transfers should be minimized, which is why mass transit isn't favored in cities if you can afford a car. For automobiles, it's a simple transfer: 1) Leave home 2) Get in car parked nearby (you may not even have to go outside) 3) Drive 4) Arrive at destination 5) Walk some (maybe) For mass transit, it's less so: 1) Leave home 2) Walk to bus stop 3) Wait 4) Ride 5) Arrive at destination 6) Walk some more When you throw in more types, it's even more complicated. tl;dr, if you want mass transit that's not bus, keep it all one grade. I don't know Austin's numbers for their rail system, but they ride on the same line the heavy rail does (saving costs, I imagine) and can go both in-city AND to suburbia (in theory, at least)

Not really what I said. The townhomes are sprouting up everywhere (not "close to major arterials" or whatever), and from what I see at Swamplot, there's lots of decent-looking single family homes that could be quite nice given the proper maintenance.

Townhomes don't leave a lot of lawn space, and even it is, it's oftentimes not yours (though sadly some of the Inner Loop houses don't have much more lawn space than some suburban sites), nor are townhomes a "starter" density. Some 200 miles northwest of where YOU are, there's these things, a 1970s invention of developers in south College Station to emulate East Coast-style townhomes. While they certainly look run down (and dated, and all that--even back in the 1990s), they aren't exactly improving density in that area.

Houston is not "urbanizing" in the way that it should, specifically the inner loop. Rather than getting mid-sized towers, we are seeing townhomes poison neighborhoods and not even much in the way of mid-rises. Why are builders attempting to add towers in places like Museum District, as opposed to Midtown, for instance?

The reuse of a Sakowitz department store as a parking garage is very strange--it still looks cool on the outside (must have been built incredibly strong), and while some pictures still have the original tile intact, it doesn't seem to look nearly as depressing as say, that theater in Detroit that became a parking garage.

If you're at 610 and Interstate 10--which is kind of a mess right now due to the new ramps of 610 coming in and all that--it's not exactly a pristine area, and one example is that huge IKEA sign down there. There was a picture (not sure if the link still works on HAIF), but it looks east toward Interstate 10 from Memorial City in the 1960s, and it was already rather "junky" looking. Furthermore, it's known even within Christian denominations that Baptist establishments tend to be more ostentatious-looking (see: Southern Baptist University in Dallas), so it's not fair to dismiss crosses or religion in this case.

So from reading the previous comments here, there was a mention of making the first floor porous somehow--what I'd like to know is how did they even get this built? When it was built (less so today, though still risky) it would be extremely prone to flooding.

I could probably argue that the Heights did improve a bit more when the rail (freight rail, of course) was removed in the late 1990s (1997?)

Well, if a light rail has a long, flat stretch of track where it only stops for stations (say, built on an old railroad ROW) then it could go fairly fast. It's slower if it stops for intersections (common in Houston) and makes hard, sharp turns (Main and Boundary, for instance). Going up inclines (exiting tunnels or climbing viaducts) will slow too.

$40 billion is a tremendous amount of money. While it would go from the G.B. Airport to the east (old) part of Pearland (in equivalent Houston-terms), it would be equivalent in tax dollars for every resident (man/woman/child) of Harris County (not just Houston) giving $10,000 for a similar project. I would not be championing a $40B subway system until two factors are taken into play: - Was the system able to relieve traffic to a noticeable degree once built? - Is the city able to solvent after x years?

Perhaps I should've also included in my original post if it was feasible costwise. Digging a light rail line under Richmond may be possible, but not for miles out. Light rail as subway has significantly lower cost--a certain transit agency considered a 6 mile branch that had several miles of underground track and had a price tag of $700 million for the whole thing, considerably less than the $2 billion/mile NYC had done. Given the soil conditions here, would building a subway be MORE expensive than other cities?

Way to create a strawman and belittle arguments against it. Good grief.

You're being sarcastic, right?

Hate to tell you this, but while the "good ole boy" feel is alive and well, there are more things at play such as screwing up streets, cost-effectiveness, and a whole variety of other factors are preventing it. And again, there is a large group of people that probably wouldn't mind light rail but could live without it. This isn't even taking account problems at METRO itself. Of course, some people would rather take the road of blaming politicians when they're not in favor of rail, no matter what the circumstances actually are.

The idea of a subway system tunneled light rail system is to be compatible with the existing light rail system to be in certain corridors without messing up anything. The reason is that there are corridors that could use light rail, but to avoid ROW demolitions, they have to be built on the road. That messes up the road. That slows down the light rail. It really benefits nobody, and it explains why people in Houston seem to be so tepid about light rail. Houston is a strange city, but definitely not a boring one. While the action is spread out, it's better than one center and miles of slums/boring stuff in all directions (I can think of several cities like that).

I really think that the existing lines drawn are more or less fine as they are, and preferably being underground should be minimized whenever possible to save on costs. And for what it's worth, the Big Dig was far more comprehensive than any other freeway project and they had to do crazy things like reroute century-old infrastructure (power/water/etc.), freeze the ground below the railroads to stabilize it, and keep heavy traffic flowing while trying to remove the overcrowded viaduct that was the cause of the whole thing.

Yes, the idea of a subway system is one that is compatible with the light rail, and not yet at least going to the suburbs. The problem is that there's no other good space to put it. There's very few usable abandoned railroad corridors, METRO has no money to do major ROW clearances, and putting rail down road does neither any favors.

Downtown is slightly different and was better off as a surface rail. Reason being is that the tunnels were already in place, and those are privately owned. Trying to retrofit a subway in would either require new stations to be built and accessed from other blocks or trying to fit subway stations in the tunnels. Notice that the Dallas light rail isn't below ground either.

It is interesting. Monorails seem to have all the disadvantages of an elevated viaduct and there's no city where monorail is actually a practical investment (Detroit has a rather useless people-mover system, Disney World has one, but that's not exactly an urban area, and Sydney dismantled theirs after it was a failure). Dallas does have a subway, but it's not like the Washington DC/NYC style subways, it still uses light rail stock and overhead power poles (in a way, basically a tunnel for the light rail). For those asking if it would fill up with water during floods, is that always the case? When were the times when Washburn Tunnel flooded? That's been in place for decades. 146 also had a tunnel (backfilled for years now and replaced with a bridge, but that's because they wanted the road widened, and it wasn't feasible to do it with an aging tunnel). Both of those tunnels mentioned ran under the Ship Channel, which was dredged to about 45 feet deep.

While the Foley's and its bastard successor is dead and gone, the Park Shops aren't. And most of the "real" shops have moved on.

Yup. I feel like people seem so enamored with the idea of connecting the two parts of Dallas with the park are forgetting that highways still have a purpose, and that Woodall Rodgers Freeway wasn't actually affected very much as a throughfare.