IronTiger

Thanks a lot for bumping this. This thread is five years old, and I would rather to see it stay buried, along with those other threads and posts of mine that run from esoteric to horrible during this era. You wanna know why my "reputation" is deeply red?

I was going to refute your first statement, but then I realized that I was saying this earlier: More transit, whether it means bus, highway, or rail, IS necessary, but specifically what we think is needed (or isn't needed) is rather subjective. I think we could all agree on that.

I'm not changing the topic, I stated that my ideal transit plan did include more highways and widened highways as part of it and you're complaining because it didn't fit your view of how the topic should be. I'm sorry that my ideals disagree with yours, but if the question is posed, there's no need to go into a fit because someone suggested *gasp* new highways. It needs an east-west freeway that is a relief route to the crowded Pearland Parkway, but there's houses everywhere and it can't be done without a lot of demolition. Realistically, it won't happen for years. I never said mass transit wasn't popular, I was saying that additional streetcars that aren't the light rail in Dallas aren't necessary. Dallas does have a little trolley in the downtown system, but that's probably not what you had in mind. Thanks to some HAIFers here, I got a PDF that does detail which businesses were lost in the widening of Interstate 10 West. I myself maintain an ongoing list of what was lost for the Katy Freeway and what will be lost for 290. You're welcome to contribute to either of them. Now, yes, I was saddened a bit to see all that go away--those tall fast food signs near Beltway 8 still occupy a little place in my heart, but what do you expect them to do? Do nothing? We both want to talk progress, right? Based on what you've said in this thread about transit, I doubt that you are a conservative yourself, but building roads and transit is a fairly universal idea in politics (unless you lean a bunch toward libertarian views). Mass transit requires demolitions, too: yeah, eminent domain sucks, but something will have to give eventually. As an aside, I think I may have posted earlier that I would like to see BRT lanes running on the Columbia Tap Rail Trail, personally. While I think 290 needs to be widened, I never said I liked all the plans they proposed.

Pearland needs a freeway, but it will require demolition. Adding new highways and widening them DOES in fact reduce congestion and make commutes easier, certainly at least more than adding mass transit does. The "induced demand" is a popular argument for anti-highway advocates but (and this is mentioned on a previous post, not by me) the demand was already there. The developments between Katy and Cypress (not literally between them, but I'm talking as a system here) was pent-up for a new freeway, and the continuing growth of Houston (and other city-systems in Texas, for that matter). If that theory was true, all they would need to do for states with declining population (Michigan, Louisiana) is add more freeways and new growth would occur like mushrooms after a rain. The "wiping out significant parts of our economy" is also nonsense. The widening of Katy Freeway was painful, yes. But it didn't damage the economy in the least: sure there were some 1980s era office buildings lost (but office space isn't particularly tight in Houston), some fast foods and hotels (nothing to worry about unless you get particularly weepy over demolishing that sort of thing), a few hotels (also not a problem), a handful of houses, a few tiny strip malls (like we don't have enough of those), and the Igloo plant (which relocated). In fact, the REI building that was demolished ended up moving to a vacant Albertsons a few miles south. And even if you were worried about economy, the "Energy Corridor" is doing better than ever. No, you don't. In New York City, long a favorite example for mass transit enthusiasts, the other way of getting around the city involves taxis. Awesome, that makes highways only accessible to the rich. The "commoners" are forced to ride mass transit.

To be fair, St. Augustine is the only city of its kind like that. Perhaps I am jaded by many other cities and towns with similar developments (but entirely fake). The reputation of Florida having these types of tourists attractions (mostly due to Disney World) wrongfully gave the reputation that it too was fake.

No one here is with an "ideological bias against transit", not even me. However, you don't condemn anyone with an "ideological basis against freeways", which some people do have. As painful as it is, we could use more highways. But we could also use more rail.

Unfortunately, as U.S. cities in the northeast show, driving is still preferred far and above. There's an extensive light rail network in Dallas: I could get from Plano to downtown, but are the highways clogged? Yes. What a lot of light rail advocates don't realize is that when you ride on mass transit, you eliminate options: you can't stop at a restaurant, store (grocery or otherwise) or otherwise on the way home, or make any other side trips (dry cleaning, etc.) A "feasible alternative" to driving could probably be rocket jet-packs that you could fly to work, but the technology isn't there yet.

Some of the overpasses south of Interstate 10 are already being belt (Bellfort, Mason, Airport, among them). Has that gas station at 59 and Crabb River been demolished yet?

Will the tunnel entrance be reopened after construction is complete?

^^ I can't imagine any of those were originally vehicular access as they're ridiculously narrow. It looks like a tourist trap-type mall, in fact, what with those goofy facades and all (and it probably is) They actually kind of did that with a small town in Ohio. The result was that the buildings retained private ownership, so the city had to maintain and operate the mall commons without collecting any revenue. They ended up bulldozing it around two decades later and rebuilt the streets as they were before the mall was added.

Not "not expecting to make money", "wrongfully assuming they could make money". You know the reason why a bunch of the first-generation .coms from the late 1990s failed, right?

I'm an idiot, because the CiCi's answer was right under my nose the whole time. I was looking through my photos from 2008, and I found this. Unfortunately, a truck was blocking most of the mall (the subject), but I managed to capture just enough to lay to rest a misconception I had...

Mass transit also involves buses: there's P&R and I've never been on Houston streets for very long without being caught behind a bus at some point. Of course, with the buses, we open a whole new can of worms--buses provide a rough ride since a lot of the four lane roads are concrete roads built in the 1970s with a bunch of potholes.

There's no traffic jams in those cities! Oh...wait. Proportionally, Houston, for as big as it is and for underdeveloped the mass transit is, the highways have done a huge favor in keeping traffic manageable (there was a study released either earlier this year or late last year to that effect). It doesn't necessarily say that highways are the future, but it vindicates the decisions made in the past. I'd love to see more light rail, but I'd also love to see new highways.

I can't see them making any money, to be honest, especially after factoring in land costs and whatnot. There's no scenario I can see where they can work and make a profit entirely as a private enterprise.

Not building freeways has to do more with historic preservation, but you were arguing how it was wrong to have multiple city centers. At any rate, concepts in Europe won't always work here (I can go into a long-winded explanation why Auchan never took off here to begin with, but I'll spare you). I think in terms of mass transit, I'd love to see a light rail that does minimal street running like Dallas' does, but their LRT is too expensive without enough riders.

While it's true that the Best catalog showroom did some pretty crazy things with its architecture, the Delmar Field House has the unfortunate apperance of a rather normal 1950s gymnasium with a roof that's caving in.

That would've one of my first guesses, yes. Maybe Willowbrook for the other. Here's another example of co-branding, from 1988... Further reading reveals that the "Wolfe Garden Center" stores inside Sears leasing was a failure, and all of them closed in May 1989. There were nine Sears stores in the (greater?) Houston area alone that included it. Since Sears doesn't tend to have skylights, I can't imagine the plants being very healthy...College Station had a Wolfe Nursery (it was closed longer than it was open, and was eventually rebuilt into a Cavender's) I wonder if anyone remembers those...

That makes no sense and is no comparison. Apples to oranges? More like apples to durians. EDIT: A durian is a large, spiky fruit with a strong odor. While fairly exotic to the U.S., it can be found in Asian supermarkets. The more you know...

European cities weren't so much designed as to basically a clustering of merchants in a walled city made hundreds of years ago. The current Paris design wasn't created until the 1800s, when Hausmann basically ran a bunch of new wide roadways through the city (sound familiar?) The previous design was a mess of little medieval streets.

I wasn't actually behind it, as that's just my imagination running wild. Of course it wouldn't work realistically.

There's another argument for not blocking it off: activity on Main will ebb and flow over the years, so there's no need to do some major reconstruction for blocking the roads that could dry up in future years.

The H-E-B at Tejas Center used to be a lot nicer, too with a more complete selection (there was even a Panda Express, apparently) and a better international foods section. It, like Gulfgate, replaced a derelict mall.

If the main problem for pedestrians comes at night, then why not install gates? A&M does it. You can't drive on Ross from 6 am to 6 pm, except for delivery trucks, official, and emergency vehicles. It becomes a pedestrian mall during the day, and has the same curbs, drainage, and brick as Main Street in Houston does, coupled with a low speed limit. My idea would do that for Main, except in reverse, closing it off at night. Reopening Main Street Square and keeping the rest of Main open will, I believe, maintain good traffic flow while creating an interesting "complete street" that crosses through downtown. I also think that major roads named the same should connect at some point (even in the future). That's why there's disconnected segments of Kirby Road to the south, or a better example, Bellaire segments to the west. And they are extending. For your aesthetics, I doubt that the preceding argument would hold weight.

The geographical center of Houston is not downtown. Most of them were "designed" in pre-industrial settings centuries ago when the rich lived in the city and actively had to defend from barbarians. To note is Paris, which looked nothing like it did prior to the mid-19th century when Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann designed wide boulevards throughout the city, replacing the spider-web of narrow medieval roads and the cramped slums, in which (in some areas, reached 250k people per square mile--that's three times the density of Manhattan) the poor suffered from extremely poor sanitation (and lots of disease). And you know what? The renovations worked, and disease outbreaks among the poor were significantly reduced. (Wikipedia)