IronTiger

HSR trains aren't silent, they'll add to the noise significantly, the faster they go. I'm not saying the HSR shouldn't be built for this reason, but there's some serious downplaying of neighborhood impact here. The Hardy Toll Road extension, also another example, will impact neighborhoods as well, even though there's a freight train corridor there already. Did you not make some argument regarding that, too? I'm not trying to drag us into another trains/highways debate, but hell yes this will impact neighborhoods more than the freight train already does.

Any large scale transportation project has to take into account neighborhood impact. It's the reason why there's no southbound frontage road on Beltway 8 near Memorial Forest, and other compromises with neighborhoods on Interstate 10. You, an armchair freeway critic, should be aware of this.

Uptown Dallas is north of Klyde Warren Park, IIRC. I think Design District will be more of a "Midtown" analogue.

Even if there weren't spurs?

He hasn't been seen on HAIF since at least October 2014, and a PM to him seems to have fallen on deaf ears. He was a great source of Houston history in many ways and I hope he's okay. Does anyone know what happened?

A fire following hurricane damage?

Those were intercity too.

As you should know, rail is only effective at areas with high density, which is why rail works in places like Japan, South Korea, Western Europe, India, and Northeast United States. Therefore, taking an example like Japan, which is far higher density on average than Texas, isn't really applicable in this case.

I think that Japan is a poor example since density is substantially higher here. But typically judges tend to be pro-transportation, like the alternate proposal to Katy Freeway, a narrower depressed highway with rail running through.

Did they actually say "We are going to build HSR by 20xx" or "We will definitely build HSR long-range"? After all, even in Houston, there seems to be some confusion even among people on HAIF, confusing "non-committal long term" with "we voted on rail, we should get rail". Either way, California can save face (and their financial solvency) by looking for private investors.

I'd rather let California go first, and see how it goes after a while. If it's a success, great, let's get to work on ours, if it's a failure, maybe we should rethink this.

Yeah, if the Minneapolis proposal gets done and that would be a good test to see if they're feasible and economical in the United States. Special note goes to Texas since we flirt with drought conditions these days.

In College Station, we have a freight train that parallels a major four lane road. If traffic gets stuck behind a train, the lights will turn yellow then red for traffic that had the green light and then give the green light to the traffic stuck behind the train. Of course, not all stoplights are built equal, even some in Bryan blink all red when a train is going by.

The original plan was to build an overpass, but the NIMBYs complained (and let's face it--they are NIMBYs, no matter how you slice it), then redesigned it as an underpass until engineering reports came back with all that dissolved gasoline in the soil, disallowing them to build it without a huge cleanup (personally, I think the whole East End has that level of contamination from a few decades of uncontrolled pollution, but it would be madness to condemn the whole neighborhood), and eventually they redesigned the whole thing AGAIN as an overpass. All of these studies take time, of course. Now, does METRO waste money on an already somewhat tight budget? I think so, but that's beside the point. Lying? I don't think so. Remember, METRO isn't TxDOT.

In 2010, I went to Florida before Christmas, and I must have heard "All I Want for Christmas Is You" at least 2 times and I think a third. The first perp was the Burger King there at Kress and Interstate 10. (Yes, I did bump this thread post-Christmas. My lights are still up)

The website mentions that the pool "could give the city back an important amenity it lost years ago". Since when Houston have a pool like that?

And Slick Vik is off to a start with both, going on about GM and streetcars again in just under four hours since you made that post...

Bob Lanier hasn't been mayor in about 17 years, with redevelopment in areas like Montrose and Freedmen's Town mostly in points after that, and that's mostly because the land value was so high that it was more profitable to build that sort of thing. You'd rather have the inner city be some low land value wasteland that no one wants to build on? Sorry kid, but you're either blaming something that Lanier didn't actually do or treating the whole gentrification of the inner loop like a bad thing, which it isn't, crappy townhomes and "Texas donuts" aside. Quit trolling, if you don't have anything nice to say about Lanier, don't post.

From Google Earth, I would GUESS sometime between 1989 and 1995. Own experiences, though--railroads are the ones close down crossings usually... - In College Station, there's a problem brewing because the railroad wants to cut two railroad crossings heavily used by people in the southern rural subdivisions. The "compromise" is to build a new crossing a bit farther north, but even that is ineffective as the reason why the two are closing is a siding is to be built, and trains would be slower around the siding. - I remember a news story in Brenham, TX where UP actually wanted to PAY the city if they could get rid of W. Vulcan Street's crossing (but that kinda made sense at the time since there were 5 grade crossings within a quarter mile span)

That's how all these suburbs develop--they'll tend to latch onto an existing town and essentially transform it into a suburb. At one time, Sugar Land and Katy were small towns independent of Houston with their own identity. The subdivisions grew like cancer, but they at least grew to some measure of success.

It's not that I'm uninterested in the 1950s or 1960s...some of the things sevfiv gave me have been gone for years, but more interested in national or regional chains. That's not to say some local chains aren't there, but some largely forgotten drive-ins without even addresses or extant buildings aren't going to be on there. The list was modeled after a similar project in Michigan, which I don't think did really old restaurants either. Oh, so Jojo's was in Dallas-Fort Worth as well? Fascinating. My ~1998 listings do include D-FW and smaller cities too. Other restaurants (Steak N Egg) not on the list don't necessarily mean they won't be added, as Jojo's was a fairly late addition too. I don't want to get too wrapped up in Houston-area ones, Dallas is another treasure trove of old stuff (that's why this is in Off Topic instead of Historic Houston because of that difference, which also partially replies to the other message too). In fact, on a recent trip to D-FW, I caught a good view of a Red Line, which looked nearly identical to one that used to be in College Station. Yes, travel plazas and gas stations DO count...there's a Denny's in a truck stop (Vidor, IIRC) that was included (and I do remember that one distinctly from a trip in 2006...not that I ate there, but I went there...and I was dumbfounded by a gas station/hotel combo. Or a Shell in Navasota that gradually lost its Domino's AND Popeyes. Or...you get the idea.

I think the master plan did involve that, yes, but not for many years hopefully. The one at Katy Freeway and Beltway 8 opened 1989 and dismantled...2006, lasting, what 17 years? The Beltway 8 and US-290 interchange will be approaching a quarter century sometime this year, by the time it ends up being dismantled, it won't seem too much out of the ordinary.

Champs was the one with the trains. Champps is the restaurant in Uptown. It's possible Jojo's wasn't a local chain, but it did have several Houston locations.

Oh! I didn't see the picture. I didn't need anymore proof, but that looks positively awesome! In a weird way, I'm glad I never saw that in person, its demolition would make me sad.

Ringing in the new year with an update! Here's what's new: - Some Houston chains like JoJo's and Champs - Burger King circa 1998 in Houston - The Grandy's and their addresses in Houston - Bennigan's at their peak - some other stuff I didn't go over Is it worth the three month wait? Unfortunately not...but next update will feature more non-Houston ones! See here: http://carbon-izer.s3.amazonaws.com/projects/former/fff.html