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Houston19514

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Everything posted by Houston19514

  1. Houston19514
    Ahhh. Very interesting. Thanks.
  2. Houston19514
    Its probably because its better to be hanging over the roadway than over neighboring condos. Its a pretty amazing site driving down Post Oak.
  3. Houston19514
    Riding by on the rail, one can see all the work currently being done on the landscaping and paths on the strip of Hermann Park between Main and Fannin. It looks like everything north of the church must be part of the park, as work is being done on the whole stretch.
  4. Houston19514
    I don't know, but this is pretty obviously the back of the building. There has to be a door for people somewhere. If nothing else there will be a rental office.
  5. Houston19514
    I was wondering about that too. Is the other part the parking garage/amenities deck? ;-)
  6. Houston19514
    Before we all rush to see who can prove their urbanist bona fides by being the first to slit their wrists over this, perhaps we should pause to consider: 1) We are seeing a rendering of one side of one building. Given that there are two garage entrance/exits and zero doors shown on this rendering, it's fair to presume this is the "back" side of the building. For all we know, the other three sides might be urban paradise. 2) There is a chance this rendering is nothing but a place-holder to represent "planned residential". The first of the two buildings is no even slated to start construction for more than a year.
  7. Houston19514
    Nothing but speculation here, but I would expect they will keep the garage-connecting tunnel in place for a connection to whatever is eventually built on the garage/Americana Building block. Given that they appear to have removed all tenants from all of those buildings, I would expect them to be demolished and replaced by something in the near future. I'm sure the Hilcorp people have plans and they are obviously pretty good at keeping their plans to themselves.
  8. Houston19514
    Love it! That's a great idea!
  9. Houston19514
    Chill, man. It's not the Galleria subforum, it's the West Loop/Galleria/Uptown/Memorial subforum. The current BP Americas HQ campus is on Memorial Drive, so it seemed like a reasonable place for it (since we surprisingly don't have an Energy Corridor subforum). If the mods want to move it somewhere else, I'm happy.
  10. Houston19514
    Wasn't sure where to put this. Hopefully, it belongs in the Downtown section, rather than Energy Corridor or The Woodlands: BP is planning to split its U.S. onshore oil and gas segment into a separate business by next year, a bid to become more competitive with smaller rivals that dominate the region’s shale reservoirs, executives said Tuesday. The move would install a new management team to oversee about 7.6 billion barrels of BP’s oil and gas reserves across 5.5 million acres in the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas, natural gas-rich regions in Oklahoma and Arkansas and elsewhere. That’s more than third of its energy reserves across the globe. The splintered company still would be owned by BP...but it would operate from an independent location in Houston separate from its North American headquarters on Westlake Park Boulevard in Houston.
  11. Houston19514
    I presume you mean you don't see any entire blocks for parking? That seems to be true. I don't think I see any entire blocks of surface parking either, but there are clearly several surface parking lots in the picture. It's all good. I'm sorry I did not include a wink in my earlier response.
  12. Houston19514
    Yeah. That's one of the reasons I said it was from 1970.
  13. Houston19514
    That would be odd. Have you seen one? ;-) (There are several visible surface parking lots in the referenced picture.)
  14. Houston19514
    It's part of Hermann Park, is it not?
  15. Houston19514
    Yeah, that story about an underground labyrinth and multiple levels of basements seems to have turned out to have been nothing but urban myth.
  16. Houston19514
    LyondellBassel Tower was completed in 1978, so the photo was taken in 1978, at the very earliest. And the Four Seasons Hotel was completed in 1981 and its site is a parking lot in the picture, so the picture must have been taken prior to 1980. Here's a photo of the area from 1970, when Texas Eastern bought the 32 blocks of eastern downtown for their Houston Center development.
  17. Houston19514
    Whoahh. Is there any reason to think this is not moving forward at full speed ahead?
  18. Houston19514
    What reason is there to think that replacing our park & ride system with commuter rail would result in anything close to a 12-15%, or even 7% reduction in traffic in weekday commuting? In the listing of top commuter rail systems in the US discussed above, only one of those top 7 metros is remotely similar to Houston -- Los Angeles. LA's 388-mile commuter rail system serving a population almost 3 times that of Houston manages to pull only 42,700 riders per day. Washington/Baltimore, which has an extensive and pretty long-standing commuter rail system, only has 55,400 riders. And after those top 7 metros, commuter rail system ridership drops off a cliff. Even in Chicago, with almost 600 miles of commuter rail, less than 5% of workers use commuter rail. 8. Miami -- 15,000 riders 9. Salt Lake City -- 13,000 riders 10. Seattle -- 11,300 11. DFW -- 9,500 12. San Diego -- 5,300
  19. Houston19514
    Yes, I understand that Baltimore and Washington are separate. But the commuter rail system numbers shown are not separate, so we have to look at the population of the CMA, not the MSA. Likewise for the other metro areas on the list.
  20. Houston19514
    You have to look at these as CMAs, not MSAs. The list in fact constitutes a list of the 7 largest CMAs in the country, the smallest of which (Philadelphia) has 800,000 more people than the Houston CMA.
  21. Houston19514
    Just Google "Houston Metro Ridership" http://www.ridemetro.org/News/Documents/RidershipReport.aspx
  22. Houston19514
    Further to my earlier post, FWIW, there are approximately 19 metro areas in the United States that have commuter rail systems. Of those 19, only 7 have ridership greater than our P&R System.
  23. Houston19514
    In the latest stats available, (YTD through November 2013), average weekday ridership on the P&R system was 33,108. Average weekday ridership for Metro (rail and bus combined, including P&R) was 286,772. Average weekday ridership for MetroRail was 37,558.
  24. Houston19514
    ... in spite of many years of horrible mismanagement by May Co.... and even then they only closed because they lost their lease. Macy's has said they are interested in opening a smaller store in downtown Houston.
  25. Houston19514
    To clarify, Pierce elevated was not completely closed for the rebuild. They demolished and rebuilt the northbound bridge in 88 days while maintaining traffic on the southbound bridge. Then traffic was switched to the new northbound structure while they demolished and rebuilt the southbound structure, which took 72 days. Further, the project involved very extensive engineering design and scheduling work to minimize the time taken for the rebuild, suggesting that keeping it at low capacity (never closed completely) for long periods of time was unworkable. Additionally, as unworkable as it was to reduce the capacity of the Pierce elevated for long periods of time in 1997, it would be that much more unworkable to completely close it in 2014 when it carries 200,000 cars a day. To say "well, we closed Pierce elevated for months in 1997 so we can just close it permanently with no ill effects" is (a) false (it was never closed in 1997) and ( jejune.
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