- Houston One of 35 U.S. Cities Invited To Join 2024 Olympic Bid Process [Houston Business Journal]
- Construction To Begin Next Week on UTMB’s $82M ER in League City [Houston Chronicle]
- City Received More Than 4,000 Complaints from People Living in 1,700 Apartment Complexes Over Past 15 Months [Houston Chronicle ($); interactive map here]
- Closed Since August 2011 for Light Rail Expansion, Main Street Bridge North of Downtown Reopening on Monday [The Highwayman]
- Metro Considering Bringing Back Daypasses for Bus, Train Riders [Houston Chronicle]
- Freebirds Soon Opening 23rd Location in Region at Highway 249 and Spring Cypress [Houston Business Journal]
- Zoës Kitchen Opening Another Houston Location Next Month at Louetta Near Tomball Pkwy. [Houston Business Journal]
- Woodlands Township Still Dealing with Removal, Replacement of Dead Trees [Courier of Montgomery County]
- Revisiting Robertson Stadium’s Forgotten Concert History [Rocks Off; previously on Swamplot]
Photo of Greenway Plaza: Bill Barfield via Swamplot Flickr Pool
re: Olympics
Couldn’t you see the rowing events in the ship channel. That would be awesome and I’m being serious.
Another idiotic bid for the outdated Olympics I’d not what this city needs.
Please don’t ruin our city with this elitist money pit.
I want to read that story about the apartments. What was the paywall tip?
Ah, this link works: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/City-gets-thousands-of-complaints-about-apartments-4295306.php
Yea for the Main St. Bridge. This will help big time. Downtown mobility has gone to the dogs with the rail construction. MMP to Smith St. used to be a quick shot in the AM.
Just wait until we have rails crisscrossing the downtown grid. You think you sit long for one train? Try two.
I’d pay money to see marathon runners in our town in August. They should create a special swimming event for Buffalo Bayou; if you can swim the course and get out of the water before your skin falls off, you win a medal.
Cody–for future, just google the title. That should give you a link that works :)
To get past the paywall, google the article title and go to the first link.
Always works…
@Craig,
You are wrong. As we all know, light rail only helps mobility – by substantially reducing the number of cars on the road. It cannot create more traffic congrestion.
Keeping (and using) the Astrodome would certainly help the city’s bid in having the Olympics come to Houston.
I’m not sure the east-west lines in downtown will have signal priority, plus they will run in mixed-traffic – essentially an extra-long bus or streetcar. If they don’t affect signals, I don’t know that they will have much traffic impact beyond what a bus would have. Of course, plenty of folks don’t like buses either…
I read somewhere that the cities that benefit the most from the Olympics are the ones who make it to the finals, but don’t win. So Houston’s bid should be just good enough to make it and get some good publicity, but not so good (i.e., lucrative to the Committee) that it wins. Let the cities with bigger heads than ours get it.
Didn’t we go through this olympic thing just a few years ago?
It was about 90 deg at the start of the marathon in Athens in 2004 were about 86 deg. Beijing in August is not a whole lot cooler than Houston. And the world champs for Track and Field have been held in Daegu South Korea. The temps and humidity for the marathon were on par with Houston temps in the summer.
All that being said, Houston would be a dismal place for the Olympics. No rail transit from either airport. Would need to build an olympic stadium (can’t do track in Reliant) in addition to a much of other venues. No good location for an olympic village. Let other cities with low self esteem vie for the spot. It isn’t worth our time.
@Old School
I’ve never been to Beijing but Wikipedia show its average high in July as 88 and August, 86. I lived in Athens for a couple years some 12 years ago and I can tell you that their summers are substantially more comfortable than ours. I didn’t even have a/c and my only problem was having to open the windows and hearing the motorcycles outside.
Weather: Atlanta gets hot in summer.
Track stadium and Olympic village: Rice
Rail from airports? LA didn’t have rail in ’84. Super Shuttle was born in LA for that event.
Mexico City’s altitude in ’68 was considered a bit extreme for track back then. Houston’s heat would be too. The Olympics aren’t for wimps..
Athens had a heat wave during the Olympics. It was well into the 90s the day of the marathon. Nike invented an ice vest for runners to wear prior to the race to lower their body temp as much as possible prior to running in the heat. Beijing has a pretty bad heat island in the city. 90s are common in the city in the summer. Point is that Olympic marathons do go on in weather that is pretty close to Houston’s. Doha is actually bidding for the 2017 Track and Field World Championships. That would be a horrific marathon out there.
mobility was the killer last time and it’d only be drastically worse this go around as well. yeah, we got tons of stadiums to go around for all this that the taxpayers are already coughing up for as the payer of last resort, but our hotel accommodations reflect houston’s lack of a central business district. you simply can’t move that many tourists across these long distances without bringing the city to a stand still and every rental car between here and Dallas would get gobbled up here for the games.
Rice’s track stadium isn’t big enough to handle the Olympics (hint, it’s not in the football stadium), nor is there enough housing there to be the Olympic Village.
When Doha hosts events like that , they usually shift them into the Fall, when the weather is really nice.
Oh ok. In order to make yourself believe that Houston is apt to hosting a mid-summer marathon, let’s just say that Athens is just as hot and humid as Houston and call it a day.
Just so long as that insufferable Dallas doesn’t get it.
My how all you forget. Houston lost its bid because we failed to emphasize our cultural and art offerings.
The rest of the story y’all are just making up.
I attended the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 (as a spectator, duh). When I got there, the locals apologized for the heat “down here”. I said, “You mean *up here*, and it’s 10 degrees cooler than where I just came from, and a little bit drier.”