- PM Realty Group Acquires Office Across the Street from Its Apartment Tower at Weslayan and West Alabama [Prime Property; previously on Swamplot]
- Costco Planned for The Woodlands, Expected To Open in November [Community Impact Newspaper]
- Houston Ship Channel Now Open to All Traffic Following Oil Spill [Click2Houston]
- Galveston Bay Oil Spill Fouled At Least 12 Miles of the Pristine Matagorda Island [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth Mayors Announce Support for High-Speed Rail; Still Needs Approval from Federal Railroad Administration [Houston Public Media]
- Northbound Frontage Roads Along I-45 To Shut Down Friday Night for Installation of Grand Parkway Girders [The Highwayman]
- Fire at Heights Presbyterian Church Ruled Accidental, Caused by Electrical Problems [Click2Houston; previously on Swamplot]
- 100-Plus Cats Removed from Northwest Houston Home Described as a ‘Hoarding Situation’ [Houston Chronicle ($)]
- The Meyerland House with an Addition for a Model Train Collection [Houstonia]
- A Video Tribute To Houston Scored By Jeff Walton and Performed by the Houston Symphony [Art Attack]
Photo of parking garage construction, Rusk and Milam, Downtown:Â Swamplot inbox
Headlines
“And everyone seems to be very nostalgic about rail.” Sums it up diplomatically…
However: if private money can get us this far, and people are already starting to talk about a Texas metropolitan region, then public money needs to take it the next step so that we’re talking about a proper Maglev system in a depressurized tube so that commuting between cities could be accomplished in 45 minutes instead of 90 minutes, and so that we’re talking about downtown-to-downtown connections. It won’t be cheap, but if it is a strategic objective that this distance is realistic for a commuter, then it will need to be high-performance infrastructure and the ticket price will need to be subsidized.
I happen to think that it’s worth it, and especially to tie together all of the big cities. Taking it a notch further, my wet dream is that each of the major airports would be consolidated to the junction of such a system, which would then easily become the largest and best connected airport in the world.