EXTENDING METRO’S MAIN ST. RAIL LINE TO FORT BEND COUNTY Metro’s lame-duck board gave its staff a half-million-dollar go-ahead yesterday to figure alignments, hold public meetings, and begin environmental studies on an 8.2-mile commuter rail line along U.S. 90A. The hunt for federal funding comes next: “It was the second development this month in efforts to bring commuter rail to the Houston region. The Gulf Coast Rail District recently hired a Houston engineering firm to study a line along U.S. 290 to Hempstead. A key advantage of Metro’s [Fort Bend] plan, [Chairman David] Wolff said, is that it would use trains Metro already owns on tracks that would parallel Union Pacific freight tracks in the same corridor, tying into the existing Main Street light rail line to create a seamless experience for passengers. The commuter line would begin at Fannin South, the southern end of the Main Street line, and continue to the Fort Bend County Line at Beltway 8.” [Houston Chronicle]
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Public Transportation
MAYOR PARKER: MAYBE WE CAN’T BUILD THE UNIVERSITY OR UPTOWN LIGHT RAIL LINES Suddenly, 2 of Metro’s 5 planned new light-rail lines are looking a lot less inevitable: “Parker said members of her transition team have ‘drilled down’ into Metro’s finances and she now feels comfortable only with the funding plans of three rail lines: the East End, North and Southeast. Construction on those lines is under way. Parker’s goal is to make sure those three lines are built “very, very rapidly,†she said. The other two, the Uptown and University lines, ‘are lines that I want to see built, but until we can finalize all the numbers, and some of them are still moving, I’m not going to commit to whether that is possible.’†[Houston Chronicle]
At a meeting last week at Kenny & Ziggy’s Deli organized by Jim “Mattress Mack” MacIngvale, owners of businesses located along Post Oak Blvd.’s vast double phalanx of front-loading strip centers — and representatives of a few of their landlords — groused about Metro’s design for the new Uptown Line and prepared for possible battle. The Examiner Newspapers’ Michael Reed first brought attention to a few quirks of the latest design for the Post Oak stretch of the light-rail line late last year: It features 7 stations, 5 gated crossings, and in all close to 2 dozen traffic signals along the 1.7-mile path from Richmond Ave. to the 610 West Loop. It also blocks all instances of that staple of sprawl-style shopping-center development: the non-intersection left turn.
Had Metro been communicating its plans to the property owners? Had the property owners been relaying any information they received from the transit agency to their tenants?
“This must have been quite a fearsome impact,” reports ever-vigilant blogger Slampo, who files these photos of what had until the wee hours of Wednesday morning been the No. 4 inbound bus shelter on Beechnut just east of Hillcroft, directly in front of the Foodarama parking lot. “There’s one of those concrete-lined garbage containers somewhere in there under the former shelter’s roof.” These photos were taken a few hours later.
What are the stations for the new Metro light-rail lines gonna look like? This full-scale mockup of a section, cobbled together from foam core, poster board, cardboard mailing tubes, and Plexiglas, now waiting way off-site in the offices of RdlR Architects provides one clue.
And here are a few more:
METRO’S FREE RIDE Suggesting that the transportation agency is “too concerned with the bottom line” — and not focused enough on the riders who depend on it to get around town — Mayor Parker proposes lowering fares on all Metro bus and rail rides. Or (why not?) dropping them altogether: “While acknowledging that Metro would have to cope with the loss of fare revenues — $66 million in 2009, about 20 percent of its expenses — she said it is a discussion the agency needs to have. . . . Metro says its operating ratio — the share of its costs covered by fare collections — has increased from 17 percent in 2005 to an estimated 21 percent this year, still well below the national average of 33 percent. Eliminating fares, of course, would make cost-benefit analysis meaningless, since every route would be fully subsidized. But allowing passengers to ride for free might attract enough riders to reduce congestion for drivers and produce other benefits, Parker said. ‘I don’t really care so much what they collect at the fare box,’ the mayor said. ‘I’m not going to tell them to do this, but I am personally interested in exploring — unless we’re leveraging those dollars in some ways for other kinds of matches — dropping the fares to get more people on board.'” [Houston Chronicle]
More details on that newly proposed alternate location for Dynamo Stadium that the soccer team is now apparently considering: It’s a 30-acre parcel at the southeast corner of Westpark and S. Rice Blvd., across from the Sam’s Club parking lot and Bubba’s Texas Burger Shack. That’s just southwest of the intersection of 59 and the 610 Loop, and right next to the planned location of the Uptown and University light-rail lines’ Bellaire Station — at Westpark and North 1st St.
Brad Feels, CEO of Midway Companies, tells the Chronicle‘s Chris Moran he’s envisioning a mixed-use development there somewhat like Dallas’s Mockingbird Station, which sits just across the Central Expressway from SMU’s Ford Stadium, and which features restaurants and retail, office buildings, apartments, and a movie theater complex. (Midway is the developer of CityCentre, now pretty much complete at the site of the former Town & Country Mall.) Feels first contacted the Dynamo’s Oliver Luck with information about the property in October or November of last year.
What’s happening with plans to build a Dynamo Stadium in East Downtown?
COMMENT OF THE DAY: MAKES IT EASIER TO CRUSH THOSE COMMUNARDS, TOO “Parisian city planners were met with similar narrow-minded criticism when they decided to construct grand boulevards in medieval Paris. The result was the Champs-Elysees and other notable conduits. The visionaries at METRO must ignore similar insuferable fools and carry on the worthy goal of bringing automobile independent mass transportation to Houston. The University line is the lynch pin of the ongoing expansion and these plans should be approved with all deliberate speed.” [Landed Gent, commenting on Metro’s University Line Acquisition Line-Up: What Stays and What Goes Along Richmond Ave.]
Found: extrapolated video footage of Houston’s soon-to-be light-rail routes, as viewed from . . . a crop duster. Hang time for the 4 routes shown: 8 minutes and 8 seconds. Your travel time and elevation may vary.
MIA: The University Line.
How old are these renderings, anyway?
- Houston [Vimeo]
Video: Gino Martin