COMMENT OF THE DAY: A LINEAR PARK TO CONNECT THE MED CENTER TO RICE VILLAGE 
“If the Rice Village wants to be a retail goldmine, it should look outside its borders. My suggestion would be a linear public park that would take the residential properties between University and Dryden between the Medical Center at Travis all the way west to Greenbriar.” [infinite_jim, commenting on Haven Is No More; The Allure of the Suburban Town Square] Illustration: Lulu
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Talk about California Dreamin’. Yeah, and I’d like Buffalo Bayou Park to connect to Memorial Park via a linear park down the Southside of Memorial Dr. and take all those apartments, businesses, and residences out on the Southside of Memorial Drive. What do you think are the chances of that happening. Do I make C of D for my fantasy as well?
Exactly
I guess I am grasping to see the logic in this. There is already a nice jogging path down University between Main and Greenbriar. The other side of the street has sidewalks which do need fixing in some areas, but the same can be said for most neighborhoods near and inside the loop.
Creating a linear public park would not make the walk any shorter and would require destroying dozens of great oak trees or buying tens of millions of dollars in property on University or Dryden. If you want to get med center people to go to the village it would be on several orders of magnitude cheaper to provide a free shuttle bus and far more effective.
B-Cycle.
“If Rice Village *wants* to be a retail goldmine”? I’ve worked in the Village for 3 years and can attest that the shops of Rice Village are not lacking in variety nor clientele. Dunno where anyone is getting the idea that the Village is not well-connected to the Med Center and therefore missing out- as pointed out, there are multiple walking paths connecting the two- and one can stroll across the “park” that is the lovely Rice University campus if they wish for a greener experience. This sounds like an impossible solution to a non-existent problem!
Shannon’s desire for a Comment of the Day is so desperate that it makes me cringe.
That looks like the hard way. Just use that largely open space on the north side of University Boulevard. As a bonus, you’re only dealing with one landowner.
Did Shannon just agree to her own comment….?
That said the plan really doesn’t make sense. The amount of money that would cost would be prohibitive beyond belief, and its not even a straight line between those two. You have to cross Greenbriar and Fannin.
And Rice Village seems to be doing fine. Only thing they really need is more parking. Which is the kind of problem you want to have.
Don’t cringe it’s bad for your posture. If you cringe at something so trivial what was your reaction about the disaster in The Ukraine? Did you spontaneously combust? Maybe you need ri assess your cringing response.
Instead, bulldoze Rice Village for a park!. Excepting brew, do they sell anything of value?
How about dedicated bike lanes and a couple new B-cycle stations?
The linear park idea has merit, but only because any park has merit. What Rice Village really needs is PARKING. Back when I lived within walking distance, I really used to enjoy going there almost every weekend. Now that I have to drive, forget it.
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A higher priority should be to build a new public parking garage. Then get rid of some on-street parking, and enhance the sidewalks. THAT would really help Rice Village expand as a shopping district. A linear park is a nice concept, but not vital to improving the area.
I completely agree with ZAW, what Rice Village really needs in parking garages. The land is so expensive in this area that parking garages are the only real option. Sure a linear park would be nice, but where would the money come from? This area is full of parks and park like neighborhoods, I can think of areas in much more need of an esplanade. This idea has less than zero chance of coming to fruition, but more parking and better traffic management is certainly attainable.
This “COMMENT OF THE DAY” was pretty much a waste of digital energy. I’d rather look at cute cat videos on YouTube :/
And if they’ll tear down the med center, the new park will have a better view of the sunrise.
The point of this thought exercise was that the low density suburb by the high density medical center combined with the anachronistic nature of Rice U. and Hermann Park is primed for upzoning (:cough: Ashby :cough:). Seems to me that most parks that get built these days have parking garages, restaurants, and shops so therefore buying out that strip of residential properties might be imaginatively expensive now but so is finding non-productive land in the Rice Village to build the amount of parking that would be necessary for it to be as convenient as it is today, tomorrow. Plus that additional parking would cause more curb cuts, take out storefront space, etc. and construction would halt retail sales on site. It would be easier to bring customers to the Rice Village if more people lived closer by (a trend that’s gaining some traction now). They could do cheap fixes like shuttle buses and off site parking garages but that would probably not be befitting of the Rice Village customer base. I admittedly like the old school diagonal parking upfront at most of the shops and hope it stays.