COMMENT OF THE DAY: MAKING A U-TURN ON REROUTING I-45 
“I was for this reroute plan early on initially, but as time has gone by I’ve grown against it. This massive freeway is going to ruin an up-and-coming scene happening currently in EaDo, all for the sake of meshing Midtown/Downtown. The best alternative is to tunnel the Pierce underneath its current route. It’s the least destructive and will make all parties happiest I.M.O. And don’t give me this crap excuse that nothing can be underground here because of floods. If everything is supposedly so ‘big’ here in Texas, then please think bigger when it comes to this project.” [Eddie, commenting on TxDOT’s Plans for Freeway Expansion Around and Below the Newly Protected Cheek-Neal Coffee Building] Illustration: Lulu
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Is it too much to hope that Houston could have its own version of Dallas’s Kylde Warren Park?
How come big civic projects like that happen so often in Dallas but the best Houston can do is to not destroy Memorial Park with a vehicular roads/highways?
it’s no different than what they are planning. whether it’s underground through midtown, or underground through eado, it’s still going to flood in freakish rains.
I totally agree. They should bury 45 along its current right of way, and build a giant linear park over it. Like 59 through Montrose, the underground road could double as detention. Giant gates and lights could be installed at the beginning and end of the tunnel to prevent cars from entering when it is full of water.
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It was Boston’s idea first. I just hope they don’t use cheap epoxy to glue precast panels on the tunnel ceilings…
There has to be a better option
the Pierce has to go, and, restoring an unbroken N-S axis in Houston is great
but I agree that a mega freeway with park on top will do nothing to help E-W cohesiveness –
Sure you can walk(?) through the park but everywhere before and after the Brown you’ll have an I-10 to cross! Ick
I love the rendering with the highway diving underground. All vehicles must off-road in 1/2 mile.
It would be a most entertaining monster truck jam like mud pit!
I could be willing to do away with the Pierce Elevated as a thru-route if the ROW were maintained for a spur with ramps that distribute the load of local traffic from the downtown/midtown grid, to provide an east-west connection between the Montrose area and all points east, and to alleviate bottleneck conditions on the approach to downtown. I am extremely concerned at the prospect of giving up this ROW from a transportation purpose for the next twenty or forty years.
You’ll get no argument from me about the flooding cliche. Stormwater that ends up on trenched roads is sormwater that isn’t flooding the nearby surface streets and the tax base. A flooded highway is a feature, not a bug.
I actually got an idea of reconstructing the pierce to make it look nicer and build part of it over pierce street, so that it’d have more capacity and i have ideas on how to reconstruct the interchanges with allen parkway, us 59 and i 10, to add more capacity and access and less bottlenecking and also my idea that i have does not acquire as much right of way as the txdot proposal, (i actually sent the idea to txdot but i haven’t got an answer or anything)