COMMENT OF THE DAY: THE SIGHTS ON AND OFF THE MEMORIAL DR. STRIP 
“. . . The whole thing of having this parkside expressway that drops to 35 and morphs into a suburban strip for all of 1/4 mile before resuming high-aesthetics high-speed is wonderfully convenient. Your last chance gas, your breakfast tacos and kolaches, your late-night eats . . . it’s all right there, no mucking about with U-turns or feeder roads required.
And no, this stripmall won’t be a huge visual contribution . . . but who cares? The views just 100 yards to the south are about as aesthetically pleasing as one can find in our fair city, and after all, isn’t that what matters? So much discussion of the urban form boils down to complaining about what we see from our car windows. But if the view from home and office is nice, isn’t that really what matters?” [Purple City, commenting on How a Stretch of the Memorial Dr. Strip Earned Its Newest Strip Center] Illustration: Lulu
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As long as they are going to put Memorial Drive under Memorial Park, why not elevate Memorial along the 1/4 mi strip? That way it would be a straight shot from 610 to downtown.
I’m pretty sure the speed limit through Memorial Park is 40mph, as opposed to 35mph past the retail. It’s people that treat it as an expressway that make it so bloody dangerous for other road users.
considering less than 10% of through traffic will ever pull over to utilize this strip means that it’s a massive boondoggle that creates serious inefficiencies in one of the most travelled routes in all of the inner loop. I’m not saying it shouldn’t exist, but why anyone would try and shine a positive glow on such massive inefficiencies is beyond me. maybe if they took out all of the median with traffic lights only for entry/exit points it wouldn’t be so bad, but we know that’s never going to happen.
The area was never this busy back in 2003-ish. It has just gotten busy as an escape route from downtown for people who don’t live far enough way to get on a freeway.