TSU LOSES A LIGHT RAIL STATION Under pressure from Third Ward residents and elected officials who didn’t want rail on Wheeler, Metro has officially rerouted an eastern section of the University Line further north. From Main, the line had been planned to travel east on Wheeler, north on Ennis, then east on Alabama to Scott at U of H. The new route snakes north sooner: north on Hutchins from Wheeler, east on Cleburne, north on Dowling, then east on Alabama to Scott. [Houston Chronicle]
Sign up for the Newsletter
Tag: Light-Rail
Christof Spieler returns from a Metro meeting with some new detail on the proposed Downtown routes for the Southeast and East End light-rail lines.
Spieler politely calls the latest plan a compromise. (“I doubt anyone is really happy with it,” he writes.) It has Metro siting the two lines — which will run on the same tracks for most of the crosstown trek — along the south side of Capitol (heading west) and the south side of Rusk (heading east). But unlike the trains that run down Main St. today, the new vehicles won’t have any right-of-way advantages over cars:
Like buses do now, the trains will share the curb lanes with cars, both turns and through traffic. . . . And the signals will be operated as they are on Capitol and Rusk today: trains will find the lights are sometimes green and sometimes red, and they will stop or go accordingly. There is no doubt that this will slow trains down and throw off schedules: for example, a line of stopped cars in the left lane on one block would force the train to hold in the previous block until the cars moved. It might also be a safety issue, but that’s not as clear.
The new lines will intersect with the Main St. line at a new Downtown Crossing station, which will likely require passengers to do plenty of street-crossing themselves:
there are 4 platforms — north- and southbound Main Street and east- and westbound East End/ Southeast — that can share one station name, making the system easy to understand. But the east-west platforms are a block away from Main Street, so some transfers will still involve a three block walk, with 3 pedestrian lights, from the center of one platform to the center of another.
After the jump: The end of the line!
Metro hasn’t sent out an overview of its updated light-rail plans recently . . . but blogger Christof Spieler of the Citizens’ Transportation Coalition, who follows Metro’s plans carefully, has put together his own revised map showing the latest changes to the complete Houston-area “fixed guideway” transit map expected to be in place by 2012.
What’s new? Spieler notes plenty of adjustments. East of Downtown, the track carrying the East End and Southeast lines
swings around the future soccer stadium on Texas, then squiggles onto Capitol (the westbound track) and Rusk (the eastbound track), passing Discover Green, Minute Maid Park, and the Convention Center. At Main Street, a new station on the Main Street line allows for fairly easy transfers between the lines (unlike the old plan). At the same location, connection tracks allow East End Line trains to swing north onto the Main Street track, serving Preston and UH Downtown before terminating at the Intermodal Center. Southeast Line trains don’t make this turn; they continue on to the Theater District.
Also, changes to planned station locations:
there’s a new station on the Uptown Line north of Memorial Drive, but no Memorial Park station; there’s a station added in the Uptown area; there are new stations on the University Line in Gulfton and at Eastside; and the North Line has two more stations . . .
More detail — including the new express bus service from Downtown to IAH — in Spieler’s report.
- The map keeps changing [Intermodality]
- Metro 2012 Light Rail Map (PDF) [Intermodality]
- Metro 2012 Fixed-Guideway Transit Map (PDF) [Intermodality]
A reader writes in wanting to find out what is planned for the “gigantic” and newly cleared block at the northwest corner of the 59 South feeder road and Richmond, just west of Midtown. The block surrounded by Richmond, Colquitt, Garrott, and Jack is the planned site of The Courtyard on Richmond, a midrise apartment complex by Post Properties that’s just a short walk away from the Wheeler light-rail station.
Back in October, the Chronicle‘s Betty Martin reported on the project: a 5-story, 200-unit structure with two courtyards, sandwiching a parking garage. The story included this comment:
It would be similar to “that property in Midtown that everybody likes – Midtown Square – that has a restaurant on the ground floor, brick sidewalks,” [Post Properties developer Bart] French said.
Post Properties built Midtown Square, so you might expect the new project will be similar . . . well, except for that part about restaurants on the ground floor. The plans we’ve seen don’t show any retail, except for a leasing office at the corner of Richmond and Milam. And a Planning Department document dating from January refers to the Courtyard on Richmond as a 252-unit residential-only project.
After the jump: those plans!
The brand new YMCA planned for the corner of Griggs Rd. and Martin Luther King Blvd. will be the first ever named after a professional sports team: The Houston Texans. Construction is expected to begin later this year. The new Third Ward facility is meant to be a permanent replacement for the old South Central YMCA between UH and TSU at 3531 Wheeler, which was abandoned for temporary digs in a storefront on Scott St. several years ago.
At a press conference yesterday, officials from the YMCA and the Texans described the new complex as just part of a larger partnership between the two organizations.
Hey, isn’t Palm Center the planned location for the start of the Southeast Metrorail line? So the Y will mark the beginning of athletic training for a lot of kids . . . plus the start of train riding for a larger group. Cute.
After the jump: A tiny picture of the new facility, plus . . . that light rail map!
In an extensive interview with Houston Press music blog Houstoned Rocks, Proletariat owner Denise Ramos explains she isn’t shutting down her Richmond Ave. bar and music venue in February because she’s afraid upcoming University Line construction on the street will hurt her business. She’s shutting the club down because Metro has told her exactly where the Montrose light-rail station is going to go:
I started going to all these meetings Metro had put together, and in one of the meetings they had the proposed design for the rail, and I noticed that our building was nowhere in the design . . .
Right in front of where our building is, that’s where they [plan to] have the station . . .
We know for sure they plan to demolish our building. That’s a given; we know that. But I just don’t know when that’s going to be.
Guess that means Metro won’t be sliding that station to the west of Montrose . . .
It’s all over ’cept the land speculating—and, of course, the lawsuits. The Metro Board has announced the alignments for the new light-rail University Line:
- Rail goes on Richmond, all the way to Cummins before zagging. No Culberson freeway cantilever freakout.
- To the east, a new route-combo twist: The line will run from Wheeler to Ennis to Alabama to Scott to Elgin. Then, somehow, maybe—to the Eastwood Transit Center. Third Ward: You’re toast!
Plus some other news:
- Light rail all the way, sez the board. That weird rail-on-rubber “bus rapid transit” thing? Not gonna happen.
- Which means, notes rail obsessive Christof Spieler, that you won’t have to switch cars to hop to the North Line from the existing Main Street Line. Soon you’ll be able to sit in the same train seat from the Northline Mall all the way to the Astroworld Sam’s Club without once adjusting your buns.
- Same goes for the University Line-Uptown Line link. If you’ve got nothing better to do—and maybe an afternoon to kill—you’ll be able to ride a single train car from the Eastwood Transit Center to the Northwest Transit Center, passing through Midtown, Greenway Plaza, the Galleria, and Memorial Park on the way. (Come to think of it, this last route sounds like a light-rail version of the 610 Loop—or at least half of one. To L with the missing North and East segments!)
- Houston, we have a map [Intermodality]
- Metro panel votes for light rail on all five planned lines [Houston Chronicle]
Houston 2012 Light Rail Map: Christof Spieler
