[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MngAUnhDDbg 400 330]
Metro says it is working with Google to add Houston’s public transportation info to Google Transit.
When will Google Transit for Houston be ready? “Sometime in November or December.”
REV HOUSTON: STREET ILLEGAL “REV Houston does not have a special license to drive the electric carts. Already, the city has given the company three tickets with numerous citations, including operating a taxi without a license. The city defines a taxi cab as any automobile or motor-propelled vehicle used for the transport of passengers for hire, explained Blanton Daniels, manager of the city’s transportation division. . . . ‘They’re trying to circumvent the regulation by saying they’re working for gratuities,’ said Daniels, adding that he sees no difference between a taxi for hire and a taxi that works for tips. It’s still money changing hands.” [Houston Chronicle, via Off the Kuff; previously]
Some brand-new houses sold by Lennar Homes will be very convenient to the new Grand Parkway!
Robert A. Hudson, a Spring developer who partnered with Lennar on the project, said builders knew the highway might come through the subdivision.
“We are not up there on a daily basis to make sure that the builders make it clear to everybody else,” he said.
Plans for the Grand Parkway have been on the books for 25 years, but only 28 of its proposed 185 miles have been built. Environmental and neighborhood groups have opposed the project.
It would include 11 segments traversing seven counties. The 12.1-mile Segment F2 would cut directly through the Lakes of Avalon Village, a subdivision with several hundred homes located on FM 2920 just west of Kuykendahl Road.
About 60 homes are in the right-of-way and would have to be demolished to make way for the parkway once construction began, [executive director of the Grand Parkway Association David] Gornet said.
Talk about offering transportation options! But it’s not just Lennar . . . J. Patrick Homes also is selling models in the Lakes of Avalon Village subdivision.
But hurry! The subdivision is in “close out”!
After the jump: pics of a Lennar Homes model for sale in this quaint little village in Spring!
HEIGHTS HIKE AND BIKE TRAIL: STILL JUST AROUND THE CORNER We have a low bidder for a portion of the proposed rails-to-trails project along the old Missouri, Kansas, Texas Southern Pacific railroad line that cuts across the lower Heights — from 7th St. at Shepherd — to Spring St. and Houston Ave. in the First Ward. TxDOT expects construction of the segment to begin in September. [Home in the Heights, via Swamplot Inbox]
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]
CNET’s Daniel Terdiman takes a tour of the Johnson Space Center and comes back with some photos of equipment and facilities being developed for Constellation, the back-to-the-moon project scheduled to begin launching in 2013. (The Space Shuttle program will be phased out by 2010.)
For those of us interested in the latest in Houston interiors technology, Terdiman includes photos of a mockup of the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, meant to take the next generation of astronauts to the moon and beyond. Is that a strip of velcro on the wall on the right? Cool!
Doesn’t look so exciting to you? Hey, they’ve got 5 years to work on it!
After the jump: The Orion capsule mockup from the outside, plus the new 12-wheeler parked outside!
A Chrysler GEM all-electric vehicle is now shuttling passengers between the Rice Lofts Downtown and the Coffee Groundz coffeehouse and El Patio restaurant on Brazos St. in Midtown. If you’re trying to get from one to the other, you can catch a free ride.
Well, almost free. REV Houston drivers happily accept gratuities — in the form of cash, credit cards, or prepaid “key tags.” To order service, you can call the REV Houston hotline (1.877.Go.REV.Go) or send a text message indicating your location. Details are on the REV Houston website.
How long is this gonna last? As long as the startup can sell ads on the vehicles. And REV Houston hopes to expand. Reports Startup Houston:
[Cofounder Erik] Ibarra also mentioned that the company plans to test additional markets within Houston for expansion, such as Rice Village, Washington Avenue and Westheimer in the future.
Photo: REV Houston
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.
Microsoft has updated its Live Search Maps with a number of new features, the most striking of which is the ability to view a street-map overlay on the maps’ signature 3D aerial views. This should be especially helpful to the armchair pilots among you who have been flying blind through Microsoft’s “bird’s eye” views, trying to figure which street is which as you rotate around a property.
Since HAR’s recent update, Live Search Maps are now linked directly to property listings. However, those maps do not include the new street-highlighting feature. To see this new feature, go to maps.live.com and enter an address, then click on the “Bird’s eye” button at the top. Street highlighting automatically appears, but you can turn it off by clicking on the button at the top marked “Labels.” As before, you can rotate the direction of your view by clicking on the N, S, E, or W in the top left corner.
Now here’s a problem: What happens when the newly highlighted streets run behind a tall building? As our sample image above shows, they don’t just run — they dash!
After the jump: How to avoid traffic online!
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!
The Hermann Park kiddie trains are running again! But blogger Lou Minatti considers the replacement C.P. Huntington too “plasticy”:
A news photographer was there and we chatted for a bit. According to his sources, the old train was replaced due to three reasons: The old 50’s-era train had no dead man’s switch, it wasn’t wheelchair-accessible, and our collective asses are bigger than they were in the 1950s. Hence the need for the much wider train.
Photo: Lou Minatti
That house built out of shipping containers on Cordell St. in Brookesmith looks like it’ll be ready for delivery soon. Yes, this was a spec house — and yes, there already is a buyer.
Last year, Numen Development owners Katie Nichols and John Walker used shipping containers to construct the Apama Mackey Gallery on 11th St. in the Heights — because the gallery owner wanted a structure she can move when the property owner kicks her off the land. But the house Numen is building on Cordell looks like it’s going to be around for a while. It comes with its own, uh . . . doublewide lot, and it’s right across the street from a meat-processing plant.
After the jump: drawings, models, and an earlier construction photo of this neat little three-bedroom, three-bath, 1,851-square-foot package!
Sure, Metro talks a lot about transportation in this city’s central districts. But a Houston Business Journal profile shows us Harris County Metropolitan Transit Authority Chairman David Wolff is also enthusiastic about Houston’s westward spread:
Many developers are building various types of commercial properties west of Houston and beyond.
The city of Katy, with an estimated population of 205,000, sits square in the path of Houston’s westward growth pattern.
“The whole city is going that way,” Wolff says. “I think Katy is going to be the next Sugar Land.”
He recalls the creation of Park 10, and how much the area has grown over the last three decades.
Says Wolff: “It was just rice fields. That was really the edge of the world then.”
After the jump, the METRO Board Chairman’s exciting projects way out west, plus how to get folks in the “next Sugar Land” to build freeway on- and off-ramps for your developments!
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:
Plus some other news:
Houston 2012 Light Rail Map: Christof Spieler
