Has there ever been a proposal to widen I-10 between Houston and SA? (Atlanta: rental car, rental)

[LocalPlanner]

Originally Posted by shanv3

First please address/widen the I 10stretch from beltway 8 to Hwy 6.

You can't be serious. That widening just happened in 2009. I won't be widened again in my lifetime. Learn to live with what you have. Look at how much more vehicle throughput there is now, even if it is at 20 mph.

[Mr. Clutch]

Originally Posted by WRM20

I know lots of folks who wouldn't ride public transport if you paid them, since it would force them to ride with the perceived undesirables

I agree, but I think that perception would change if the pain from driving was bad enough. As an example, I grew up in Houston, but lived in other cities - Dallas, Austin, LA, and never used public transportation. Only when I had to commute from the northern VA suburbs to DC did I consider using a train. At first I hated it because I did prefer driving - even though it was slightly more expensive and took a little longer ($20 parking + 24 round trip miles of gas, 40-50 minutes, 7 minute walk from the parking lot) than the train ($11 train fare, $5.50 station parking, 35-45 minutes, 3 minute walk from the metro station).

Nowadays when I'm in DC, I only drive under two circumstances - Metro is being unreliable (which has decreased a lot since they began fixing it in 2016), or the weather is ridiculously cold - I AM from Texas after all. Other than that, the train is better for the workday commute because its both cheaper and more convenient.

Nowhere in Texas offers that combination, which in my opinion is needed to encourage public transportation use. However, the threat of future gridlock and loss of business competitiveness is very, very real. The status quo in Houston with respect to transportation cannot continue unless we want to accelerate our eventual decline.

All large metro areas have congestion. In Houston, the problem is a lack of convenient alternatives to the congestion that people use. Having a robust and yes expensive heavy rail system would push commuters toward that system and give them options, while simultaneously freeing up additional roadway capacity and supercharging development. The only other thing I can think of that would save us from gridlock is an acceleration of the platooning capabilities of driverless cars which is essentially a capacity increase. But if that's not coming in 10 years or less, forget about it. Completing the majority of the Harris County street grid would do wonders in certain local areas too.

There is a cultural component to shunning of public transportation that's definitely present in the Houston, but I think it can be overcome in time with a robust system that actually makes sense for people to use. The problem is, that system would probably cost more to build here than in most places simply because of our sprawling geographic footprint. It's not a great place to be in.

Originally Posted by timtemtym

Exactly! I remember the nightmare of that old 3 lane in and out on I-10. To see what it would look like today, consider the 5 freeway in LA. They are only now going back and trying to redo it. It's been 3 lanes in and outbound southeast of DTLA down to the Orange County line. It is a mess 24/7. I don't know why they left it in the original 3 lane configuration for so many decades. Now they are having to buy out businesses and neighborhoods to widen it.

Agreed - if I-10 was still in the old configuration, so many businesses and other economic drivers in the area would not be there - I-10 was the worst freeway, by far, in Houston for most of my life. We're talking 6-8 hours of bumper to bumper traffic a day in the early 2000s.

People throw out this simplistic argument "well the gains didn't hold up for but a year or two!" without considering the insane economic growth in West Houston that accompanied the I-10 expansion. While I think a commuter rail line would have been a million times better than the tollway they put in the middle of the freeway, the Energy Corridor and Westchase wouldn't even exist in their current forms had that expansion not been done.

[Dopo]

Originally Posted by Mr. Clutch

All large metro areas have congestion. In Houston, the problem is a lack of convenient alternatives to the congestion that people use. Having a robust and yes expensive heavy rail system would push commuters toward that system and give them options, while simultaneously freeing up additional roadway capacity and supercharging development.

Makes too much sense = It's not going to happen

[oceangaia]

Originally Posted by Dopo

light-rail .... less cars on the road = less traffic

Very simple

Can you provide real life examples where this has been demonstrated? Plenty of cities have built light rail. Did they see a reduction in traffic? How does their traffic compare with ours?

bottom line: it simply is not cost effective. A rail line down I-10 would have cost more than the freeway expansion and served one-tenth the number of people.

[Dopo]

Originally Posted by oceangaia

Can you provide real life examples where this has been demonstrated? Plenty of cities have built light rail. Did they see a reduction in traffic? How does their traffic compare with ours?

bottom line: it simply is not cost effective. A rail line down I-10 would have cost more than the freeway expansion and served one-tenth the number of people.

Seoul wasn't ready to be a megacity
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/19/tech...ity/index.html

But as people flooded into Seoul in the hope of higher living standards, the 600-year-old city began to buckle under the weight of its new population.
"We had no choice to expand, build the roads and bridges to include so many people and cars," said Mayor Park Won-soon.

In 2004, the Seoul Institute partnered with the mayor's office to begin a program to overhaul the ciy's public transportation.
Thirteen years later, its nine-line subway is hailed as one of the world's best and a sophisticated monitoring system helps keep road traffic flowing above ground.
"If you imagine without this sophisticated system, we would have been a very car-oriented city," said Chang Yi, a transportation specialist at the Seoul Institute. "We would have been like a traffic hell."
But while traffic congestion has significantly improved in the past decade, the mayor still sees work to be done.
"Seoul citizens have been addicted to cars for a long time," he said. In the task of reorienting the city to favor pedestrians rather than automobiles, "changing of the minds of the citizens is the most difficult and time-consuming job," he observed.

[oceangaia]

So you have to go to the other side of the world to find a viable example? Comparing Seoul to Houston is like comparing apples to feathers. Seoul has a population density 10x Houston and had not been investing adequately in road infrastructure.

[HookTheBrotherUp]

Originally Posted by Dopo

We need rail to connect Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas
Sadly, people think is a waste of money
Not realizing that it would eliminate the need for more highway lanes

We do have rail service between SA and Houston... if you want to spend 2 days to get there! Ba-ha-ha! Okay, well not two days, but you would have wasted two days.

We travel frequently in Europe where my wife and kids now live, and at first I was amazed that I could fly from Houston to Paris (Frankfurt, London, Zurich, Barcelona, Milan, etc.), and get on a train and end up just 200 feet from the train station to my wife's uncle's place in Spain; we've been doing that for at least 16 years, before the kids were born. Now I take it for granted, but hard not to as the trains are frequent, and all day long.

I once wanted to treat the kids to a trip to El Paso from Houston to see my family, but it took almost 2.5 days to get there on the Sunset Limited! WTF? Two plus days? I heard that the train makes a stop in Alpine, Texas, and waits there for hours, just so the freight trains can travel because passenger train service is last on the list because the railroads belong to private owners. I'm not debating that, it is private, they can do as they wish, but the fact that the US government does not have much infrastructure out of the Northeast says a lot on how people view rail in this country.

I'm Conservative, love my freedom in my own vehicle... but I am not stupid. Rail serves everybody and can take a shyt load of vehicles off the streets that don't need to be there. If someone could find a way to make rail convenient for the masses, they'd do well. Besides cost, the problem is eminent domain laws, private land rights.

Where my family will be moving to shortly in The Netherlands, the neighborhoods look like those in the Hollywood hills, very lush and green, hills and water, just paradise. But most of those people ride their bikes to the train stations around the area, and then commute to the city. Works well. People always raise cost as the number one issue, but obviously, it will never get any cheaper than it is now. In 15-20 years, a billion dollars will seem like a small amount for a 'little project'.

[Dopo]

Originally Posted by oceangaia

So you have to go to the other side of the world to find a viable example? Comparing Seoul to Houston is like comparing apples to feathers. Seoul has a population density 10x Houston and had not been investing adequately in road infrastructure.

You can say the exact same thing about the Grand Parkway
"Why is it being built there? Nobody lives over there?"

You think people and businesses are not going to move there?

[oceangaia]

Not at 27,000 people per sq mile.

Besides, Grand Parkway is a toll road. The users are paying for it. There's not a rail line anywhere in the world, except maybe a few in high density Japan, where fares cover even half of operating expenses.

[LocalPlanner]

Transit (rail or otherwise) should never be justified by the assertion that it will "reduce congestion." Yes, there might be fewer cars making that trip, but generally congestion will occur regardless, as driving is always the first option for most folks.

What we have to prevent is folks who want only driving improvements from trying to supersize our local streets and make them even more unfriendly to walking, biking and transit. That is bad policy for sure.