Archive for the 'mobility strategies' Category
The brilliance of freeway tunnels (part 2 of 2)
Closed Published by Tory Gattis December 13th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesPart 1 here. Reading the paper sparked a couple of my own variant ideas. All of the conceptual cross-sections show two tunnels, but some tunnel concepts contain as many as 8-9 lanes in each one (stacked 2-3 levels high inside the tunnel cross-section…
The brilliance of freeway tunnels (part 1 of 2)
Closed Published by Tory Gattis December 10th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesA few weeks back, Gonzalo Camacho sent me an intimidating 30-page white paper on the tunnel option for expanding the I-45N corridor using some of the newest tunnel-boring technologies from Europe and elsewhere. It took me a while to get around to read…
The last-mile problem with high-speed rail
Closed Published by Tory Gattis December 3rd, 2007 on Houston StrategiesIn a Sunday Chronicle op-ed, Paul Mangelsdorf of Texas Rail Advocates laid out the case for high-speed rail in the Texas Triangle. I have to admit it sounds pretty cool, being whisked between cities at a comfortable 200-mph without most of the hassles…
Summing up my views on transit
Closed Published by Tory Gattis November 19th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesI’ve caught a little flak recently for a string of posts that were a tad hard on transit. Sorry if I offended some of my readers. Sometimes my posts are less thoughtful and balanced than I’d like them to be - just depends on my mood and time crunch w…
The problem with transit polling
Closed Published by Tory Gattis November 15th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesA new, expanded version of the 2007 Houston Area Survey came out today, and the Chronicle story notes the high support for transit as a “solution to traffic congestion.” If “solution” means “alternative” - then maybe - but if means “alleviate” - then …
Digging into the newest congestion numbers
Closed Published by Tory Gattis September 24th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesSo the Texas Transportation Institute at TAMU came out with their 2007 Urban Mobility Report last week. In case you missed the story in the Chronicle, it’s steadily getting worse in Houston, now up to 56 hours of average delay per traveler per year, w…
The potential for GPS at Metro
Closed Published by Tory Gattis September 17th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesChristof mentioned to me recently that Metro is planning on adding GPS units to all the buses, so they know where they are in real-time. It got me thinking about potential services they might offer with that information. Maybe display them in real-ti…
Industrial Houston and packets/cars vs. circuits/transit
Closed Published by Tory Gattis August 16th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesA couple quick pass-alongs tonight. The first is from a Joel Kotkin editorial in the Wall Street Journal on the myth of deindustrialization in America, which argues that manufacturing is alive and well in this country. A couple paragraphs on Houston:…
Reason response on private toll roads
Closed Published by Tory Gattis August 6th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesReason’s Len Gilroy is a good friend of mine, and he wrote such an excellent and thorough comment on my recent post on private toll roads that I asked him to convert it into a full guest post:Tory’s July 30th post on public vs. private provision of to…
Someone anonymously left an excellent pair of comments about NYC mobility on one of my Reason posts on why mobility matters to personal life from a couple weeks ago. It’s so good I decided it deserved its own full-blown post for those who don’t track …