Archive for the 'toll roads' 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…
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…
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…
Private toll roads: take the money (and concrete) and run?
Closed Published by Tory Gattis July 30th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesThere’s a big debate going on in Texas about private toll roads, especially for the Trans Texas Corridor. The legislature slapped a two year moratorium on them last session, although with enough loopholes to be pretty toothless. I’ve been very skepti…
Getting congestion pricing right on Westpark and elsewhere
Closed Published by Tory Gattis June 24th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesCatching up on my Chronicles from last week, it looks like Westpark tolls were a top story: first the proposed rush hour increases (doubling the tolls), then the blowback, then the giving-in to public pressure to rescind the proposal. Obviously an unfo…
Most Houston place, $ for parks, strong housing, wireless problems, toll roads, transit networks, and vote for Houston!
Closed Published by Tory Gattis May 27th, 2007 on Houston StrategiesTime again to clear out the miscellaneous small items of interest. I also would like to announce that work has gotten so busy that I think I’m going to have to drop down from 3 posts/week to 2 posts/week, probably on Sunday or Monday nights, and Wedne…
Cheap fixes for traffic congestion
Closed Published by Tory Gattis May 21st, 2007 on Houston StrategiesThe LA Times recently ran an article on “quick and inexpensive” ways to reduce traffic congestion. There are some good ideas in here that are just as applicable to Houston:Open up transit to competition by ending the govt-sanctioned monopoly, allowing…
Preliminary 2035 HGAC Regional Transportation Plan
Closed Published by Tory Gattis May 3rd, 2007 on Houston StrategiesLast week I was able to attend a Livable Houston presentation by Kari Hackett of the Houston-Galveston Area Council on the preliminary 2035 Regional Transportation Plan, a process they go through every 5 years. I thought I’d cover a few highlights tha…
I wanted to comment on a couple very interesting Chronicle mobility articles from Monday. The first is Rad Sallee’s Move It! column on Texas House Bill 1892:…would give the Harris County Toll Road Authority first shot at developing any new toll proj…