I thought they stopped doing this- Houston communities may lose homes due to freeway
A booming spike in Houston's population is making traffic terrible. To help with this, a massive $9 billion freeway-widening project was put in place to widen 24 miles of interstate. But the project is threatening to disrupt the lives of thousands of people — most of them are from communities of color...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ho...ion/ar-AAUduF4 |
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Now IMO it's on the state to offer more than market value, which completely throws away the generational wealth argument because often times folks wouldn't even be receiving this money if it wasn't for the new development displacing them. I remember when the Katy Freeway was expanded in Houston's affluent west side that a few residents and businesses were displaced then too. This happens all over and I think is okay so long as you are provided adequate compensation (above market value). There's an entire neighborhood near LAX that was emptied out over time to allow the airport to expand and place a rental car facility there. The homeowners were mostly minority but were well compensated. |
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Saw this story on TV this morning. Unbelievable.
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So you think things should just stay as they are. Let a wide freeway continue to get more crowded without any improvements done? I'm looking at the bigger picture as far as the region goes and see how the expansion will lead to numerous improvements in other areas that I already mentioned. |
What is that gigantic freeway on the west side of Houston? That has to be the most epic freeway in the U.S.
Texas loves big trucks and big roads. |
At least in Stockton, they built over the poor neighborhood (Highway 4).
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This also means that there will be 5-10 years of construction and congestion added to every single freeway entering downtown. People who actually live inside the loop don't need a wider road. |
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Another thing people aren't talking about is the current freeway design. I-45 North has, IIRC, the highest accidents per mile than any other freeway in the country between downtown and BW8. The reason for this is because of freeway design. This expansion is going to make the freeway safer to drive on with wider lanes, better merges, improved sight distance, etc. Of course that's not discussed in the article either. Edit: I-45N deck park if freeway moves forward: https://cdn.abcotvs.com/dip/images/1...ect-bw-vid.jpg So basically what this expansion will do is: 1. Remove a few hundred residents, giving them market level (or above) compensation 2. Doing the same for the businesses in the area But it will also: 1. Improve a poorly designed freeway 2. Add a deck park connecting neighborhoods across a freeway 3. Lead to the demolition of an elevated freeway downtown or turning it into an elevated park like Hi-Line NYC 4. Adding new trails and paths near the freeway through the improvement of neighborhood streets that will cross it Pros outweigh the cons to me, especially since the freeway is there already. |
It will also massively expand the freeway, which is pretty much the last thing you want to do from an urbanist perspective. "The freeway was already there, so let's take out more cityscape for more lanes" doesn't make much sense.
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So you say they are taking out cityscape, but how much more are they going to add to the city. Wouldn't a brand new deck park connecting a once divided neighborhood and a brand new linear park downtown be more beneficial to the cityscape and used by more people? Will drivers feel safer using 45N to get to Houston's main airport with a more updated/safely designed freeway versus the skinny lane clusterfuck currently there now? I think too often folks get tunnel vision anytime freeway expansion comes up. They aren't all the same and freeway expansion isn't the only "progress" that has displaced people (I mentioned the LAX example earlier). |
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But that's just one problem with the updates. The bigger problem is Houston has few alternate routes than freeways, so traffic and congestion funnels into very few roads. In Houstonian terms, just like a bayou, a "flood plain" is needed for cars when the existing engineered channels (freeways) become overcrowded, and multiple exists and alternate paths need to be available to reduce the load on a single highway. This "fix" - essential combining 3 highways into 1 along the north side of downtown - just creates a single bottleneck that in-turn can produce worse impacts on mobility than having separate paths. And of course any "fix" requires things to become worse during the years of construction, and as I-10 has shown roads tend to fill back up as soon as they are expanded, so although there may be a "benefit" of higher capacity, the value to an individual driver is lost as soon as the roads fill back up. It is never ending. Houston needs more alternate routes, not just bigger freeways. |
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I-10 the Katy Freeway is a great example of an expansion done right. I remember that thing would have bumper to bumper traffic 7 days a week before it was expanded. The only times you'd be able to avoid traffic would be between 8p-6am. That freeway was the worst. As they were expanding it, TxDot and the traffic folks would always say "rush hour traffic will still be bumper to bumper but the freeway will flow throughout the day". I believe it was completed in 2005 and what they said then has held true. The freeway will back up during rush hour as usual, but outside of rush hour it is free flowing. That wasn't the case before expansion. |
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Well, all I can say is as former resident who lived along Montrose, I can see nothing good coming from this redesign for people who live inside the loop.
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The freeways mentioned have a lot of blight and derelict looking development built up along them. While some people will be displaced, this is a good opportunity for Houston to clean up these corridors.
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