A few questions:

1) To what does "an overpass at Harrisburg" refer? The one over the railroad tracks where it branches off from the Southeast Line, or the more contentious one over the railroad tracks farther east?

2) When will work on North and Southeast be getting under way?

3) When can a deal on University Line be expected?

4) When will we be able to see the first cars from CAF?

Thanks.

Moving to increase the rail system is a great step for Houston, but I have concern over two parts of the plans:

The rail cars are being ordered WITHOUT racks to hang bikes and the system continues to prohibit bikes during rush hours.  This means that the system does not offer equal accomodation to bicyclists.  Other transit systems allow access to cyclists at all times of operation and provide racks.  

On the Uptown Line, parts of the route will be a single shared track, according to plans I saw.  This seem like an accident waiting to happen the first time there is a signaling failure.  We should have parallel sets of tracks throughout the system.

I still don't think having another company do all of our work is a good idea. Plus, I still don't like those UGLY new train cars.

Where can I find the maps of the projected routes?

Harrisburg Overpass:

That would be the cossing of the East Belt Sub of the Houston Terminals Division of the UP.  UP is using the old HB&T name for the route.

Now, how about this for the crossing:  ONLY  run the LRT UNDER.  You would only need about 20' to get it under, and the LRT can run on 4 % grade.

BWT, in the prelem METRO plan in the late 1970's. this crossing was listed as a possible Mobility project as a grade separation.  It was listed as "Harrisburg at HB&T tracks".  That booket should be in the METRO achives, brown ogover, with red and black paint, with four drawings.

Royko, where were you? I thought you would single handedly defeat the tram. ;)  Just kidding.  I guess we can look forward to years of posts on how wrong Metreaux was for herding the sheeple onto the trams and what a waste of 1.46 Billion dollars it was.

I'm thinking I'll have to trot out some new pigeon plans to keep Dominic entertained

P&R Rider,

Gloat all you want.

There are things that METREAUX nor the pro-urban rail media have yet to disclose.

Ther are more elected oficials who do not hesitate in saying METREAUX has not been honest.

Time will tell.

P&R:

Bring your avian friends on.

BTW, I was getting off the LRT at Main Street Station during one of our last cold rain fronts.  Was going into the old Foley's, now Macy's.  20 of your freinds were there, right by the front door, shaking!

All:

With the new cars, you should be able to enough seats so you can bike racks in both the new cars, and retrofit the old.

Royko, I didn't mean to gloat and I am ambivalent about the train.  You seem like Don Quixote tilting at wind mills and I applaud your efforts although I think that ship has sailed.  The big money and big government guys seem to have made the decision that Houston is going to have a rail system no matter how much resistance is applied.

I've ridden the Boston MTA and it is pretty efficient but they have had 100 years to get it right.  Boston is also blessed with much better soil and a low water table than is available here.  The rail at grade with cars is cheaper to construct initially, but with all the stops for traffic, it will be slow to ride from the suburbs to the CBD.

P&R Rider said:

"I've ridden the Boston MTA and it is pretty efficient but they have had 100 years to get it right.  Boston is also blessed with much better soil and a low water table than is available here.  The rail at grade with cars is cheaper to construct initially, but with all the stops for traffic, it will be slow to ride from the suburbs to the CBD."

I have also ridden the MTA and my one daughter uses it regularly.

There is a HUGE difference between their transit and our "wanna-be" mentality that Metro has come up with.

Boston's is virtually ALL grade separated.

Metro's is essentially ALL in-the-street, up yours, slow poke trolley lines.

What is so pathetic about Metro's approach, and the giving in's from the liberal council members, is that we are losing two full lanes of existing roadway to make way for this slow means of moving people that conflicts with all other modes of transit as well as walking.

Look at what Metro is now doing by installing those fences everywhere to keep people off their tracks!!

Years ago, when the design for Main St was still under consideration, I wrote to Metro and asked a VERY simple question:  Why not simply dust off the previous study done that concluded that a monorail down Main St and out to Hwy 6 and reissue it.

John Sedlak, Senior VP, wrote and lied to me and said they couldn't because City Council "forbid" any elevated rail on Main.

I responded and asked him to prove it and received a letter stating there was no forbidding.  But, and this is what tics off caring people like myself, they simply ignored it and went the way they had always decided to go.

Yes, people like Wilson, and Brown...and others, can claim they achieved "world class" status for Houston but that is simply self-justifaction for their positions.

On another matter, will Ms Sit please tell us exactly waht the TOTAL costs will be for the above mentioned lines including ALL costs, taxes, misc, etc?

Don Gallagher

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MET_Houston/

Metropolitan Elevated Transit-Houston

^ Your complete acronym spells METH. Use some of these vehicles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Mover

and you would have Crystal METH.

Like I said before, putting the train underground is feasible in Boston because of the water table, and the grade separation where lines cross means very deep subway terminals.  There is a station in Boston where the Red line (IIRC) intersects with the Amtrak line to NYC and another subway line and the escalator to the street is the longest I have ever seen.

Your elevated train idea has merit in that the speed of the train is not constrained by street traffic, but the cost of getting fat, out-of-shape riders up to the platform with escalators or elevators would run the cost up.

The current design of trains at street level is the cheapest to build and I suspect that is why they decided to go that way.

P&R Rider said:

"Your elevated train idea has merit in that the speed of the train is not constrained by street traffic, but the cost of getting fat, out-of-shape riders up to the platform with escalators or elevators would run the cost up."

The costs are less than those costs to get those "fat, out-of-shape riders" down to a subway.

But is cheapest best?  I strongly disagree unless your goal is to disrupt all other means of traveling, especially cross-traffic.

How many lanes of roadway have been removed by the Boston T installations?

Boston, NYC and Philly are three of our largest cities and all have primarily full grade separated mass transit.

Last night, for one of many times, my wife commented as we got to 59N and Weslayan, how long the light takes to change and the traffic back-ups on Weslayan SB.

I reminded her to think about how nice it will be when then throw in at grade light rail crossing there every 6 minutes (3 minutes) counting two way trams!

Overhead or underground, on the entire route(s) would eliminate all of that including Metro's need to have expensive police units sitting at intersections just to watch for problems.

I lived in Chicago for 2 years and rode the "El" frequently. While I think an elevated train system would be better overall for Houston than the current at-grade system, elevated trains do have the disadvantage of being both noisy and unsightly. Also, it wouldn't surprise me if the number of serious car-versus-train accidents in Houston were exceeded by the number of serious car-versus-El-train-support accidents in Chicago. (Yes, the supports don't move, but there are lots of them, so the statistical likelihood of hitting one is pretty high.)

I rode the Chicago El a couple of times and used to ride the similar 'El' in Philly.  I was raised outside of Camden, NJ and watched the SEPTA elevated being built.  

It ruined our communities becauxe they basically built an earthen dam with tracks on top.

The El is not even close to the design of a monorail line.  In fact, a monorail line uses much smaller columms than any other elevated line because a dual rail line has far more mass with a solid concrete platform.

The Vegas Monorail has columns approximately 120 feet apart.

The codes back when Chicago's El was built allowed for columns very close to road traffic and they tended to have no gaurd rails.  That, plus being steel with no rounded corners makes for a certail death trap if hit.

Here's a good picture of those designs that today would be illegal;

http://brattononline.com/photos/041305-chicago.jpg

As for Houston and monorail, one would hope they would have designed it using a linear park taking up one lane of roadway rather than 2.5 lanes.

The El, and any dual rail line would mean a 23-26 foot wide concrete platform that would cut off all light and grow mold on the underside.

Again, a monorail, or any columns built now like the one's on I-10, are rounded and set back or have guard rails.  

Steve,

I almost forgot the most important point to comment on!

The Chicago El "IS" NOISY!

Modern monorail's are quieter than traditional rail.  Dubai has just built an artifical island called Palm Jumeirah.  They designed a rail line down the spine and chose monorail over all other choices for one primary reason.  Quietness.

As with Disney's properties, the trains pass very close to rather expensive residences so quiet is an important issue.

The Palm monorail has beams that are 145 meters long continuous to improve ride and noise reductions.

My preference now though would be maglev (urban for Houston) as it is far quieter.

Don G,

A monorail sounds fabulous. I imagine, though, that it's too late to get METRO to switch formats (or whatever you call distinct track/train types). Also, didn't we learn about the dangers of monorail from THE SIMPSONS? :)

Is there such a thing as urban maglev? I thought the main point of maglev was speed, which seems kind of pointless if the stops are a mile apart. Also, isn't maglev still more or less experimental? I get the impression that the existing maglev lines are pretty much for showing-off purposes and are not terribly practical.

First, it isn't experimental anymore.  Pro dual rail folks can argue that some companies that are proposing maglev have never built one but the technology is sound and it's a matter of the type of design one thinks is best.

As for an urban design, they would travel at the same speed as light rail but by being completely suspended, they are few moving parts.  The Shanghai Maglev's only moving parts are the doors!

With urban maglev, you have super quiet travel that would make the Chicago El seem like a jackhammer compared to a hummingbird.

That Simpson episode is used frequestly by poro dual railers but was simply a comedy plot done by Connan that is quite funny.

In the past 110 years, there has only been one fatality accident with a monorail.  

That was the Wuppertal suspended line and that one accident was caused, not by the design or the monorailm but by a contractor who forgot to remove a steel bracket attached to the guideway for major renovations and the operator failed to run a test vehicle first.

Interesting sidenotes:

I wrote an Outlook letter to the Chronicle the other day and they removed 80% of my comments and publ9ished it yesterday as a letter to the editor.

I was arguing that two articles written by the Chronicle mislead the public on high speed rail.

Elitist's tend to operate with predisposed opinions and do not care to argue all points.

Also,  did you know that a maglev can be installed in a vacuum tube and could travel at 4000 MPH?  One tube for NYC to LA could make a trip in less than one hour, all with no noise.

I'll admit that I have not looked into Maglev and thought it was only a demonstration project to prove feasibility.  It seems like it would take massive amounts of power to levitate a "light" rail train and the switching circuits to propel the train would have to have some redundancy but digital controls have brought a lot of technology to the table.  I just wonder when you consider the overall cost to generate and buy the electricity would it be cheaper than a DC motor to turn the wheels?  I mean in a Maglev train the electricity has to provide the power to levitate the train plus the power to send it along the "rail".  Admittedly there is no rolling friction but the amount of power to levitate would be much more that our current train takes to turn the .wheels

4000 mph aye?

That's enough to scare be into NOT purchasing a ticket. I'll stick to flying.

Very interesting info, Don G. What would you say are the barriers preventing the widespread construction of maglev lines? Is it power consumption, per P&R Rider's suggestion? Or is it simply high startup costs?

As for the underground maglev idea, I imagine that we'll probably have a spaceplane that flies people from New York to LA in an hour before we have a 3000-mile underground vacuum tube.

where is metro going to get all the supplys like steel from are they going to give contracts to certain groups or will they just import it from somewhere