Houston News Blog

Photo by agent2n

​Blame Obama if you're stuck in hopeless traffic on I-10 East at I-45 this weekend. I-10 East will be completely closed, due to that socialistic stimulus act.

Best attempt to put a good spin on it, from TxDOT: "With progress there is often sacrifice and the work on I-10 East will be no exception," spokesperson Deidrea Samuels said.

The agita-inducing details:

Beginning Friday, November 6th at 9 p.m. until Monday, November 9th at 5 a.m., contractors will close IH 10 eastbound at IH 45 in downtown. Traffic will be detoured to IH 45 South or IH 45 North exit.

Motorists can either take IH 45 North to the North Main exit and u-turn back to IH 45 South to access IH 10 eastbound or IH 45 South to US 59 North to access IH 10 eastbound.

This closure is necessary so crews can stripe the roadway and set up concrete traffic barriers for the major freeway rehabilitation work that will begin on Monday, November 9th which will reduce IH 10 eastbound traffic to one lane from the IH 45 North and IH 45 South exit ramps to White Oak Bayou Bridge for approximately three months.

Helfully, TxDOT says drivers "should consider an alternative route."

IT'S TOO LATE: We already elected Obama.

​TxDOT, do you ever fail in coming up with ways to screw drivers? No, you do not.

The agency announced this neat little piece of news this afternoon -- from 9 p.m. Friday to 5 a.m. Monday, a nice big chunk of the North Loop and the East Loop will be closed. Completely.

The westbound lanes of "the IH 610-North Loop between the IH 10-East Freeway and US 59-Eastex Freeway will close," TxDOT's announcement says.

We really suck at directions and things like that, but looking at a map it seems that much of the area between what we call the I-10 East Freeway and 59 North is actually the East Loop, but what do we know?

We called TxDOT for clarification, and learned two things: a) no one was in who could answer the question, and  b) TxDOT does not have voice mail. We got a busy signal. We tried a main number, and were cheerfully informed that yes, there is no voice mail. (The woman we talked to did confirm that TxDOT has push-button phones and not rotary-dial machines, at least.)

So what will drivers be doing to get around the problem this weekend?

​The Texas Department of Transportation has put out a list of the 100 Most Congested Roads in Texas, and boy -- do we suck.

Almost 40 percent of the little pieces of traffic hell TxDOT listed are right here, in Harris or Fort Bend counties.

The usual suspects make the top (Six of the top ten are in Harris): I-45 around downtown and north of it, the Katy, the Southwest Freeway.

There's a math-ridden explanation for how much all this is costing commuters, but it seems full of numbers and multiplication and other things we'd just as soon not think about. But according to the chart, sitting in traffic racks up more wasted money than abstinence education.

What are some of the more obscure traffic-hell spots around here?

​Planning on a big weekend in the Galleria area? Better bring some good music for the car. Because you are going to be sitting in traffic with a capital T.

The Uptown Houston development TIRZ is announcing what it euphemistically is calling the "Final Push to Finish San Felipe," but you may have other names for it if you try to drive in the area.

Eastbound lanes of San Felipe will be completely shut down between South Post Oak and the Loop from 9 p.m. tonight until 7 a.m. Monday August 24. "By opting for a total closure, construction time will be reduced from six weeks to two," an Uptown Houston spokeswoman says.

Hmmm. Usually there's not a whole lot going on in that area in that time frame. Just people going to clubs, stores, restaurants and hotels.

Fair warning: If you're planning on using the Gulf Freeway tomorrow morning, be prepared to wait.

Houston Transtar has sent out an alert noting that the funeral services for the two fallen firemen will tie up traffic from 6 am until 1 pm.

The details:

A combined Memorial Service for fallen Houston Fire Department employees Captain James Harlow and Probationary Firefighter Damion Hobbs will begin with an 8 a.m. processional from Fire Station 93, at 911 FM 1959 (Dixie Farm Road), to Grace Community Church, 14505 Gulf Freeway.

From about 6 a.m. until about 1 p.m., commuters along Old Galveston Road near Ellington Airport should expect heavier than normal commuter traffic. At 7:30 a.m., Dixie Farm Road between Old Galveston Road and IH-45 will be reduced to a single lane in both directions as firefighters participate in a mile-long procession from Fire Station 93 westward to the church. The northbound feeder of IH-45 between Dixie Farm Road and Scarsdale will be closed to northbound traffic for the procession.

Transtar says to expect "significant delays" and advises using alternate routes.

"We thank you for your understanding as we honor the memory of these public servants," the announcement says.

Photo by alex-s

In 26 years, the average Houstonian will be forced to endure a three-hour commute, according to a mobility study submitted to the Greater Houston Partnership's Transit Planning Committee. The study was presented by Ray Chong, the City of Houston's outgoing Deputy Director of Public Works for Traffic and Transportation.

As president of Houston Tomorrow, a non-profit that examines urban issues and wise growth, David Crossley sees the study's conclusion as more of a warning than a plan.  "Nobody is a fan of three-hour commutes," he says. "The reality is nobody will do that if that is confronting them. In all of history people have, on average, allowed themselves about an hour to get to work and back. This is a traffic model that predicts something that doesn't have human behavior in it."

You could term this study the "What Grand Parkway Shall Wreak" plan, Crossley believes. Should Houston's third (or fourth, depending on if you count FM 1960/Highway 6) loop road ever come fully online, there will be explosive growth in rural areas far from most of the jobs in the area.

Transtar, the umbrella agency that coordinates traffic on Houston roads, is entering the Twitterarium, or whatever the kidz be calling it these days.

Go to their main link and you can get individualized Twittering for all of the area's main roads.

"Twitter is a great way to give travelers the quickest, simplest news about what's going on with the roads they travel most often," Jack Whaley, Director of Houston TranStar, said in a release. "When it's rush hour, getting through an entire traffic update on the radio may be more information than the person wants; Twitter cuts through the irrelevant and unnecessary and focuses on what's important to that person."


We're assuming you won't get updates on what Transtar employees think of the latest House episode or whether they're getting a mocha latte at Starbucks. Like here.

Photo by Anderson Mancini

This weekend begins a traffic nightmare on the Gulf Freeway.

Actually, it sorta began last night, when they closed down NASA Road 1 and FM 529 for a couple of months. But tomorrow night the real fun begins, as the highway itself is closed so that workers can destroy the overpass that is being replaced.

From 9 pm Friday until 5 am Monday, the freeway is closed at the Nasa Road 1 intersection.

It's the frontage roads for you if you're hoping to get to Galveston. Combine that with the fallout from closing the east-west roads and -- well, you just might want to re-think your trip.

Hey, maybe it'll rain this week and you will have an excuse not to support Galveston.

Photo by hsjfender

A couple of weeks ago Hair Balls was on the Island, quaffing a few pints at O'Malley's Stage Door Pub with several of the Islander By Choice bloggers -members of Galveston's small but increasingly feisty and vocal thirtysomething-age middle class.

"We're all drooling over rail," said IBC blogger Adrienne Culpepper. "There were people for and against it before the storm, but now nobody can think of a reason not to do it."

We agreed wholeheartedly with her sentiment, but as a non-Texas native, thought her naïve. Didn't she know the state's almighty highway lobby didn't go in for namby-pamby Old Europe quasi-socialist pipe dreams like candy-ass rail projects like this? What did they care if rail just might save Galveston from a slow withering death?

Looks like we might have been the naïve ones.

Photo by TimDuke

Commuters in the Woodlands, UH students, Galveston day trippers, people driving to Dallas for some reason, and any number of other Houston motorists - congratulations on cheating death!

According to Fox News, I-45 in Harris County ranks fifth in a list of the 10 most dangerous stretches of highway in America with 153 deaths in the past five years. Apparently the danger stems from the sheer volume of traffic on this stretch of highway.

But Raquelle Lewis, a public information officer for the Houston district of the Texas Department of Transportation, tells Hair Balls those numbers are misleading.

"Harris County is one of the largest counties in the nation and it has one of the longest stretches of interstate," she says. "If you just do the math on the number of fatalities in a large county versus the fatalities in a smaller county, you're gonna get more. The data that was used to support the [Fox] story was not normalized...our numbers are based on the number of crashes per million vehicle miles traveled."

Last week, the Houston Business Journal reported that high speed rail  is coming to Houston.
At a speech at New York's Penn Station, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Mary Peters announced that her office will soon begin "accepting expressions of interest to finance, design, build, operate and maintain high-speed trains on the Northeast Corridor and in 10 other federally-designated corridors around the nation."

And wonder of wonders - Houston is on one of the corridors.

Just think - you could take the bullet train to Austin for a UT game or SXSW show and head home and sleep in your own bed, merrymaking all the while without having to worry about going to jail. Or you could head over to San Antonio for a stroll and a margarita on the Riverwalk at dusk and make it back to your Heights bungalow by midnight. Or you could zip up to Dallas to... to... do whatever it is they do up there.

Or maybe not. All of this is a long way off, and down here, we've heard grandiose talk like this before. And then there's the fact that as the plan stands now, Houston lies at the western terminus of the Gulf Coast Corridor, connected to New Orleans and points north and east, but not to any other city in Texas. So Houston will have a passenger rail connection to Portland, Maine, but not the state capital or second and third largest cities in the state, all of which are on another corridor.

So how is traffic on the Katy Freeway now that the expansion has been officially completed?

Pretty good -- if you ask the people in charge of it.

The Texas Transportation Institute has done a study at the request of TxDOT and found what it's calling "significant improvement."

Evening commuters on the 20-mile trip between the West Loop and State Highway 99 are saving six to 17 minutes a night, the study says. In the morning, the drivers are saving three to 26 minutes. (That's a pretty big spread of minutes.)