Grand Parkway
Ok, I couldn’t help myself. There’s been loads of hoopla surrounding the Grand Parkway recently. The most interesting piece, I think, is that the Sierra Club has now sued TxDOT to stop the Grand Parkway.
Now, most of the environmental issue with the Grand Parkway is that it tears right through the middle of a rich grassland area we know as the Katy Prairie. That, and it doesn’t actually go anywhere anyone lives or works. The only function of the Grand Parkway would be to open up the Katy Prairie to development. As it is today there is moderate development activity happening already, but things would sure go a lot faster if there was a new freeway out in the middle of all that grass.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and what I’ve decided is this: the whole Grand Parkway concept is ridiculous. The city doesn’t need to, and should not grow endlessly outward forever. Accelerating conventional suburban development activity on the Katy Prairie would generate absurd amounts of new traffic congestion on I-10 and 290, both of which are already at capacity (despite having just spent 3 billion dollars to widen I-10).
That said, the idea of an outer arterial corridor linking the Northwest Cy-Fair area and Katy does make a degree of sense, so long as that corridor was deliberately designed NOT to start a land-development binge. So, what if we reimagined the northwest portions of the Grand Parkway as scenic multiway that both improved mobility for the tens of thousands of people who already live out there and served as a defining edge to the city?
What would such a road look like? How about a rural highway, 2 lanes in each direction. Intersections could be grade separated, ala Memorial Drive or Allen Parkway, but no frontage roads. Do not allow driveways (therefore no strip malls will be built). In order to keep development west of the parkway rural, the city could decide to stop all major thoroughfares at the parkway, and could work with TxDOT to plan for rural transportation within the Katy Prairie.
Where should this road go? How about this:
By hugging closer to existing developed areas and taking a more direct route from Katy to Cypress, greater mobility value is achieved for the region as compared to the original Grand Parkway concept. Tying in at Skinner Road links to the nice new METRO Park and Ride facility there, and someday a similar facility could be built on the Katy side. Where Bridgelands has already been built in the north, a new road (Prairie Parkway) could fork west from the Grand Parkway and continue the ‘edge’ of the city.
The tie in at 290 might look something like this:
Another advantage comes in the next segment, which logically would connect Cypress to Spring, and there are several routes that could be upgraded to multiways with few problems. Spring-Cypress Road, for instance, is wide enough and has few enough intersections for most of its run over to I-45. That, however, is a topic for another day.
So, love it or hate it, that’s my idea for a toned-down Grand Parkway serving as a scenic edge between the urban and rural limits of our city. Let me know what you think in the comments!
Categories: move
Tags: 290, cypress, Grand Parkway, Grand Parkway Segment E, Houston, I-10, Katy, Katy Prairie, multiway boulevards, multiways, Sierra Club, Spring, traffic, transit, transportation
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10 Comments
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First of all, the Sierra club is a joke. There’s hundreds of thousands/millions square miles of undeveloped land in this world. If/when we develop over this, the world will not come to an end. Mosquitos and squirrels will not go extinct!
Anyway…
Love or hate it? Sorry, but I hate it.
We can and we will continue to build out. Actually, we’ll build up and out, but mostly out.
The older I get, the more I see that spread out is the way people want to live. People don’t want to drive endlessly just to get to the grocery store (although I could be wrong on that by the way people buy houses), but they don’t mind driving decent distances either.
I believe even if schools and public transportation were outstanding, most people would still choose to live out in the suburbs, or wherever they can get the most space.
Of course, we know the people who get to have their cake and eat it too, are those who live in Memorial, Bellaire and other suburban type places in/near the city in safe areas.
The Grand Parkway is absolutely needed for the future. Heck, parts of it are needed NOW.
But to finish off, I’ll tell something my dad told me the other day. He grew up just north of 610 near 59 and moved out to Spring about 25 years ago when I45 was just two lanes. He said back then, IAH was waaaay “out there.” He remembers when they began building the Beltway and wondered why these CRAZIES were building it in the first place.
Look at us now. Could we imagine Houston WITHOUT it?
The same goes for the Grand Parkway. It may seem unneeded (not even “crazy” by beltway standards), but 10, 15, 25 years down the road…we’ll wonder how life could be lived without it.
Build it there, build it now!
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Andrew-
Completely agree with you. Maybe it is because I moved here after living in a city that has finally begun to think about sprawl and its effects, but it continues to amaze me when I hear people support the current Grand Parkway plan.
The bottom line is that the Houston area is in no way built out. There are plenty of places for infill development all over the metro area. Even in Midtown, supposedly the densest, most urban area of the city outside of downtown, there are plenty of vacant lots, abandoned buildings, etc. You see the same all over the city. And then people wonder why this city has such a poor reputation generally.
My final point is to simply question why anyone would encourage sprawl growth out in the middle of nowhere when we know that such development will again be completely and utterly reliant on the automobile. I guess I was under the impression that we were looking to reduce our reliance on foreign oil and to attempt to address the many adverse effects complete auto dependence has on the environment and quality of life. I keep hearing people tell me that essentially mass transit is fine and dandy but in Houston it won’t work because it is too sprawling at the moment. And then it seems that the same people support this type of edge development that will only make the city MORE sprawling. It is about time that this area finally started to deal with the sprawl here and all the serious problems that it causes.
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I’m with Jessie on this one. It may seem too far out for inside-the-loopers, but what about for people who work in the Energy Corridor, or Westchase? That’s reasonable for them. And as that Energy Corridor grows its job base, instead of people moving farther and farther out I-10, they can grow up and down the GP – so in that case it actually keeps them closer in than if they move out to Brookshire or Sealy.
Loop freeways help keep an urban area more compact and connected. Cities that don’t build them end up with a starfish urban shape, and each arm is relatively independent of and disconnected from the rest of the arms. Not a healthy city if you ask me. If you live on one of those arms, you can’t realistically choose jobs on the other arms and have a reasonable commute. It limits where you work and live and socialize. Loops keep a region unified and give citizens more choices and opportunities.
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I did not mean to be too harsh. I’m simply in favor of the GP.
But I would love Andrew’s idea to replace roads like 1960 with Memorial type roads. They would be useuful all over town really.
Part of the reason I don’t like this idea to REPLACE the GP is b/c it wouldn’t be able to hold the needed demand. 2 lanes is way too few.
But I do like different ideas to stimulate conversation which allow us to see hole’s in each other’s arguments so we can come to a better decisions.
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Is there a housing shortage in Westchase or the Energy Corridor that makes the construction of new housing units urgent, or are there just developers with a welfare mentality who done a good job convincing the state government that they just HAVE to have a handout in the form of taxpayer-funded infrastructure to open up new land for them to make money off of?
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I like your idea. Of course, I’ve supported those “crazy” groups like Sierra Club in the past, and tend to question the need for Grand Parkway in general. I also tend to think we’d get a better bang for the buck building more flyovers and improving mobility on Highway 6 if we wanted to focus our resources on the far West end of town, or maybe adding capacity to Beltway 8 in some spots. There are already plenty of opportunities for development in Houston, and plenty of existing roadways that could use increased investment.
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Two lanes is plenty if Grand Parkway isn’t foolishly thought of as the only north-south corridor west of the Beltway.
Let’s consider for a minute why traffic is so much worse in the Uptown/Galleria area than it is in downtown. Put simply, there are dozens of viable routes in and out of Downtown, but only a few in and out of the Galleria.
As areas like Westchase and Memorial City grow up, the potential is there to become even greater traffic nightmares. Why? There’s no parallelism, no alternate routes.
We don’t need more lanes, we need more roads. So, imagine Grand Parkway as just that, a parkway that starts as 2 lanes each way with all intersections grade separated, and no driveways. Leave room for a third lane in the future. To make things even better, make it a toll road with congestion pricing.
The road won’t carry that much traffic for a long time, and it can be expanded if the need materializes. The need will materialize if that’s the only corridor available, BUT if we expand/improve Highway 6 / 1960, we’ll have a much better transportation system functioning where people actually live rather than just dismissing the transportation needs of the existing communities in Northwest Houston.
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I like the idea of a road with no drive ways, but I don’t think Houston will ever build one again. The main reason…$$$
Without them, businesses would most likely be hidden from a high traffic road.
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Sure they’ll build one, they’ll just call it a freeway.
What I would suggest is that we build parkways in the future more like the way I-10 is from TC Jester to Patterson (but with fewer lanes in edge, low traffic areas of course). You get an off-ramp which becomes a frontage road for about the distance you need to create a neighborhood commercial center. Then, as you pass through less commercial areas, the frontage road comes back into the main lanes.
The thing is, when building a road out in the boonies you could easily start with the frontage road, then put the main lanes under the middle later on.
This saves money, and actually helps concentrate commercial areas around logical centers rather than developing them as razor thin strips clinging to the major roads. The biggest advantage of this is reduced congestion on the major roads due to the lack of driveway conflicts, and more viable ‘second row’ commercial, places that are one block off the main road. That’s where you find a lot of the best businesses in the inner-loop part of town, places where the rent is cheaper but the traffic is still close by.
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To all the nuts that LIKE the grade parkway aka 99. It’s being built for big trucks to get around without going throw the city for one.I live in spring my wife’s grandmother is retired an her property is payed for shes lived there for 30 plus years.If this highway 99 goes throw it will takes her house an land. She’s over 65 do you think she wants to start over again i think not.If you move out of the city stop crying about how long it takes you to get to the city i didnt tell you to move there.As for the grade parkway from 249 to 45 widen 2920 whut the hell do u think it goes from 249 to 45. My son thats 10 knows that, in other works the grande parkway is just another way for the city to maker money nothing more nothing less thank you for your time.
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