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.

Without them, businesses would most likely be hidden from a high traffic road.

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.

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.