BLOCKS of East Houston About to be DEMOLISHED

if highway expansions worked, LA and Houston would have the best traffic in the world

Got to love how the solution to connecting midtown to downtown is to make the east end even more disconnected from downtown. Really brilliant planning there.

Contrary to what a lot of people are saying here, this project will NOT add any additional freeway lanes. Its simply moving existing lanes to another location.

Even if they paved the entire city, it still wouldn't be enough.

Man that sucks about the brewery as they just got award for best for the year in Texas for 2022.

The reality of highway expansions is that traffic will not get any better. We should be investing heavy dollars into projects that restore the health of our bayous, building mass transit including commuter rail lines, and rehabilitation of our existing roads to make them safer for all uses. That's not to say that the benefits of reconnecting Central Houston neighborhoods are not important, but there are other less expensive options to connect our urban core.

So that's why they tore that down??????!!!!! I was like dang, they just built those lofts a few years back

This is so sad. I was about to encourage any and all locals to fight this tooth and nail but it sounds like the plan is already moving ahead (@4:23). Houston is about to swallow a massive infrastructure liability that will only serve to destroy the wealth and livelihoods created in this revitalized neighborhood. Such a shame, but its honestly par for the course in US infrastructure engineering.

It’s a big money grab for politicians, construction companies, etc. It will not alleviate traffic. It will affect poor people the most, as projects like this have historically done.

$7 billion for such project? ...and some people critivize the proposed $12 billion 218 mile Brightline West corridor

Adding more lanes comes with six problems that are never solved, and all of them increase traffic.

1. People who previously took alternate routes will use the freeway more (wayz and google streets have "avoid highways" features for people who hate crawling).
2. People who used other modes of travel will use the freeway (transit abandonment due to lack of investment, active pedestrian transit is too dangerous).
3. People who waited to travel at off peak times (i.e. 8 PM or later) will use the freeway more at peak times.
4. People who avoided additional trips at peak hours will take more spontaneous trips at peak hours (i.e. errands or shopping).
5. People will take the expanded freeway due to future economic development around this infrastructure (i.e. offramps to new malls, perhaps new stadiums or job centers) instead of transit oriented development.
6. The places people want to go (shopping centers, sporting events, downtown, major employment centers, airports) are located on bottlenecked lower capacity surface streets. It wouldn't matter if you had a 1000 lane highway, those exits will always back up.

And the 7th problem is none of this development pattern is sustainable or affordable. Houston and Dallas are drowning in debt and instead of paying it down, the government passed a tax cut. Good luck with dirt roads and open sewers in the cities, because you'll never pay your way out without raising taxes, especially when you're trying to maintain 26 lane highways with population densities lower than Detroit TODAY. As someone from Detroit, spoiler alert, when the growth stops, you'll see the same effects. Might not end as bad, but there will be the bankruptcies.

This is probably the worst idea to change the downtown freeway system. It will cause tons of confusion for drivers trying to figure out which freeway they are trying to go to. It will be a huge waste of money and screws up an up-and-coming neighborhood. The problem with the downtown Houston freeways are the choke points before and after downtown, not within downtown. If anything, a lot of connections to the freeway need to be removed to lessen the easy access to the highways at the choke points. I could go on and on for days, but my common sense solutions don't matter.

I had really thought the USA had moved past Robert Moses level clearance projects... Guess not! SMH! Damn, Houston! What are you doing???

Let’s be real though that park will never come…expanding freeways don’t work..look at I-10? It’s still terrible. Unfortunately, many organizations in Houston that’s supposed to help the city get better actually support this boondoggle of a project…btw this project will take years to complete…this plan is a complete embarrassment to the city…stuff like this makes the city move backwards…This project just shows how leadership has absolutely failed Houston. It also shows how corrupt the city and state is. Also, this could be disastrous to EaDo. Who really wants to fight traffic and construction to go out at night or during the day? This project is not something a forward thinking city would do. However, I do agree with getting rid of the pierce elevated. It would be cool to have a hi line type park but we all know that won’t happen just like the proposed EaDo park. They even said it’s not a guarantee even if this horrible project gets completed…it’s projects like this that make me understand why so many people I know are leaving Houston.

"Just one more lane" they say, absolutely refusing to invest into rail infrastructure. Metrorail has been around for 20 years at this point yet is still nothing more than a novelty to bus out-of-towners between downtown, NRG, and the museum district/TMC. Additional stations & expansions to the suburbs & exurbs could help alleviate highway congestion. Between the Gulf Freeway expansion, 59/610 expansion, this, and whatever other projects TXDOT comes up with in the future, freeways will continue to be an insatiable beast that perpetually need to be widened.

My band and I have been playing warehouse live for a couple years now. Great venue, but we found out they will close in December.

The thing a out the park is that there will be a ton of homeless people there as there are ALREADY a lot of homeless folk in that area

Level entire neighborhoods for highways: ✅

Level ANYTHING to build fully grade-separated rapid transit: ❌❌❌

That’s a lot of property tax revenue lost!

The TXDot plan is pure lunacy.

Net negative unfortunately this will reduce the city as well as the states revenue and will be a huge tax burden for decades to come for repairs. Seriously it would have been more cost efficient for them to just burn the money in a bonfire, since at least then they wouldnt have to worry about the insane maintenance costs and also loss of revenue. Since it also isnt a toll road this project will never pay for itself, not that it needs to but its insane that we say that public transit needs to be self funding.