Houston accolades continue, re-imagine METRO, sign the Uber petition, spaceport dreaming, and more
A bit of a backlog of smaller items this week:- Give METRO your input for their Transit System Reimagining project
- Sign the pro-Uber petition for Houston City Council. Houston is a free market city - let's act like it. Just like we did allowing Southwest to compete internationally at Hobby with United at IAH.
- Dallas ranks first, Houston second in the happiness factor. San Francisco lands dead last, which is kinda surprising given the city's reputation. Of course the whole ranking is suspect if Dallas beat Houston! ;-)
- Houston #1 in global trade
- Houston revels in its rise to the top. Really good Chronicle story on our national reputation improvement.
- Forbes with A Map of America's Future: Where Growth Will Be Over The Next Decade (HBJ story). Love the infographic. Here's our excerpt:
"The energy industry and burgeoning trade with Latin America are powering the Third Coast, combined with a relatively low cost, business-friendly climate. By 2023 its capital–Houston–will be widely acknowledged as America’s next great global city. Many other cities across the Gulf, including New Orleans and Corpus Christi, are also major energy hubs. The Third Coast has a concentration of energy jobs five times the national rate, and those jobs have an average annual salary of $100,000, according to EMSI.
As the area gets wealthier, The Third Coast’s economy will continue to diversify. Houston, which is now the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse metro area, according to a recent Rice study, is home to the world’s largest medical center and has dethroned New York City as the nation’s leading exporter."
- A Swiss journalist visited Houston a couple months ago and interviewed me for this piece on Houston where I'm quoted. He informs me it was one of their top 3 most-read stories the day it went up. Google translate will help you get the gist of it, but it's somewhat painful to read the rough translation. It concludes with this confusing line:
"The city's motto could therefore be: Its not slip."
Which the author tells me should really translate more like:
"The city´s motto could therefore be: Being not pretending."
Being not pretending. I like that!Finally, I thought I'd end the post with a fancy rendering video of the Ellington spaceport proposal. Pretty slick. I hope they can pull it off with a fair economic return on any taxpayer dollars invested. It would be really cool to have a major spaceport here.
Labels: aviation, economy, identity, Metro, mobility strategies, NASA, rankings, transit, world city
posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:48 PM
1 Comments:
I'd love it if there were a spaceport anywhere. But I was at Rice when the donation of land for NASA took place, and nothing would give a sense of completion like seeing Houston even more truly become "space city."
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