Super Bowl kudos, Houston keeps winning, Texas HSR questioned, and more
First the Super Bowl items this week, which was the biggest NFL comeback/collapse since... well, this, which I remember all too well. From everything I've seen and everybody I've spoken to, we pulled off the hosting with flying colors. Congrats and thanks to everyone involved for their hard work. Unfortunately it could be quite a while before we get another one - too many cities are building new stadiums or upgrading old ones (Miami, NOLA) - each guaranteed at least one Super Bowl - and I'm betting the $2.6+ billion behemoth in LA will get more than that.- Houston Chronicle: Houston hosts a Super Bowl like no other
- Mimi Swartz in the NYTimes: Houston's Supersize Super Bowl
- Chicago Tribune: With or without Super Bowl LI, Houston is a winner
- Houston ranked the #2 best Super Bowl host city after New Orleans
- Kotkin: All Houston Does Is Win. Too many great points and stats to excerpt - read the whole thing.
- Elon Musk wants to solve traffic with tunnels
- Great four-minute introductory video to Houston. I love it, but it has a bad stat in it at the 2:40 point (1:46 left). Houston may have ~190 nonstop *destinations*, but we have *way* more daily flights! 190 would be pretty pathetic for daily flights – we have north of 5 or 600 at IAH plus ~200 at Hobby – can’t find current hard stats that would include all airlines. Wish the HAS kept them on their website...
- The Antiplanner is skeptical that privately financed Houston-Dallas high-speed rail is economically viable, and he marshals a lot of stats to make the argument. Republished in Gray Matters at the Chronicle.
- "Houston’s Quiet Revolution: A modern settlement house movement is brewing in Texas. Have organizers figured out the secret to reviving the immigrant dream?" Great excerpt:
"I sat down with Angela Blanchard last year at a coffeeshop in the Third Ward, a historically black neighborhood about two miles from her house. She had walked there to meet me, so I brought up the concern of some self-appointed urban advocates who want to redesign Houston to make it “walkable.” She laughed:
'I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to roll my eyes, but everyone is trying to create these precious neighborhoods. I remember being at a conference and someone said the thing we need to do with poor neighborhoods is make them walkable. I thought this was absolutely hilarious. If you’re in a poor neighborhood, your neighborhood is walkable. It might not be a nice walk or a fun walk, but you walk. … I actually love Houston for its total, messy, sprawling randomness. I get invited to conferences where people talk about Houston with frowns on their faces. People haven’t been able to figure out our city and how to make it smart and precious like other cities that no one can afford to live in. My biggest concern for this city is that it remains a place where you can start at the bottom and work your way up. Where it’s a good city to begin in, and where if you have a dream and water it with hard work, it amounts to something.' "
Labels: aviation, economy, growth, high-speed rail, identity, mobility strategies, rankings, sports, stadiums, tourism
posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:12 PM
6 Comments:
There's a Houston based company called flightaware that does exactly that.
It will track flights, but will it tell you how many daily flights an airport offers?
From the Elon Musk article:
“'A tunnel wouldn’t reduce traffic. Nor would a new highway, or five new highways,' wrote Alex Davies for Wired. “Blame the law of induced demand, which says the more roads you build, the more people come out to use them."
It amazes me how credulous people are when they hear this ridiculous argument. If someone said, "Increasing train frequency won't reduce overcrowding on the subway because of the law of induced demand," they'd be laughed out of the room, and rightly so.
It's not a coincidence that a lot of the same people oppose replacing low-density housing with high-density housing in the name of "affordability."
Total agreement!
You have to pay them for that info, unfortunately.
I like that Texans are having children, unlike most large metropolitan environments.
That said, I feel like the Center for Opportunity Urbanism is going to end up with egg on its face.
It has made Houston its go-to omelette all-purpose example. What happens if Houston stops winning?
Well, take a look, because it already has:
http://usmayors.org/metroeconomies/0616/report.pdf
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