Houston Strategies

How Houston Defied Doomsday COVID Predictions, HTX books and art, transportation innovations, and more

This week's items:

• National Review: How Houston Defied Doomsday COVID Predictions: Houston’s approach is a model for how hospital systems should handle intense case surges. Hat tip to Joel. Excerpt:

“All of that was overblown. We never even got close to capacity,” Delgado stated. “It’s just crazy. Crazy, crazy, out of control, overblown stuff. It’s fear, basically. It’s a fear-factor so the patients, particularly older patients, are afraid to death to do anything. There’s elderly people with chest pain staying at home and just dying, or coming in late — someone brings them in — they’ve already had a big heart attack. A lot of that is going on, and it’s really unsettling.” ... 

“We always had the idea that we would not be overwhelmed quickly like New York,” Delgado said. “A lot of people got infected very quickly in New York because the population density there is just many orders of magnitude greater than Houston, Texas. That is the problem, the problem is all of them getting infected at a short period of time. That’s the problem, and that’s what screwed up everything in New York. That never was going to happen in Houston.”

• Texas Observer reviews two new books about Houston.
• 'Houston's where it's at': Artist shows love to quirky, iconic mom-and-pop spots all over Houston. Very cool art.

A lot of interesting items in Reason's July Surface Transportation Innovations:

• Are we headed for a traffic apocalypse?
• A closer look at hyperloop feasibility
• Electric trucks’ infrastructure needs
• Concerned scientists vs. ride-hailing
• How many crashes will AVs eliminate?
• More states testing per-mile charges

Finally, another clever fun video from Pop Culture Urbanism's Nolan Gray: The City Planning Behind "Avatar: The Last Air Bender"

Labels: autonomous vehicles, history, identity, mobility strategies, pandemic

posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:36 PM