Originally Posted by
tjspiel
This winter was tough on the asphalt in the area and there's a lot of potholes. A few blocks from my house there's an intersection where a large chunk of asphalt has broken up to reveal the cobblestone underneath.
I had known that the streets in the vicinity were originally cobblestone but I noticed something else this morning, - a rail from the old streetcar line.
What a shame. All the expense and drama that have gone along with creating and expanding our limited light rail system could have been avoided. Between having a bike and the trolleys, it would have been easy to get just about anywhere in Minneapolis/St. Paul and from Lake Minnetonka to White Bear.
You bring up something that is relavent here in Houston. We also had a trolley system in the distant past; however as a port city we also had an excellent medium rail system for years including an excellent rail station right on the edge of downtown. So what happened? The mouth breathing knuckle dragging people wanted a new baseball stadium. So the Mainstream Media played up the putting it in "Blighted" east side of downtown and the Idea of ENRON field was born and the old rail station was torn down to a facade and converted to a baseball stadium. Meanwhile the medium rail right of ways were handed back to TXDOT who used them to widen the freeways. Then Guess what? The powers that be wanted to host the Superbowl, but to pull their plan off they needed light rail. However, they already plowed up the available right of ways and the logical terminal. So they created a toy train that is about as well planned as the railways in the SimCity game. It's essentially landlocked, smack down mainstreet and goes from the Med Center to the Uh campus downtown. In otherwords: Nowhere and does nothing to reduce traffic congestion. If anything it made mainstreet impossible to ride down in a car and the fenderbender tally is over 20 or more.
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