How blinding is too blinding? LED advertising in League City

When are we going to set reasonable limits on the likes of this nonsense?!

LED business advertising sign on Highway 3, looking southbound toward the Walker Street intersection in the background.  The picture is a bit blurry because my telephone could not cope with the over-exposure - it messed up its ability to focus.  And if this sign did that to my high-tech phone, what do you suppose it did to my geriatric eyeballs?  

How many million megawatts of illumination are we going to permit before we start realizing that these new-fangled signs are completely blinding to motorists?  Especially older motorists whose eyes are no longer capable of adjusting quickly?  For an average older adult in good health, I estimate that they would experience a minimum of 10 seconds of visual impairment because of this thing - at least 5 seconds of being blinded during the approach to the sign, and at least 5 more seconds of perceiving abnormal darkness as the age-stiffened pupils slowly re-expanded to a degree appropriate to functioning in ambient night lighting.  During that 10 second period of impaired vision at this location, their car would travel at least 500 feet, during which I believe they would be seeing much less than they rightfully ought to be.  And that is downright dangerous.

I am not in favor of increased government regulation such as sign illumination ordinances (hint, hint) but apparently common sense is not going to prevail on this one (I took this pic while walking my dog last night, but this is by no means the only such sign in League City). And apparently we haven't yet had time for case law to deal with it either.  I'm not an attorney, but if someone blinds me in the roadway such that I run over a pedestrian whom I am prevented from seeing as a result of that blinding, then I would guess that both I and the pedestrian have a claim against the person who inflicted the blinding.  And if we can't act on that claim, I'm guessing that subrogation might get the job done for us.

Google screengrab on the subject of subrogation.

But is it really necessary to let it get that far?  Why can we not, as a society, realize that certain things are just plain stupid and then decline to do those things in the first place?  Instead, apparently we have to escalate into Sign Wars until someone (a City Council maybe?) draws the line and says "when".  Ugh...

Update on the IH-45 construction in Clear Lake

I retweeted this, but because the link is not active in the original tweet due to a formatting issue, I thought I'd repost it here as well.  Houston Matters interviews a TxDOT spokesperson on the progress being made with respect to the IH-45 reconstruction through Clear Lake.

Clear Lake in my rear view mirror.  Of course the reason why I'm able to fool around and take artsy photos like this is that, like everyone else, I'm sitting stock still in gridlocked traffic for extended periods of time.  And with 158,000 vehicle transits per day and only three lanes in each direction, it's no wonder.  

Why League City needs a bicycle safe passing ordinance

Answer:  Because this type of ordinance provides new tools that empower the public to assert their rights in a way that would not otherwise be practically achievable, tools that are absent from the existing regulatory framework.

This gentleman, a public edu-activist whose creative methods appeal mightily to my own dash-camming heart, capitalized on Houston's new 3-foot passing ordinance by creating (drum roll, please) a 3 foot space on the traffic side of his bicycle.  This screengrab from his helmet cam shows a car entering his space, and the scary part is that he was in a dedicated bike lane when that happened.  It's not like he was sharing a shoulderless road with traffic such that they were squeezed into proximity.  Drivers in our area won't even give clearance to cyclists when they have their own lanes!  That's how bad things are here.

Video screengrab from this YouTube entry by the cyclist.   

The argument against adopting bike passing ordinances and laws (which also include provisions for giving adequate space to pedestrians, the handicapped, construction workers, and other non-motoring right-of-way users) is that we already have laws on the books which make it a crime to (duh) run over and kill or maim people and therefore, any additional laws would only add meaninglessly to our society's cumulative regulatory burden.  In Texas, Governor Perry vetoed the Safe Passing Act for this reason despite its overwhelming bipartisan support (it passed 25-5 in the Senate and 140-5 in the House).   

Sure, it's against the law, but that doesn't mean that people stop doing it:  Photo of a car after its driver rammed and killed a bicyclist.  Screengrab courtesy of this site.  

The superficial declaration "we need to enforce the regulations already on the books rather that create new ones" belies the nuances and complexity of some of our underlying social precedents.  Houston's safe passing law (PDF) furnished a quantitative performance standard that allowed Houstonian Dan Morgan to gain a great deal of positive publicity by documenting the extent to which the law (and common sense) were being routinely violated (e.g., this story and this story and this story).  His effort is particularly meaningful because it comes on the heels of numerous high-profile bicyclist deaths in Houston, deaths that have intensified public calls for a sea change in the way vulnerable road users are treated.  It's the kind of peaceful public protest that can effectively be built upon by others to eventually bring about positive change.

And of course it's not just in Houston that cyclists are being killed.  Just over a month ago, this story of a fatal hit-and-run riveted the attention of folks all across greater Houston in part because LCPD was so effective in using surveillance footage and social media to help track down the alleged guilty party.

Screengrab courtesy of KHOU.  

As near as I can determine, League City has no analogous safe passing law.

When I searched through Municode, which is the third-party repository for current ordinances, it mostly contains boilerplate reflecting the fact that bicycles must be operated in conformance with existing rules of the road.

Screengrabbed from Municode.  

That being the case, I too could stick a 3-foot flag on my beloved Gary Fisher hybrid mountain bike and ride around League City with it, but it wouldn't mean much because it would be a propos of no existing rule or precedent.  I, too, could bring video evidence of unsafe passing before City Council and/or the police department, but I'm not sure they'd be able to do anything about it even if they wanted to because we lack a concise enforcement framework.

I have a hunch that, some day, 3-foot traffic lane flags are going to be widely available commercially for bicycles and the expectation that they be honored by motorists will be standard.  Until that time, we can continue to push for additional culture-changing measures that help inch us in the direction of that better place.  Safe passing laws are one of the tools that provide us with additional concrete options in that regard.

I recently started rehabbing my scruffy old bike, which hasn't been on the road in years.  I stopped riding it because it was just too dangerous - I have a child, I have responsibilities in my life; I can't go getting myself killed by engaging in denial about the degree to which Texas lacks a protective road culture.

But it shouldn't be this hard.  I should be able to ride my bike to Walgreens this morning without risking my life.  

IH-45 ramp realignments at SH 96 / FM 646

In this post, I attempt to shed some light on the well-publicized but poorly-described pending changes to our local IH-45 southbound access.

It's not going to win any graphic design awards:  TxDOT's depiction of the project area (project description page here).  Unfortunately, this is the extent of the visual aids that I've been able to locate on either their website or League City's website.  

It's a public disservice that apparently neither TxDOT nor League City can find it in their schedules to take 30 bloody minutes to create a very simple but accurate visual depiction of what changes residents can expect from this $2 million project.  A red dot and a green dot convey almost no information.  Wordy imprecise descriptions such as League City's public information release also convey very little practical detail.  People need to see pictures.  It's obvious from the comments on GCDN (paywalled) that some folks are confused about this.  Even my husband, a mechanical engineer, said, "I'd need to see a diagram before I can fully understand what you're talking about" when I tried to describe this project to him.

Given the lack of a better alternative, I gave diagram-making a shot. This is essentially what we've got right now.   

This is approximately what the end result will be, based on what I've read. 

Why is this project really necessary?

Well, to my untrained eye, the biggest existing problem is that there's now so much traffic and the existing 646 exit ramp is so close to the exchange itself that in certain conditions, traffic might be expected to back all the way up onto the mainlanes themselves.  Plus, exiting traffic interferes mightily with shopping center access.  Anyone who has ever been to HEB Bay Colony knows this.

For those of you who have lived in this area for a long time, this predicament is quite similar to what we used to see years ago at FM 518 before they pushed its southbound (SB) off-ramp further north.  During evening rush hour, traffic exiting IH-45 SB at FM 518 would back all the way up onto the mainlanes and remain stopped there, creating quite a safety hazard.  This was occurring because the original off-ramp had been situated much too close to the intersection of FM 518 and IH-45.

The new configuration at 646 strikes me as serving property interests as much as motorists, however (LC admits as much in the fourth paragraph of this press release).  In order to obligate traffic to pass by valuable commercial land (thus increasing the chances that people will stop and spend money there), the FM 646 exit will be situated such that motorists traveling southbound from SH 96 will be forced to travel all the way down the feeder (an extra distance of about a mile and a half) until they get somewhere close to 646 in order to enter the freeway.  There's probably enough room so that TxDOT could have left the existing SH 96 on-ramp alone and simply pushed the FM 646 off-ramp further north, analogous to what they did to correct the FM 518 off-ramp.  But they chose not to.

And all that wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that it imposes additional feeder negotiations that are not currently required.  Right now, people accessing IH-45 SB from SH 96 simply get on the ramp and enter the freeway with no interferences - it's an uncomplicated transaction.  Under the revised configuration, those same people will be forced to drive further south and they will be forced to jockey for freeway access with motorists who are simultaneously trying to get off the freeway.

As such, this project increases safety by reducing congestion at the FM 646 intersection, but does it optimize safety?  At first glance, it arguably optimizes property values by increasing traffic to those properties, perhaps even at partial expense of safety.

And that notion prompted me to re-access TxDOT's official mission statement because I didn't recall that "increasing the property values of a select few at the expense of the many" had been crafted into their official governmental agency mandate.

Alas, what I found when I looked it up this morning was not what I remember from a number of years ago.  I don't have a copy of the exact previous language, but I recall that it used to have a very simple and straightforward tone along the lines of "to provide safe, effective, and efficient movement of people and goods throughout the state"  (in fact, I copied that passage from the existing Wikipedia entry on TxDOT).  But as of today, TxDOT's official statement instead reads "Work with others to provide safe and reliable transportation solutions for Texas".  The Wiki entry reads as it does because it has not yet been updated.

The new "work with others" smoking gun clause certainly does open the door to a universe of additional nuances, eh?  Including the potential for factors other than maximum safety and maximum traffic efficiency to get weighted into the right-of-way design equation (factors such as property valuations, for instance).

Your tax dollars at work.  Sort of.

Five Corners fellow sufferers

OK, sometimes I like going beyond the trilogy, especially when new information comes to light.

Translation:  "That ain't our mess."
Now that we have a clearer view of who the responsible party is, I will attempt to get more information on the full scope of the changes that are in progress.  Such as, how much of our tax dollars are being spent on this mess?  

I want to provide you with some additional photographs of this "project" so that you can make up your own mind about what's happening here, rather than just listening to me beat my gums post after post.

But first, a digression for the purposes of expounding on context.

I'm the proud 'rental unit owner of a newly-learner-licensed teenager, and one of the things I've been teaching her is how to evaluate autobody language as it expresses itself uniquely on our different local roads.

Screengrabbed from this 2012 post.  My Dad and I are in a friendly competition to see who will manage to go the longest without having a car accident.  I'm currently at 31 years.  My Dad is at a remarkable 55 years and counting.  There's a good chance that only one of us will live long enough to see who actually wins this competition.   

Learning to read autobody language to the depth that it can be achieved is like defensive driving on steroids.  During Sunday's practice session, for instance, my newbie driver learned that there's a subtle but important difference in driver expectations between SH 96 and SH 146.  The headspace changes the instant one makes the turn from one to the other, and the wise driver accounts for that in his or her own mental state and driving style.

Similarly, left-turning from SH 146 onto FM 518 needs to be done with a degree of responsiveness that isn't necessarily expected at every similarly-configured intersection.  Drivers don't like being on SH 146 - it stresses them out - and they want to get the hell off it ASAP.  If you don't accommodate the implicit demands of your fellow left-turners, they are going to get just a little bit antsy, and when drivers get antsy, surrounding people get just a tiny bit distracted, and then the chances of accident go up for everyone involved.

Five Corners has always been unique in the degree to which procedural expectations and negotiated rules of mutual exchange dominate driver behavior.  Most of the people who drive Five Corners do it daily, so they've seen every possible transactional scenario hundreds of times and they're pretty comfortable with the long-established de facto rules of driver conduct there.

It is that status quo that the curb improvements are interfering with now, and not in a particularly functional way.  In other words, it's not that we're changing to a new status quo that simply happens to be different.  In my opinion, we are devolving.  As my teenager was honing her skills yesterday, here are a few pics that I took from the passenger seat to further illustrate this.

Here's a lesson in exasperation:  This driver is mentally still trying to operate under the pre-concrete rules.  Nobody would have the guts to attempt this maneuver in this spot unless they already knew from previous experience that (a) it was physically achievable and that (b) other drivers would tolerate it without getting antsy.

And it was achievable, right up until the point where that barrier went in.  This is what I meant in my third trilogy post when I said that we can't afford to be forfeiting even one foot of space here and there at Five Corners.   All this fellow needed was another foot of space to complete a legal traffic move.  I see nothing to be gained by not letting him (and those like him) have that foot which was there to start with but which has now been taken away from all of us.    

Here's a lesson in impossibility:  Compare the size of that extended-cab pick-up truck to the width of the opening in the left-turn center lane.  How is that even remotely supposed to work?!  If that pickup were traveling in the opposite direction intending to turn left, could he make it through the almost 90 degree turn that this configuration obligates?  

Here's a lesson in autobody language:  Have you ever taken a plastic laundry basket, turned it upside down, and plopped it on top of a cat who was curled up on your living room floor?  Cats *hate* that.  They get that sour, withdrawn look on their faces as they try to figure out how to flee the situation with some small portion of their dignity still intact.

That was the analogy that occurred to me as I watched the driver of this Toyota.  (S)he was being a nice driver who was doing the things that are expected of drivers at Five Corners - responsive to the needs of the larger situation, aware that there were other drivers to the rear who were also needing to turn left.  So (s)he pulled way up in order to give those other drivers room to also enter this ridiculously small turn space, only to end up trapped in the laundry basket that this configuration represents.  There's no way (s)he could have completed that turn without scraping that barrier or maybe even hopping it.

It's a mystery to me as to how such a restricted turn lane could be placed on a sharp curve such as this one and function, even if it the concrete had been cast correctly.  

In just one single back-and-forth pass through Five Corners yesterday, I took pics of two drivers who were obligated to smack the concrete barriers.  Both of them were acting within bounds according to the unwritten rules that govern behavior at Five Corners.  It's not going to matter whether these barriers are "painted yellow for safety" or not.  They're still not going to help the situation there.

My daughter was initially skeptical that a thing called "autobody language" even existed.  The challenge for her now as a beginning driver is to learn to partition her finite attention resources such that she can register those large-scale manifestations of driver behavior and road conditions and still have enough mental reserve left over to devote to monitoring the fine-scale, subtle behaviors that paint a deeper picture of what's happening in the roadway at any given moment.  It takes years and years to develop that capacity - Gladwell's ten thousand hour rule comes to mind.

In the meantime, Five Corners will continue to give us both a constant run for our money.  My Dad has an unfair advantage in our crashless competition.  He doesn't live in this area, and so he doesn't have to drive Five Corners.

Quote screengrabbed from this post.  

Five Corners futility

Y'all know how I love writing trilogies.  This post completes my first and second on the subject of the notorious Five Corners traffic intersection in #LeagueCityTX, the so-called third worst intersection in the Houston-Galveston area.  (Update April 3, 2014:  I spoke too soon and have since added a new blog category called Five Corners because it's becoming more apparent that this issue is going to persist).

Here's the biggest issue that I have with the modifications that are being done thus far:  I simply don't think they'll improve traffic flow at this intersection.  I suspect they'll make it worse, and I explain why below.    

Just for openers, they ain't even finished yet, and they're already broke.  The end of this curb was sheared off sometime around March 23, and I noticed yesterday afternoon (March 28) that another one seems to have been snapped off maybe within the past 24 to 48 hours.  

Close-up.  What's going to happen here is that drivers are going to hit these things over and over and over until they're worn down to not very much.  There's going to be a lot of people upset over damaged tires and ruined alignment.  Have you paid for an alignment  job recently?  I have.  It sucks.  

So there's the breakage problem just for openers, but for another thing, I don't think that FM 518 was ever originally designed to take these kinds of improvements.  That's why they're being built with such a thin, tire-disrupting configuration - there's so little room available here.

Look at this poor guy in the dually.  He's in the EB FM 518 left turn lane waiting to head north on FM 270, and he's barely got any room at all on each side of him.  There's little margin for error.

This is just a dually - this is not a full-sized bus or a delivery truck.  I personally do not think that we can afford to sacrifice a couple of feet of right of way to a concrete barrier here.  

And speaking of which, why is that particular concrete barrier so wonky in the first place??

It bumps out unnecessarily into the turn lane, and to this unexplained wander we lose about another precious foot of space.  You can already see that this hump is covered with black tire marks from folks who have hit it, and it's only been there a couple of weeks.

It's like a shallow S-curve when it should instead be a nice smooth curve that follows the expected lane trajectory.  I believe this causes a degree of visual confusion among drivers.  They expect to see a regular curve and instead they see this obstacle that they need to be mindful not to hit.  And when they're paying attention to that little inconvenience, they're paying less attention to the rest of the intersection.

This is a subtle distraction, sure, but every bit of attention counts when you're navigating Five Corners.  I got distracted by the thing enough to take this phone pic and draw a curve to suggest what it should look like instead.  My point being, it's noticeable to drivers.  

I'm not a traffic engineer, but I do have 31 years of accident-free driving to my credit and I do have an energetic obsession with details of all kinds.  I don't always agree with what @TxDOTHoustonPIO does.  I tend to look at right-of-way segments not the way they should be driven, but the way they actually are driven, and I think I know how people drive through Five Corners, having done it about three billion times myself.  One of the biggest challenges with Five Corners has always been that there are too many mental transactions that need to take place within a frighteningly short period of time.  On top of that existing burden, we have now overlain an absolute maze of new concrete lane restrictions.  What I already see happening in response is that a lot of drivers' eyeballs are pointing down when they should be pointing up.  They're looking twenty feet ahead of themselves trying not to hit concrete barriers in overly-narrow spaces when they should instead be taking holistic stock of the massive intersection that confronts them.  Either that or they are looking up and some of them are smacking the barriers as a result.

I think I understand why the engineers decided to try adding these barriers (for brevity, I won't go into that in this post), but I'm not so sure that what we'll gain from the restrictions outstrips what we're losing.

I guess we'll have to see the whole picture before the full story makes itself apparent.  Unfortunately, the degree of public outreach has been so poor that the whole thing might end up being built before any of us really become aware of what it consists of.

This is a partial screengrab from this map which was published on this undated LC webpage as of March 2014. The map itself is dated 2011 (three years old) and if I'm understanding this correctly, it doesn't appear to show the same improvements as are actually being built right now.  For instance, left-turning onto FM 518 from the Kroger parking lot has been eliminated via the questionable concrete improvements shown in pictures farther up in my post, but I don't see anything drawn on the left side of this map to indicate them.

Furthermore, the LC page states that "TxDOT eliminated the bypass".  So what does this whole present-day picture actually consist of??    

How will the Baybrook expansion impact mobility?

The proposed Baybrook Mall expansion might be of concern to some local residents who could be negatively impacted by changes in rights-of-way and mobility.  As a distant early warning, I describe this potential in the post below, based on the very incomplete information that has been released to the public thus far.

A couple of news outlets, including Houston Chronicle (paywalled), KPRC, and Bay Area Citizen reported on this expansion yesterday.  In conjunction with that story, the developer released this artist's rendering, which was republished by all of those news outlets:

Screengrabbed from this source image.  

Those of you who are familiar with the Baybrook area may find this to be a bit of a head-scratcher.  From this rendering alone, it is difficult to understand where the improvements are in relation to the rest of what currently exists.  My first question was, "What happened to IH-45?" because intuitively, I couldn't put the spatiality together.  My second and potentially more important question was, "What happened to Baybrook Mall Drive?"

So out of curiosity, I decided to yank together a few other aerials to see if I could make sense of this.

The artist's rendering shows an oblique angle whereas the Googlemaps image is taken from straight overhead.  I rotated this Googlemap image so that it would approximate the oblique rendering.  This seems to be very roughly where the new improvements will sit, if I'm interpreting things correctly.    

For reference, here's the artist's rendition annotated with two of the spatial markers that are the easiest to spot:  The iconic water tower next to the Texas Art Supply building, and Baybrook Mall Drive.  

Here's why this is important:

Here is the obvious question:  If we really are going to lose Baybrook Mall Drive, what compensatory measures are being included in this design to offset that loss?  Are there one or more new rights-of-way being included in the overall design to relieve congestion?  This expansion will make Baybrook into one of the largest shopping complexes in the greater Houston region - but how are we local residents going to be able to drive around it?

Anyone who is familiar with this area knows that Bay Area routinely gets gridlocked in front of the mall.  There are subdivisions and other developments on West Bay Area Boulevard that can only be accessed efficiently during peak times according to the diagram above.  You can't cut southward from El Dorado Boulevard, for instance, because El Dorado also gets severely congested near IH-45 due to its own retail density and also because there's a CCISD middle school a short distance from the freeway.  And you can't cut northward from NASA Road 1 because the route is just too circuitous and long.

Bottom line:  I personally think we need to retain Baybrook Mall Drive or add some other right-of-way which serves an equivalent mall by-pass function.

Hopefully the mall owners and developers will be able to furnish more complete design drawings and some answers to these questions in the near future.  Additionally, I'm assuming Baybrook Mall Drive is a full public right of way, which means that there'll probably be some kind of a public notice process before it can be condemned.  That would be the time for potentially impacted parties to speak up.  I would think that the retail owners on the far northwest side of this complex (on West Bay Area Boulevard) would also be interested in the answer as well, as these mobility issues would be expected to impact the ability of shoppers to get to their area.

I've based this post on very limited information, so these interpretations are subject to considerable uncertainty.  If anyone has additional details that could help correct or clarify my guesstimates, I'd appreciate receiving that information via the Comments section below or via centerpointe.blog at gmail.

Five Corners flaws

I'm still waiting for some kind of explanation of what's happening right now at Five Corners.  Meanwhile, I thought I'd piggyback on my first Five Corners post to draw additional specific attention to one of my long-term least favorite subjects, which is the lack of pedestrian access in our area, and the fact that Five Corners is not safely navigable for anyone traveling by foot or bicycle.  And this has serious ramifications for many local families.  Case in point.

Willie Sutton robbed banks because that's where the money is.  Street Smart Driving School set up shop near Clear Creek High School because that's where the driving students (and their moneys) are.  

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps.   

If you examine that map grab, you'll immediately see that the distance across the Creek campus itself (that pile of development to the northeast, wedged between Marina Bay Drive and FM 518) is not much different than the distance from the southwest corner of the campus to the driving school.  It should be a very easy and quick walk from one to the other.

However, given the ill-conceived configuration of this area, the only way to get from the high school to the driving school is through Five Corners.

And Five Corners is simply not safe for pedestrians.  There are umpteen lanes of intense traffic and virtually no pedestrian improvements.  You can see white crosswalks painted on the road itself, but they largely don't connect to sidewalks or other non-motor vehicle conveyances.

Screengrabbed from Googlemaps.  

I'm not one of those overprotective parents who wants to pamper my child with chauffeur service and 24/7 climate control.  I raised her free range, and she describes herself as having "grown up playing in the streets".  She's not the kind of helicoptered kid who can't handle normal challenges presented by her surrounding environment.

We are not one of these families.  Screengrabbed from TIME magazine's seminal article on helicopter parenting.  

But I can't allow her to traverse either Five Corners or FM 270 on foot - without supportive infrastructure, it's simply too dangerous.

So what happens instead??  Sixteen times thus far, either my husband or I have had to leave work in the late afternoon on weekdays, drive several miles to the high school, pick her up, and drive her the whopping 3,500 feet (as the crow flies) from the high school to the driving school.  Sixteen times, and we're not nearly done with it because she hasn't even started the behind-the-wheel portion of the training course.

Now, mentally integrate that impact over time and space.  If you check the driving school's class schedule, you'll see that they have new classes starting every other week.  Each one of those classes is typically so chock full of students that most of them must queue up for class by waiting outdoors on a series of benches that the school has set up to handle the volume.  An enormous number of local students use this resource, but none of them can drive there under their own power because, duh, they're all in driving school.  I see a few of those students walking from the high school, but most do not because of the safety issues I've described.  Most get driven by family members.

Integrate mentally and what you come up with over time is thousands of impacted families, tens of thousands of hours of lost productivity due to the driving burden, and who knows how much extra money spent on gasoline and per-mile automotive depreciation.  

And that's just from that one isolated Point A to Point B transaction.  The amount of money squandered locally on the sum total of all student-schlepping simply boggles the imagination.  And a lot of that is done because parents correctly deduce that their kids can't walk safely around here for lack of infrastructure.

And then all of a sudden, lo and behold, we've got THIRTY-ONE THOUSAND CARS PER DAY traversing the area in question.

AADT stands for "average annual daily traffic" and this table is screengrabbed from this report.  However, this is probably way out of date because it's ten years old and League City's population has almost doubled (!) in the past ten years.  Today's AADT number is probably much higher than 31,000.  

So what seems to happen in public policy is that the decision-makers say, "Ah, we will eliminate sidewalks, curbs, shoulders, and other safety features from our new roadway project and this will save the taxpayers money."  But then what happens in response is that we have all this extra driving and we have to start spending major money to handle the extra driving that develops because there's no other safe option but to drive.  Right now they're apparently in the middle of spending another $5.5 million trying to fix the mess that is Five Corners, but what would it have cost them to have included sidewalks in the first place?

I'm not even remotely suggesting that sidewalks would be the total answer to all of this, but hopefully I've been able to make the point that they would be an integral component of any sensible solution.  Meanwhile, I'll just keep doing my part to help congest Five Corners multiple times per day because I don't have a viable alternative.

This is what it looks like when Clear Creek High students walk north on sidewalk-less and shoulder-less Egret Bay Blvd.  Tell me that this is even remotely safe or sensible.  Who designed this jack-ass right of way, and according to what hare-brained justification?!

Five Corners frustration

If you drive on FM 518, you've no doubt experienced what's been transpiring at League City's infamous "Five Corners" intersection these past several weeks.

Traffic has been even crappier than usual as new turn lanes and new turn restrictions are installed.  I had plenty of time to snap cell phone pics such as this one, given that it sometimes takes me three light cycles to get through the danged intersection.  

BTW, how did a Minnesota contractor get this job?  If we had a local newspaper, we might see stories on that kind of thing.  

I haven't heard commentary of any kind on this latest Five Corners project.  There's this City of League City page, but I have the following concerns with it:

1. It's undated.  The relatively new League City website rarely adds dates to any entry, making it pretty much impossible to verify whether the information presented is the latest and greatest.  There have been so many detailed historical accounts of what may or may not happen at Five Corners that I can't be sure this information is applicable to what is occurring present-day.  Other official documents such as this one are similarly un-dated.  I have to go back to commercial news stories such as this one in 2010 before I can even get a sense of where we were (past tense) on this issue.  
2. It's nebulously written, without context, and with a lot of stuff undefined.  "A new design that reduces the turning movements through this acute angled intersection was adopted and approved by TxDOT eliminating the bypass".  Really?  Adopted by TxDOT when?  Why?  And what happened to this "bypass" idea and why?  Context, anyone?  Frame of reference?  Timeline?  Rationale?  
3. It lacks visual aids (diagrams, maps, photographs) that would help the reader to comprehend the full scope of work.  A total of $5.2 million will be spent here??  Surely a few concreted turn lanes do not add up to that kind of money?  What else can we hapless League City motorists expect?  

If I had the time, I'd pay more attention to this issue because it affects my family greatly.  It is not uncommon for me to have to drive through Five Corners a mind-numbing six times per day (three traverses in each direction).  If that sounds bat-sh*t crazy to you, then you probably don't have a young high-schooler in your household.  Even if my child takes the morning bus alleviating a need for me to drive her to school, I still need to pick her up at Clear Creek High School following afternoon tutorials and club meetings, and then drive her to her Drivers Education program, and then pick her back up from Driver Ed after class.

Hopefully this post will plant the seed in the mind of one of our local journalists to do a piece on this latest realignment work, because I haven't seen one yet (hint, hint).

Hell on wheels, holiday-style

It's the Memorial Day weekend, so you can literally bet your life that you're going to see some hair-raising dangerous stunts unfolding on the Gulf Freeway as many folks make a mad dash for Galveston.  Here is one such example that I had the great gift of experiencing as I was driving home from a business meeting inside The Loop late this afternoon.

Talk about a proverbial Kodak moment, eh?  Framed by the League City Parkway exit sign to boot.  Gulf Freeway southbound, about 4 p.m. this afternoon. 

I mentioned in previous posts that I often drive with a DSLR in my lap, so that I can simply raise the camera and do a point-and-shoot without taking my eyes off the road. 

Do you recall that I published a post recently titled "Where to buy a mattress in Houston"?  Well, this right here, folks, is how not to bring one home. 

Many people grossly underestimate the wind forces associated with highway speeds.  No planar object is ever going to remain tied to your roof-rack unless you've secured it very, very well, because the lift forces are absolutely enormous in scenarios such as this.  Here, the mattress is acting as a double-bed-sized sail that is on the verge of separating from the automobile and assuming its own airborne trajectory.  Which of course could easily become a fatal proposition if it caused a crash involving other cars in the freeway lanes behind it. 

And yes, as a matter of fact, I think I will leave your license plate visible in this photo, thank you very much.  Next time, spend the fifty bucks it takes to get the danged thing delivered, OK?   

I was exiting League City Parkway, so I pulled in front of this vehicle and took this pic with the camera pointed toward my rear view mirror.  Look at that view and invoke your common sense: imagine the air pushing against this thing at 60 or 70 mph.  It has zero chance of staying on that car without extremely strong restraints and without being prevented from "catching wind" like this. 

The driver wisely exited League City Parkway behind me (he's in the center of these three lanes), presumably in order to better secure this thing.  This pic taken into my rear view mirror is blurry, but you can see that, at the reduced traffic speed of the feeder, the mattress has settled back down onto the roof of that car.

Have a great weekend, and remember - don't do anything stupid like what's shown above.  And don't drink and drive.

I had another business meeting yesterday in Galveston, and I snapped this pic just before the Highway 6 / Hitchcock exit.  This tally will certainly rise by the end of this holiday weekend, flying mattresses or no mattresses. 

Left from League City Parkway, after a spell

This is becoming annoying.  With the increased real estate development in our area and the corresponding intensification of transit needs, the left-turn lane from League City Parkway (SH 96) eastbound onto northbound West Walker is no longer long enough to accommodate normal traffic patterns.  Even when it's not rush hour, it's often a two-light wait for this left turn because cars are blocked from entering the short left-turn lane.

Under the current light sequence, all eastbound SH 96 faces simultaneous red lights regardless of whether there's an intention to proceed left or go straight. As I took this pic, I was blocked from entering the left-turn lane by the string of cars waiting to proceed east. 

So what happens with increasing frequency is that I watch that first green arrow sail away like a ship into the sunset, while I'm stuck behind the line of cars.  Other people behind me who need to turn left are similarly blocked. 

What'll happen eventually here is that so many left-turners will get bottlenecked like this that they'll start spilling over and stacking up in the center lane, which will completely foul mobility on this heavily-used arterial.  Hopefully League City and/or TxDOT will be able to intervene responsively and adjust this lane and the signal patterns before that happens. 

Annual POA meeting, Part 3: Traffic issues

An interesting story on the front page of this morning's Houston Chronicle provides a great lead-in for this next topic which was covered during Centerpointe POA's annual public meeting on March 26, 2013, because we are up against this same issue of dangerous driving (as is every subdivision in greater Houston).

According to the internet, this nonprofit group represents a slew of subdivisions and businesses in the Copperfield area.  Screengrab of text from Houston Chronicle. 

I find it a amazing that so many people are so passionate about traffic violations and yet at the same time, a significant majority of people are so passionately opposed to the idea of automated traffic enforcement.  I'm not sure if we're dealing with different sub-populations or what, but B doesn't always seem to follow A. Part of me wanted to stand up in that POA meeting and ask, "How many of y'all voted against red light cameras, now?  Can we have a show of hands?  And yet here we are having a detailed discussion on how to improve traffic compliance?!" 

But I didn't do that because I didn't want to distract from the specific solve-able issues that people were raising. 

Anyway, as the story was reported by Chron, the president of that nonprofit watchdog got into some kind of suburban road rage incident with one alleged sign runner.  This led to vehicle damage and an arrest.

If we wanted to make a meaningful dent in the number of stop sign runners within Centerpointe, I estimate that it would require at least six people working full time - either that, or a computerized camera system that issues tickets automatically - duh!! 

The fact is, people run stop signs here more often than not.  Recall this random dash cam video segment that I first embedded in a post back in March of 2011: 

That was just two sequential vehicles chosen at random - and they both barely slowed down for their respective stop signs.  This is entirely typical of what happens here. 

As of right now, Centerpointe doesn't have a formal group that performs a similar function as the Copperfield Coalition. 

We do have one vocal dash-cammer in the form of yours truly, and a couple of other residents began voicing specific concerns to League City's Assistant Chief of Police in the POA meeting.

A few of those issues I'm not going to comment on yet, because we need to advance the progress of those issues before I have a more complete story to convey.

However, one resident's complaint is worth talking about in terms of the work-arounds and countermeasures that are and are not feasible. 

Reportedly, there's a teenaged driver wreaking havoc with dangerous driving on his or her particular street segment, where many small children play outdoors.  None of the opposition mustered by the impacted residents has abated this behavior to date.  What fell out of the resulting discussion with LCPD is the following:

• It's not lawful for citizens to put their own cones or other traffic impediment devices in the public right-of-way for the purposes of traffic control. 
• It's not lawful for citizens to park their vehicles in such a way as to intentionally restrict traffic on a public street.  However, if there is a perceived situational need for residents to be parking their cars directly opposite each other on the street... as long as it's not done for traffic control purposes, that's another matter, because it is legal to park on our public streets.  Both sides thereof. 

Do you get the picture on that second point?  It's extremely difficult for motorists to proceed with excessive speed between two opposing cars, because our subdivision streets are not that wide.  It's usually necessary to slow down in order to pass between two opposing vehicles safely. 

The LCPD representative encouraged contacting the police where dangerous driving is perceived to occur.  That's what the police are there for.  Your tax dollars at work. 

Anyway, I'll have more later on the other traffic issues that were raised.

How often do you see this happen within Centerpointe - a 25 mph motorist?
Very rarely, in my observation. 

Beware of "The Bowl"

If you're a regular reader, the phrase "beware of the bowl" probably causes you to assume that I'm referring to these bowls, but the one I'm going to talk about now is far more dangerous, in my opinion.

But first, we must have our standard disclaimers.  Do you remember back in August 2012 when I noted for the record that I'm not a traffic engineer, mobility expert, or any such related professional?  At that time, I was describing what in my opinion was the conspiracy of dangerous circumstances that existed at the corner of West Walker Street and League City Parkway.  To my relief, that intersection got revised lickety-split after I published those diagrams - the flashing yellow left-turn light sequence was deleted, as I personally feel it should have been.  I don't know if that revision was in any way related to the alarm I sounded in my post, but it got done. 

So I'm not a traffic engineer or anything remotely resembling it.  (BTW, I apologize for my frequent disclaimer-packing of posts, but in this age of rampant SLAPP suits and other insidious curtails on the First Amendment, a blogger can't be too careful.)  But I like to offer my opinions, just in case there proves to be any merit to them. 

"The Bowl" whose existence I am postulating today is the one found on IH-10 just southwest of Taylor Bayou.  If you've ever driven between Houston and Beaumont on IH-10, you've driven through what I call "The Bowl". 

Here.
Low-res screengrab courtesy of KTRK. 

"The Bowl" is reportedly the location where Debbie and Vincent Leggio were killed this past Thanksgiving, and where about one hundred and fifty vehicles (!!) were ensnarled in a pile-up of inconceivable magnitude.

The scope of this event absolutely boggled the imagination.  KTRK's headline read "Two killed, dozens injured in massive I-10 pile-up".
Video screengrab courtesy of KTRK-TV. 

There was no shortage of commercial news coverage of that event.  Here is a piece by KHOU.  CNN published a blurb which thousands of people linked through to Facebook.  The story was widely re-broadcast by overseas sources, including at least one in Pakistan. 

KHOU (and probably other news services) made what I consider to be a very telling statement during their reporting on this incident:  "Early last year there was a similar smash-up on that same stretch of roadway."  If memory serves me correctly, there was also an inconceivably-high number of vehicles involved in that previous incident - but I can't find web references to it now because it has been submerged by the avalanche of reporting on the subsequent Thanksgiving 2012 event. 

Beaumont Enterprise went on to recount the sequential mechanics that resulted in the tragic deaths of the Leggios. Here's the thing, though: I can't locate any source which examines the potential for contributing factors originating with the environment.  It is possible that the dearth of information on the web is simply an artifact of reporting bias: most news outlets focused on the details of the accident itself.  Any investigative reporter who also focused more closely on prevailing roadway conditions may have simply gotten lost in the crowd. 

So in the absence of that perspective, let me tell you what I've personally observed about the area of the crash, which I have been driving through at least several times per year for about twenty years now.  Again, I'm not an expert and I can't pass judgment on these things.  If anything, I'd hope that a strictly-personal account such as the one below would raise enough questions in some investigator's mind such that a formal analysis would then be done (if it hasn't been already) to confirm or deny the existence of unusual conditions in the area of question.

"The Bowl" is roughly centered on Mile Marker 835 on IH-10. 

Here is a close-up of a Leggio highway memorial that has been erected near the foot of this Mile Marker.  May they rest in peace.

Sorry for the blurry photo - in this previous post, I explained how I do a lot of pic-taking simply by shooting photo frames without looking, because I can't take my eyes off the road. I took the photos in this post on or about January 29, 2013.

A lot of pavement scarring is visible in this area, suggesting that accidents have taken place here.

But here's the main thing to notice in this photo, which was taken from the "eastbound" (really the northeastbound) lanes: this area is extremely flat, but bordered by this line of tall forest you see in the background.  The effect of this is that the IH-10 lanes are at the bottom of a shallow "bowl".

Here's a view to the north / northwest, looking across the westbound lanes and showing the ring of trees being mostly unbroken.

Still eastbound, here is a view of where the freeway is vaulted over Taylor Bayou.  If you are eastbound on this section, this is where you drive back out of "The Bowl" as I perceive it. 

Do you see how these features seem to work together?  Not only do the trees form a ringing enclosure around this section of roadway, the freeway itself may be helping to furnish the final piece of an almost-continuous elevational barrier that helps to restrict air movement at this location.   

And furthermore, what exists at the bottom of "The Bowl"?  Mostly agricultural fields which tend to retain and transpire large quantities of moisture.  So to my non-expert perception, there seems to be both a moisture source and a confining source here, perhaps moreso than in other areas. 

All this is just pure speculation on my part, but these are the photos I took in conjunction with that speculation.

Driving up over the rim of "The Bowl" at Taylor Bayou.  Up, and out. 

Here's the view in the opposite direction, heading southwest toward Houston, driving down the slope from the Taylor Bayou bridge.  Do you see how a confining line of trees is present on the opposite side of "The Bowl" as well?  They appear to form one almost-continuous coherent ring around these ag fields and this section of freeway. 

In the twenty years I've been driving this freeway, I have experienced instances when I have been absolutely dumbfounded at the atmospheric conditions that manifest in "The Bowl" - conditions that didn't appear to exist as intensely on either side of it.  I'll be driving along merrily and then all of a sudden - WHAM - I'll descend the Taylor Bayou embankment and instantly, I'm thrust into an ethereal mess the likes of which I haven't even got words to describe.  There have been times where I've seen this roadway slow to a crawl, with some drivers pulling onto the shoulder out of apparent fear.  I've watched drivers eyeballing each other, staring open-mouthed, with the same expression written across their faces:  "Is this for real?!"  Regarding the Thanksgiving 2012 crash, the authorities were widely quoted as noting the extremity of the atmospheric conditions here: "the fog was so thick that deputies did not immediately realize they were dealing with multiple accidents".  Yyyyup.  Been there, done that. 

And there's yet another potentially-conspiring factor to keep in mind regarding this location:

A short distance before entering "The Bowl" from the west side of it, one crosses the Jeff County line, where the speed limit increases accordingly.  This speeding up occurs very close to the location where drivers should arguably be slowing down at those times when visibility becomes significantly reduced. 

Here is my personal advice:  If you're eastbound and you see any fog at the point where you pass this pair of signs, Be Very Afraid, because driving conditions might get much worse very quickly from there. 

Anyway, there are my personal observations and opinions on this phenomenon.  I drove through "The Bowl" two more times again yesterday, to and from a business meeting in Beaumont.  The sun was shining and the air was crystal clear, but as always, I kept my eyes open to see if any new signage has been added.  I did not see any.  I don't know if a formal study has ever been done on this area, but I keep hoping that maybe someone will do one, and decide that warning signs are indeed warranted.  Maybe just a simple advisory that dense fog is possible, something along those lines.  Because if you aren't made aware that this quirky little bowl-like place exists, it could take you by terrible surprise.

Is something like this warranted?  Has anyone done a study to confirm or deny whether an advisory should be posted?

Sign screengrabbed from this site.