They really should stop investing in more and more busses (they contribute to traffic and emissions) and widen the rail system

At least Texas is trying to build a high speed rail line from Dallas to Houston.

The Houston to Dallas high speed rail, if built, will originate at the former Northwest Mall, 8 miles by road to the Amtrak station. It's 23 minutes on the 85 bus, plus 7 minutes critical walking.

I lived there to awhile back also. Years ago it was actually in downtown Houston then moved to even more of a ghetto area outside of downtown. I'm not sure of the date it moved though.

The dead grass growing through the ballast adds a nice post-apocalyptic touch.

Thank you!

Getting mentioned in the same sentence as NJB is an honor!

Same -someone who literally lives there 😭

Hey! I have to live here. You’re lucky, wherever you live. I’m sure there are worse places, though.

I live in Houston and it is THE WORST

I visit family in Houston every year and I like the trips because it reminds me that although my city has problems, it could be much worse

I really like the Oceania regional rail model! It seems like they tend to run good, fast service and get ridership to match.

It's generally because the tracks are usually privately owned by freight companies unlike here in Australia.

The Katy Freeway is the poster child for why highway widening doesn't work!

Having to download an app was insanely annoying! I think we both deleted them immediately afterwards.

It's coming sooner than you might think!

Houston's are 6k per sq mile and 4k per sq mile which is embarrassing.

That’s an amazing channel!

Whoops, I had forgotten to put a card in with the link!

Nah, they're all kinda the same! The Amtrak station was a masterpiece though, of course.

My Greyhound cross-country videos involve a little transit out west, and I have some stuff in the works!

Haha, yeah, it's a running joke on the channel that over the years I've been racking up jaywalking fines that will never actually be handed out. Since I've been going to a lot of new states recently, it's been interesting looking up how much the fines differ in each one, including complete decriminalization like in Philadelphia! But yeah, in most cases the fines are "in the books" but no one would ever actually give a ticket.

Don't try it in Columbus, OH.

Some parts of LA (West Hollywood and Beverly Hills in particular) do enforce its jaywalking laws. Just a heads up! 👊😊👊

Nathan doesn't have a KZfaq unfortunately! I think his online presence is pretty limited to the videos he appears in on this channel.

@@MilesinTransit thank you for replying! Your videos are great and you've got awesome collaborators (Nathan, Jeremy, Classy Whale, etc etc).

Well, we were originally going to Sanderson but that fell through - Houston was just a cheaper place to fly than San Antonio.

I can't remember it being TOO bad...

@@MilesinTransit... What time of year were you guys down there?

It was in the summer! I just don't remember it being tooooo horrible out.

He's not really on social media!

@@MilesinTransit smhhhhh🙄

It did a weird detour on some other tracks to get in!

you are a monster

I understand where you're coming from - there were clips discussing those aspects of the Red Line that I cut out for brevity's sake (in my head I imagine that people don't want to sit through discussions of granular details, but I could be wrong about that) and the Silver Line looks really cool. Ultimately this is a transit channel (and that's where my travel interests tend to lie) and we only had five hours in the city, so riding the whole rail network seemed like an attainable goal that took up pretty much the whole time. Had we had more time, I would've loved to have ridden the Silver Line, explored more of the parks, and visited the Menil Collection at the very least, which I've heard is incredible. That being said, it was pretty jarring to step off the bus in an area designed solely around the car with the absolute bare minimum of provisions for pedestrians and I don't think it was disrespectful to point out that those conditions were incredibly uncomfortable. We highlighted a couple of fantastic small Mexican restaurants that offered amazing food and (granted in passing) mentioned how cool the neighborhood we traveled through on the 56 was. So I would push back on the idea that we were dead set on bashing Houston at every turn - we liked what we liked and we disliked what we disliked, and if I were to go back, I would focus more on being a tourist and going to some of the areas you mentioned.

To be fair, that's Miles's schtick. It's like when Greyhound still had stations and would show you the least scenic views of each city on the East Coast. Even trains do this in most places: the backsides of old warehouses, etc. I haven't seen Miles in Transit's cross-country trip, but when I took Greyhound from from Denver to Oakland it stopped twice in Utah and seven times in Nevada, always next to a place with slot machines. But I agree with everything you said about Houston.

@@MilesinTransit I like museums and feed in their cafes. Menil was not a highlight of my trip to Houston because half the buildings were closed (pre-pandemic) and the cafe crowd too hoity-toity to welcome a very slightly scruffy guy who'd just ridden a bike five miles. That *can* happen at museums cafes, but what was unusual was the staff was uncool too. Those people are usually art students or at least slightly wacky. Probably the large museums in Htown would have been fine. Like they are at the fantastic Toledo Museum, with its glass box building!

Ah yeah, I could see Menil's combination of smallness and pretentiousness factoring into your experience there. Still, I can't help but appreciate that it's free!

Transit Channels have a hard-on for shitting on Houston constantly. Houston isn't a city for tourists, it's a city for living a good, decent low-cost life. Too bad people ignore this and can't fathom why Texas cities don't have 5 billion supertrain lines running each and every direction.

Also there’s a cheap bus from the IAH airport and an express bus. I find that interesting, since airports in my area have zero bus/train, even for the workers, and keep building bigger parking decks. Meanwhile they spend bux improving bus or even rail elsewhere in the same cities. Houston was fun aside from the fences I ran into and bike/transit worked great. Amtrak admittedly doesn’t do much yet, until Texas Central gets built northward. Also I had delicious coffee.

It's a little hard to call it "going green" when Houston still sells plastic cards in a variety of locations - just not the airport, where they would be well-used. The app wasn't convenient; the driver said to download the Houston METRO app, but that actually forces you to download a SECOND app, the QTicket app, to ACTUALLY be able to purchase a day pass. There's also no signage at the airport to tell new travelers that this is what you're supposed to do, so instead we were yelled at by the driver to do it - not a great way to get welcomed to the city. The true "going green" would be to allow contactless card payment but Houston does not have that in place. I thought the Palm Center line was pretty inconsequential and I don't really care about the name, but for what it's worth, it's not exactly a "transit center" if it only has two bus routes that stop on the street down the road from the light rail station. I think "Palm Center" would be a more fitting name.

Yes both the lines were meant to terminate at Hobby Airport east and the Municipol Courthouse west of Theater District station. As for the voters, I heard some politicians were yeeted out of office last year (few of them anti-transit) so hopefully the MetroNEXT program can breathe easy.