As noted earlier in this post, the street rebuilding project that has been going on in downtown Houston during almost the entire administration of former Mayor Lee Brown has been one of the mostly poorly managed public works projects in recent Houston history. This Chronicle article gives a good example of the legacy of this mess that new Mayor Bill White has inherited.
Houston's Clear Thinkers
Longtime Houston attorney Tom Kirkendall's observations on developments in law, business, medicine, culture, sports, and other matters of general interest to the Houston business, professional, and academic communities.
Incompetence, like many other descriptive terms, is relative.
As I left Houston in 1990, the city had announced a multi-year project to renovate the Southwest Freeway, eliminating any second thoughts I might have about staying in the Bayou City.
A comedian at a local comedy club once said that it was no wonder that the Japanese had outsurpassed the US in the global economy (this was before the tech crash, BTW). In the years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had completely rebuilt the country and economy. In the same time frame, Houston had not been able to finish work on the Gulf Freeway…
How much worse in downtown than any other traffic-congested part of the city?
Just in case you are interested, when traffic is really busy on 31st Street in front of the Colonial Mall here in Temple, it takes me 8 minutes to get to work, instead of the usual 5…..