Results tagged “southwestfreeway”

Good morning, Houston. We admit that we have a thing for interview shows, so we thought we'd take a second to note that NBC's Meet the Press, the king of Sunday morning TV news, made its television debut 60 years ago today. Meet the Press began life as a radio show in 1945 and moved to TV a couple of years later, and it hasn't stopped since. Now, MtP is the longest-running show on...

So, it would be bad enough to nearly be involved in a wrong-way collision on a freeway — but it would be that much worse to fall from an overpass after you nearly crashed. Don't believe us? Ask a guy who did exactly that on the Southwest Freeway early this morning. It happened in Stafford just after midnight, when police say the man was headed south on the northbound feeder road of the Southwest Freeway...

More information in the story of Sonoma, the giant mixed-use development being planned for a two-block site in the Rice Village: The Chronicle reports that the city has released the appraisals for the 2400 block of Bolsover Street, and there's a little bit of variation between the two — about a half-million dollars' worth, to be specific. The appraisals — for $913,171 and $1,460,340 — pertain to Lamesa Properties' plans to buy that stretch of...

The first gang member testified yesterday in the trial of Ashley Benton, the 17-year-old girl accused of stabbing 15-year-old Gabriel Granillo to death last summer during a gang fight at Chew Park — and he told jurors that Granillo wasn't trying to run away from the fight, as prosecutors had said during opening arguments Monday. The witness — a 20-year-old members of Southwest Locos Salvatrucha, a Houston subset of the MS-13 gang, who calls himself...

Good morning, Houston. We thought that ding someone put in the door of our 1983 Diatribe in the Starbucks parking lot the other day was bad, but then we heard about the $150,000 Aston Martin damaged last week when a car went out of control and slammed into a southwest Houston car dealership. It happened when a pickup truck hit Leonard Ross' car while he was on the Southwest Freeway feeder road near Fountain...

Good morning, Houston. It's June 5 — does that date mean anything to you? It should: Six years ago today, Tropical Storm Allison made landfall on the upper Texas coast, bringing with it more than 40 inches of rain in some areas (and all the flooding that went with it). When all was said and done, the damages totaled $5.5 billion, making Allison the most costly tropical storm in U.S. history. Have any memories of that weekend? We know you do — share 'em in the comments.

The big stories Thursday: two inner-Loop fires, one of which cut electricity to thousands of people and another that potentially endangered workers in a high-rise under construction. Fortunately, no one was injured in either fire, though they both caused headaches for people trying to get around the city. The first fire broke out at an electrical substation off the Southwest Freeway just before 1 p.m. yesterday, knocking out electricity to about 17,000 customers in the...

The Chronicle's Matt Stiles brings us the locations of the city's 10 newest red-light cameras, a couple of which we had already noticed — while lawfully stopping at red lights, we might add. And here they are: Northbound Wayside at Gulf Freeway Northbound Woodridge at Gulf Freeway Northbound West Bellfort at Southwest Freeway Northbound Fairbanks N. Houston at Northwest Freeway Northbound West Sam Houston Parkway South at Westpark Eastbound FM 2351 at Gulf Freeway Eastbound...

Last night wasn't a good one for people on foot in Houston: Two people were killed in two separate vehicle-pedestrian accidents, and in both cases, the drivers fled the scenes. The first accident happened around 9:15 p.m. yesterday at Emnora and Peppermill in Spring Branch, where a 16-year-old girl and her friends were crossing the street. A Ford F-150 heading east along Emnora went across oncoming traffic and onto the shoulder, hitting the girl, who...

Houstonist remembers the point when gas went over $2 a gallon and oilman T. Boone Pickens said that was no big deal — what we should really worry about is when a gallon gets up to $3. And guess what? We're getting there. This week's AAA Texas gas-price survey reports that the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded in Texas is now $2.79 — an increase of 6.8 cents over last week. So...

One person was killed and four others were injured — one critically — during a Southwest Freeway shootout Tuesday that police say might have been triggered by a rivalry between immigrant smuggling gangs. It happened around noon as people in two trucks headed north on the Southwest Freeway began exchanging fire; the two vehicles then exited the freeway, ran a red light and crashed into a car before the occupants jumped out and continued the...

Ubiquitous Richmond Avenue rail opponent Daphne Scarborough has pulled out a new weapon in her fight against the light rail expansion that she says would destroy her livelihood and her street: Scarborough has sued Metro, claiming that the transit agency has broken a "contract with the voters" established by the 2003 passage of the Metro Solutions referendum. Scarborough's focus in the suit isn't solely the contentious Richmond light rail alignment, but that's certainly a part of it: The suit claims that Metro has isn't complying with the terms of the referendum because the western section of the proposed University light rail line won't run totally on Westpark. Scarborough said she's filing suit because she has tried to talk with Metro for three years and has gotten nowhere: "I can't seem to get any straight answers," she said.

A bizarre scene that involved a car accident, an SUV atop a Cadillac and gunfire reportedly brought traffic to a standstill along the Southwest Freeway in front of Memorial Hermann Southwest hospital yesterday morning — but thanks to TV news, it's hard to know exactly what happened.

Local tech news in a compact, digital format. Overpaid Teachers Saga Remember last week when we mentioned that HISD overpaid some employees because of a computer glitch? Well, we also found out that HISD is now asking for that money back and the head of the local teachers union is saying no way. Are You Experienced? New Cingular Retail Outlet Amidst crosstown traffic, AT&T has unveiled a new face in the wireless storefront community....

Hey, guess what? It rained again yesterday — and we mean a lot, in case you didn't notice. Not only was there a bunch of rain, but also high winds and hail of all varieties: "I got a lot of reports of hail — pea-sized, marble-sized, from Sugar Land to Tomball out toward Pasadena, Hobby Airport, League City — dime-sized hail is being reported there," KPRC meteorologist Frank Billingsley said.

More in the ongoing saga of MetroRail's stray electrical current: Looks like Metro is going to go after payment from contractor Siemens, despite a refusal letter. Last summer, Metro billed Siemens Transportation Systems $917,400 for monitoring related to the stray current between May 2005 and June 2006. No one's sure where the leaking current is coming from: Metro has tracked down and repaired points it thought were causing trouble, and it replaced metal anchors in...

Via Off the Kuff, it seems some residents along West Alabama are wondering when they're going to get their old street back — you know, the pre-Spur 527 reconstruction version, sans contraflow lane and with the old bike lanes back in place. Alabama between Spur 527 and Shepherd, you may remember, was reconfigured to better handle increased traffic expected while the spur and parts of the Southwest Freeway were under construction. Originally, the street had...

Ten more red-light cameras have gone online around the city, many of them — like in the last group to begin operating — along the Southwest Freeway. The locations of the new cameras are: West Loop at San Felipe (east frontage road) Southwest Freeway at Bellaire (west frontage road) Bissonnet westbound at Southwest Freeway east frontage road Southwest Freeway at Beechnut (east frontage road) Southwest Freeway at Fondren (east frontage road) Chartres northbound at...

So it's after lunch and it's still not icy — yet. To celebrate, officials have reopened some freeway interchanges that were closed yesterday when it looked like all hell would break loose. According to the Harris County Toll Road Authority, the following ramps and bridges are now open:

Houstonist was just advised, via the Chronicle, that there are some road closures beginning at 5:00 p.m. today and continuing until the threat of icing has passed. Mainly, this might concern you if you live "outside the loop", or need to head that way in the next day or so. So, notify your friends or family if needed. Make a mental note to adjust your drive, if you haven't left work already. Houstonist asks you to please drive/be safe, regardless of the road conditions. Here's the skinny:

The shot from flickr user and Houstonist photo contributor bilbao58.

And so we have some final-ish alignment options for Metro's University light rail line: All of them would begin at MetroRail's Wheeler Station on Main Street and head west along Richmond Avenue for some distance, and all would avoid Afton Oaks, which has been a loudly squeaking wheel in the planning process. But that's pretty much where the similarities end: • The first proposal would turn south on Montrose Boulevard, then west on an elevated...

As we all know, criminals take holidays off — so we guess they were working overtime last night to prepare when three suspects led police on three separate car chases across the city.

So the MetroRail line is leaking electricity. It's nothing new: Metro admitted to the problem last year, and since then it's come up more than once. But what's news is that the problem continues to be a problem, and according to community watchdog Tom Bazan, it could bring the Pierce Elevated down on our heads (assuming, of course, we were standing underneath it at the time). Bazan is worried that the electricity leaking from the...

Your chances of being caught running a red light just went up: The city's 10 newest red-light cameras go online today, bringing the total number of cams to 20 — not quite halfway to the city's goal of having 50 cameras up and running by early next year. The initial batch of cameras began operating Sept. 1, and since then they have caught more than 3,000 traffic violators, according to HPD: "They've proven what we...

image: National Trust for Historic Preservation

This may be one of the strangest stories about a foreign object on a freeway that we've heard lately: In southwest Houston last night, a couch in the middle of the Southwest Freeway caused a car to crash into a furniture store.

We've been noticing gas prices falling in our neighborhood, and apparently that's part of the trend across the area: The AAA Texas weekly gas price survey shows the average price for a gallon of unleaded gas in Houston this week was $2.06, down 3.2 cents from last week and the lowest average price of any listed in Texas. We wouldn't call it cheap yet, but it's way better than paying nearly $3 a gallon, right?...

After about five years of work, the $344 million reconstruction of the West Loop is finally finished — and though it's quite a bit better than it used to be, it's still a freeway. That means traffic still backs up, there's still noise, hundreds of cars still spew pollution and nearby neighborhoods still have a dozen lanes of concrete at their back doors. Hey, that's not good, right? Well, maybe not, some people say. The...