Light Rail, Heavy Burden

"People confuse rail with transit."

by Alex Wukman

The ballroom at the Greenway Holiday Inn is packed with engineers, business owners and community members. The occasion? An “Open House”. The board of Greater Houston's Metropolitan Transit Authority has just released the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for it's controversial University Corridor light-rail project, and it's time to start selling it to the public. The DEIS is a federally required survey of the effect the construction of light rail will have on Richmond and the surrounding area. Weighing in at over 300 very dense pages, hardly anyone is actually going to read the thing....a fact that Metro is counting on.

The crowd here, in contrast to the early and contentious public meetings, is pretty solidly pro-rail. Two middle aged men in suits flip through the DEIS. Nearby, a couple of Galleria area business owners trace their fingers over a table long map showing proposed light rail routes. An elderly man who identifies himself as a Memorial area home owner studies the poster size charts showing the summaries of which properties might need to be acquired for right of way when an engineer from Turner, Collie and Braden walks up and asks if he needs any help.

Read the whole story.....