Kinder Institute expert available to discuss METRORail’s new Green Line

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Kinder Institute expert available to discuss METRORail’s new Green Line

HOUSTON – (May 27, 2015) – This past weekend Houston METRORail’s new Green Line servicing the city’s East End officially opened. A new blog post by Kyle Shelton, a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, examines the history of transportation in the East End, investigates how residents have used political pressure to gain and shape mobility systems in recent decades and tracks how the Green Line came to fruition.

Photo courtesy Houston METRORail

In “How Houston’s East End finally got transit,” Shelton said, “… if the community hadn’t demanded better service 40 years ago, it might not have the transit line it now enjoys.

“For much of the past century, East End communities have confronted serious mobility barriers, despite their proximity to downtown,” Shelton wrote. “This is especially true in the historically Mexican-American neighborhoods of the Second Ward, Magnolia Park, Harrisburg and Manchester, which sit close to the Houston Ship Channel and house many of the city’s current and former industrial and manufacturing facilities.

“The working- and middle-class Mexican-American residents of the East End lacked political power in Houston prior to the 1960s and 1970s, and their communities received little in the way of public resources,” he said.

To read the full story, go here.

Media who want to interview Shelton should contact David Ruth at 713-348-6327 or david@rice.edu.

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Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.
Follow Shelton on Twitter @KyleKShelton.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,888 undergraduates and 2,610 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked among some of the top schools for best quality of life by the Princeton Review and for best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.