TheNiche

You're right, the real world doesn't work like sim city, if it did, I imagine there'd be random godzilla roaming through parts of the city every so often.

In my Houston like Europe thought, in each smaller community there would be a circulator that could get people to and from a rail system that would get them to central hubs and then they could take that central hub to other locations. Potentially that central hub rail system could have additional rail lines that go around the spokes. so if you were in Katy, you wouldn't have to go into the central hub to then get back out to Sugarland.

If you think about it, a system that mimics our current freeway system would work rather well, it would cost, and isn't going to happen, but it would certainly be the best solution in a rainbows and roses kind of world.

In your Houston like Europe thought, does Houston also experience a crippling debt crisis? Oh, but you said that it isn't going to happen. Of course. So what's your point?

This last time I went, I stayed about 5 blocks east of the the central area and spent a few days there, we parked and walked/rode transit the whole time. The previous time I stayed out by the airport and still rode public transit. Subways, streetcars, rail, buses, they all work together very well to get you to a destination very efficiently.

Transit, and particularly fixed-guideway transit, is fantastic for affluent tourists that fly into town and don't rent cars because they aren't licensed to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road. And yes, I love it when the cities that I pay practically no taxes in pay for me to enjoy myself. It's as though they are taking money away from the people that live there to give to the people that don't live there. Nothing wrong with that, no sir. Nothing at all. But Houston has a different set of comparative advantages from a Bavarian city. F*** our tourists.

Seeing as Metro has chronic management problems with buses and will never run the 44 with the same frequency as light rail, I prefer more development of light rail.

You say that the buses would be better than the light rail if only they ran on time, but they don't, and probably never will. If a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops.

Seeing as that you acknowledge that METRO has chronic management problems, I would expect that you would oppose giving them any more public money without first reforming the organization.

After all, you'd expect that METRO as we know it could do something right, but they don't, and probably never will. If a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its ass when it hops. (Why does that saying sound so familiar? Hmmm...I wonder.)

I think you are living in an alternate universe. You've obviously never lived somewhere with an efficient transit system. Buses and jitney are not the answer unless you are in la la land on strong hallucigens.

Lay off the crack pipe niche. Light rail is good for a certain corridor but I'm more an advocate for heavy rail. This idea Houston is better than, um, every other major sized city on earth sounds absurd. We are headed for permanent gridlock if something isn't done.

Moderately large? Another lie. Just stop it niche, really.

If you don't want to see what I say, then there's an option to turn me off so that you won't see my comments. If you want to vent and attack me personally, or if you want to lob unfounded accusations of dishonesty at me, then don't waste everyone's time with that garbage. Just PM me instead.

Where do most of the people who live in pleasantville work? I'm guessing they work as longshoremen, or in a refinery along 225. In an ideal system, they could hop a local bus that would include the ship channel, or overlap another circulator that did get them to the ship channel. For those that work out along 225, they might have to take the rail into town, where they would hop another one back out down 225 and get off close to their refinery.

Nope. According to the Census' LEHD program, there are 908 workers that live in Pleasantville. However, only 31 workers from Pleasantville that are employed east of 610, north of 225, west of SH 330 in Baytown, and south of I-10 (3%). And a fair number of those are right off of I-10 where there's a lot of retail and some office space. By comparison, there were 28 workers from Pleasantville employed downtown (3%).

The fact is, Pleasantvillites work pretty much all over. Their workplaces are concentrated disproportionately on the eastern side of the metro area, but you simply cannot predict where they might should work based on proximity. The real world doesn't work like Sim City.

I know Houston isn't constricted as some places in Europe, but I think if you took a trip out to Munich and partook of their mass transit for getting to and from each brewery, cause that's what you should do when you visit Munich (and maybe take in the BMW museum, it's pretty awesome), you'd get a feel for how a complete system really works (so long as you don't go when they're on strike).

When I was in Munich, I caught a bus to Innsbruck. It was a large, cushy, comfortable bus and it drove on smooth roads. And believe it or not, their bus didn't even smell like pee. That's the sort of luxury and comfort that I would envision for Houston's P&R system as well as an inexpensive and highly effective BRT system; it would be achievable except that we've been so financially bled by a myopic obsession with rail-based transit.

fixed, sorry.

Oh, I see. So the broker that's trying to sell the land thinks that the land is awesome. Shocking.

Lay off the crack pipe niche. Light rail is good for a certain corridor but I'm more an advocate for heavy rail.

How would heavy rail help Pleasantville? On account of that Pleasantville is close-in (not even outside the loop), that heavy rail stops may not be convenient to it and might require that a bus actually back-track away from the city to reach one, and that a transfer to a mode that doesn't provide as frequent a service, I think that it'd probably be cheaper and more convenient just to bus them directly into town...if that's where they're headed in the first place.

Heavy rail only replaces P&R on managed lanes with something that is less flexible and inappropriate for a polycentric city. And moreover, by servicing the far-out suburbs, it actually provides additional impetus for suburban sprawl and private automobile ownership and use (because most people will drive to P&R lots). I know, I know...you want buses to connect everywhere. But consider the way that subdivisions have been laid out. The streets aren't laid out to accommodate someone's mile-long walk to a bus stop along streets without sidewalks and they aren't ever going to be. What's there is there, and it's still what is getting built.

We are headed for permanent gridlock if something isn't done.

That's right, as we become a really big city, we have to deal with really big city problems. Gridlock is among them, and there isn't anything we can do to avoid it. A mass transit system shall be as necessary just like sewers are necessary. But for now...we're only a moderately large city. We should build and cross the transit bridge when we get to it.

http://www.bizjourna...l-downtown.html

“The KBR deal is very likely going to become some type of urban lifestyle, mostly high density,” he said. “Once you get the residential in there, it will drive the retail.”

“I think the KBR site will be a very large mixed-use development specifically taking advantage of the bayou,” he said. “The east side is the next area to undergo change, following after the development of Midtown and the Washington areas.”

I can't get past the paywall. Who was being quoted?

exactly, Pleasantville should have a few buses (or just one) that circulate around to all the neighborhoods in the area and have a final destination of the rail station (or at least the park and ride location), where they can board and take it into the city.

Yes, into the city...because Pleasantville isn't inside the city...and its vital that Pleasantville have transit so that these lower-middle class blue-collar workers can access a place with only one fifth of the region's jobs, of which they're unqualified for most. Oh, but never mind that. Raise their taxes, give them access by way of a geographically inconvenient transfer onto light rail, and then give yourself a pat on the back for making our city more "global".

If you want to help them live better, legalize jitneys and subsidize private automobile ownership, then curtail METRO services to their neighborhood.

Buses have a place in a transit system. They should come every 5-10 minutes 18 hours a day and cover the entire metro area. But they should feed into a good heavy rail and bus rapid transit system. But in comparison to both of those modes they are loud noisy and cause lots of pollution. The only advantage is they can go to closer to homes.

Yes, and that is a supreme advantage in a low-density city with effectively no geographic or political barriers to development and an unusually high proportion of blue collar employment.

Unless your precious light rail can take you back into geologic time and cause some volcanism to mold the Houston area into the lush mountain valley that the Allen brothers advertised, and perhaps also raise up Galveston by some natural circumstance so that it might have fulfilled its destiny as the 'Manhattan of the Southwest', then I'm afraid that you are squarely out of luck on this issue.

Buses can never not suck, but they should be feeders of a rail system, like the rest of the world figured out decades ago.

The rest of the world appears to have a debt crisis. I think it was just a fad.

But hey, if you can concede that even something that sucks has a place in a system then you've shown a willingness to compromise. And I can work with that. It's a slippery slope, so before you know it, I'll have you reading Ayn Rand novels and voting for Ron Paul.

I think you are living in an alternate universe. You've obviously never lived somewhere with an efficient transit system. Buses and jitney are not the answer unless you are in la la land on strong hallucigens.

Its easy to forget how many neighborhoods Houston has that are off the beaten track because those are the neighborhoods that we are least prone to experience for ourselves.

Take the Pleasantville neighborhood as an example. You'd hardly knew it existed if I didn't direct you to look it up. There is currently bus service directly into this low-density neighborhood. How would it be best-served in your universe?

Now consider Oak Forest, a sprawling close-in neighborhood that is better-known, higher-profile, and that is served by several bus routes. People know where the bus routes are, and the routes aren't going away or shifting to the next street over because it isn't physically possible. The routes may as well already exist on fixed-guideways for lack of alternatives. The area is very low-density, however, will always be low-density because it is deed-restricted, and is not inhabited by a population that is especially interested in riding transit. How would it be best-served in your universe?

On some level, there has to be a recognition that the economic costs and benefits of light rail in most of Houston simply won't add up. And perhaps, if buses so completely suck as has been suggested over and over, then there either shouldn't be buses at all or the money to be spent on light rail would be better off spent making buses not suck.

I'm confused about why you would want to limit analysis to just high income households. Transit benefits many people, especially low income households. It isn't just the riders, either. Transit options for those who can't afford or don't want cars allows employees to get to work at businesses where motorists want to shop/dine. Businesses can keep costs down if they're not having to pay employees enough to live on as well as the significant costs associated with buying, registering, insuring, and maintaining a car.

Which is precisely why transit route density and different modes should continue to be expanded to other neighborhoods. I am very fortunate to live in an area with a lot of buses and a light rail line going through it. A person with only one bus route passing through their area has far fewer options as to how to get around without a car.

I think that the mobility of poor households is best served with buses and particularly private jitney services that can reach further into the nooks and crannies of our city that cannot effectively be served by fixed-guideway transit. A cost-effective alternative would be to subsidize private vehicle ownership by low-income households because reliable transportation is often a key factor preventing them from obtaining and keeping a job.

As for individuals that simply choose to be impractical, I have no particular desire to accommodate their impracticality. Public policy should not subsidize their whimsy, and especially not at the scale that you propose. METRO would be better off financially by buying people like you a Porsche to make you shut up and go away, I think, rather than try to accommodate you.

122,000 households like mine in the metropolitan area, 6%. http://www.brookings...files/26420.pdf

That's just the 0 car households. There's plenty others that would benefit from alternate modes of transit when someone else in the household has the car.

Yeah, I'm betting that you'd fall into their high income bracket. So that means that yours is one of 13,478 high-income households without a car. That's 0.65% of households in the entire MSA, which is considerably larger and more populous than the METRO service area. Consider yourself more middle class? Fine. Throw them in, too, and you're as typical as 1.6% of all households in the MSA.

But that's not all. Let's take it another step. Let's look at downtown to see how special you are. Within downtown, the Census' LEHD program recognizes 151,408 people employed, of which 150,830 commute from outside of downtown. And of the 2,882 employed workers living in downtown, just 578 of them also work there. Your lifestyle (notwithstanding that your friends put up with your B.O., because the Census doesn't quantify how unusual that is) comprises 0.3% of your co-workers and an infinitesimally small fraction of Houston as a whole.

Let's look at the urban core, overall. I defined an area as far east as Spur 5, as far west as Sage Road, as far north as Center Street, and as far south as the South Loop in order to capture every major urban employment center and university in central Houston. There were 554,225 employed workers in this urban core of which only 48,031 also lived in the urban core.

Then let us consider that there are 2,530,059 people employed in the Houston MSA. So out of those, only 22% are employed in the urban core. Only 6% are employed downtown. And someone that works and lives downtown has to be accounted for with scientific notation (!) by the Microsoft Windows calculator, they're so unusual.

No. I don't think that we should be aspiring to reshape our metropolitan area to accommodate someone like you. You're special.

Everybody seems to want this land to end up like CityCentre or the Sugar Land or Woodlands town centers, but the retail components of those places absolutely require the vast numbers of upper middle class residents in the many miles of neighborhoods around them to support them (the residents on-site are nowhere near enough support). Given that this site does not have those income levels surrounding it, I'm not sure what's feasible. It seems like there are a few options:

- go for very high density so the on-site residents can support the retail. There will definitely be a chicken-and-egg problem for quite a while as it is built out.

- focus mainly on residential and office space, and the residents will drive elsewhere for most retail

- try to do something more tailored to the area demographics, maybe like a town center version of Gulfgate? (which I believe has been quite successful)

What I think would be ideal would be to establish a new university campus. Houston is lagging peer cities in college campuses and numbers of students. Maybe a Texas A&M branch? Or Texas Tech? Or UT has an undergraduate branch in all the other Triangle cities but us. UH probably wouldn't be thrilled, but competition is good, and it would attract more students from across the state and region to Houston, as well as provide new a new higher ed option for locals, which would have to be good for the city.

We could do something similar to what NYC just did with Roosevelt Island, eventually awarding it to Cornell for a technology campus.

1. High-density takes a half-century. 2. There is no market for office space to speak of on Clinton Drive, and office space trades at severe discount in the East End. 3. The traffic count is poor at the intersection of York and Clinton. Very very poor. Abysmal. It is in between two neighborhoods that are both low-income but starkly different from one another, and also not within a neighborhood to speak of at all.

It will require an attraction that can serve as a destination unto itself in order to foster additional development.

I suspect that the only retailer capable of bringing together a divided and far-reaching community of people into a non-neighborhood is Wal-Mart. But...Wal-Mart will be getting its East End coverage from the Wayside location. The subject site would just cannibalize demand for the other store.

A university is an interesting idea, and it would anchor the East End on both sides as a community with a great deal of student housing. OTOH, I think that the timing is poor. I'd prefer to let UH mature into a respected 50,000+ student body before we introduce more competition. So...I oppose a new general studies type of a campus. However, what would probably do quite well in that location and fit well on that tract could be a specialized technical college emphasizing the STEM professions. Big energy companies are constantly whining through their mouthpiece, the Greater Houston Partnership, at how difficult it is to recruit qualified labor from the pool of new college graduates. If that's a problem, and I believe it is, then a college that focused specifically on recruiting and educating such students might be effective at soliciting for major donations from a variety of the big energy companies around town. UH probably still wouldn't be very happy with a new competitor, however such a competitor should be smaller, more nimble, and actively recruiting the best and brightest from a global pool of talent, then bringing that talent to Houston...kind of like what Rice does, but with less of a liberal arts bent. That actually seems viable. I like it. I encourage anyone that likes this idea, too, to write letters to the GHP and the philanthropy and human resources divisions of major energy companies. It'd be just one more arrow in the quiver to attract and retain employers.

Here is a article about how Peter Brown thinks the site should be developed.

http://www.chron.com...key-3797150.php

He seems to suggest that a streetcar suburb circa T-minus 100 years ago should mate with Paris. How contrived and predictable. It's just a fantastic thing that he lost the mayoral election to a lesbian in a relatively conservative Texas city, as the major cities go.

I was specifically addressing the sentence: "Transit use just isn't very convenient to people with an active lifestyle, whether its because of their job or their personal lives." My work is pretty sedentary, but my personal life is an active lifestyle that incorporates the transit system.

Since I don't own an automobile, why does it matter? Sure, cars are "ideal." Like I said before, a million dollars in my bank account would also be ideal, or a personal helicopter, but since we can't afford to issue every person a car or helicopter, it's good to have a transportation system for people without cars to get around. That's an important purpose for a transit system, but you only seem to care about the transit system as it relates to decreasing congestion.

If your work is sedentary and your friends and family are forgiving of your scheduling challenges, body odor, and lack of passenger and cargo carrying capacity on your part, then I'd say that you have life pretty easy. Maybe "active lifestyle" wasn't the best descriptor on my part. Clearly you're getting a lot of exercise, so that could confuse people. How about "carefree", "luxuriant", "unbothered", "delightfully impractical". Pick your poison. Whatever the case, enjoy it while you can. I hope that you can appreciate that I envy your incredible luck and that you actually are special. The world shouldn't be built for people like you, though, because there are too few of you. It should be built for the masses, and private automobiles enable them.

The complete ultimate freedom would be the to choose to take the car, or a viable public system!

What better choice could there be?

But then it has to be paid for. And that costs money. You get taxed. And that means that you have less discretionary income and that your lifestyle will suffer in some other way. If the luxury of choice of transportation modes is foisted upon you by government, then the only choice that you are left with is which other luxury you'll consume less of.

If it has nothing to do with distance, why is it apparently impossible to live an active lifestyle within a more closely defined area?

How is it that I can use the qualifier "very little" and that is read by you as "nothing" when describing the effect of distance? That you're relying on strawmen fallacies to make some of your points makes all of your points less credible. And it's pissing me off. Stop pissing me off.

Why does driving to Waller make me a more active person than say, riding my bike to the store, or using bike + bus to get me to a friend's house in Spring? I would argue that I'm a lot more active than a lot of sedentary motorists.

In the example, a drive to Waller (or the Port Houston neighborhood) was used as an example of a work-related task that had to be accomplished on short notice. Many people have jobs that demand a higher degree of versatility with respect to scheduling and mobility than others. I don't know what you do for a living, but if you work a 9-to-5 job and mostly are just sitting behind a desk all day, then you probably are not as cognizant of people like myself. I can hardly blame you. It would never have occurred to me how many people are like that until I became one of them.

Now compare to your bus/bike ride to Spring. How many times longer did it take you to get there and back than in a private automobile? How safe did you feel in Aldine (i.e. were you willing to whip out an iPad while waiting at a bus stop)? Were you able to effectively and reliably account for the possibility of inclement weather? Did it concern you that bike riders have a tendency to get run over in areas not as used to accommodating them? Were you able to get any work done while you were on the bus; what fraction of time were you on the bus, anyhow; and if you were productive at all, where you as productive as you would've been at home or at the office? What if a family member or a friend had an emergency on the opposite side of town and needed your assistance? Once you got to Spring, did your schedule mesh well with public transit through the rest of the day? What if there were a change in plans? What if you or your friend were to lose track of time? What if your friend had lived in Pearland (about half the distance to Spring, but not in a METRO service area and separated from downtown by a very crime-prone part of town)? Did you remember to pack enough fluids? Did you charge your cell phone before leaving? Does it matter to them that you can't balance a 24-pack of beer on your bike, or that the six-pack you show up with is warm (and sweaty) (and shaken up) when you get there?

I look at your example, and I think to myself that you must have a very leisurely lifestyle to be able to accommodate such uncertainty and such long stretches of sub-optimal productivity. That, and possibly some very forgiving friends for whom B.O., showing up late, and bumming rides are all forgivable on an ongoing basis. All I can say is, it must be nice. I even envy you a little.

That may be the purpose from a motorist's point of view. I have other purposes for it, like getting to work or shopping. As to "active lifestyle", I don't think number of miles traveled determines how active a person's lifestyle is. Are people flying to Australia the most active people?

Are you intentionally missing the point just to piss me off!? What I've said has very little to do with distance. Go back, re-read what I said about my own frustrated attempt at making Houston walkable, and try again.

Wal-Mart is where the people are. The people are weird, genuinely weird. This is different from Target shoppers, who are also weird but try to pose as not weird. Or hipsters, who were perfectly and normally weird to begin with but try to brand themselves as a different flavor of weird.

I find it kind of endearing, actually. Wal-Mart is where America lets its beer gut hang out.

I think he exaggerates, but freeways do alter the makeup of a neighborhood when they plow through the middle of it. there's no doubt about it, and there's no doubt that the alterations they make are negative.

PE specifically? it creates a clearer delineation between midtown and downtown, but the bus station on Main and homeless that hang around St Johns have a much greater impact on people venturing too far north from midtown.

Midtown as it is defined today is a hodgepodge of psychological boundaries. It used to be divided between the 3rd and 4th Wards along Main Street. Talk to the black community and they think that Midtown is an incursion into their territory. And back then, 4th Ward meant more than just Freedmen's Town. The freeways, the spur, the bus station, the shelters and pain clinics (the unsung villains), and the light rail tore it asunder from its old associations and totally reshaped it. It is one district and it is many.

And it may be easy to say that the Pierce Elevated is a barrier to downtown...but I'd argue that the derelict buildings and surface parking lots within the downtown district are a barrier to the actual downtown. Downtown hasn't gotten that far south yet. OTOH, 59/288 became a barrier between Midtown and the 3rd Ward. And that's been good for Midtown. You wouldn't see townhomes creeping across the barrier today if people hadn't felt that Midtown was a separate and insulated district in the first place. Depending on your background, you might see that as a good or a bad thing, so I won't proclaim it as either. Suffice it to say, the placement of a freeway can change a community...but change is not necessarily bad, or bad for everyone. It's just something that happens, a force of nature. The city as a whole will adapt to it, change will happen, and then it will be okay.

So we shouldn't build any more rail because most people don't live a block from where the rail already is?

You've missed the point again.

The ideal form of transportation is the private automobile. The purpose of transit is to siphon some vehicles off the road in order to reduce congestion, thereby improving mobility.

Transit might not work for every lifestyle (such as people who have to drive to Waller) but it absolutely can work for an active lifestyle, and does for me.

I used Waller as one particularly extreme real-life example, but there were many such places that I had to go visit on short notice. Spring, League City, Santa Fe, Pasadena, Channelview, and more. And there were at least as many such places that are closer-in that were just awkwardly situated. Do you even know where Denver Harbor or Kashmere Gardens is? Just how active is that lifestyle of yours?

I agree with Niche (for once?) simply because that as much as people talk about it, the "post-automobile world" is just not here yet and won't be for years and years to come. Unless you dwell exclusively in the Inner Loop and have an apartment about a block away from the LRT, your work is on the route, and the local Kroger/Randalls/H-E-B/Fiesta/what have you is also within walking distance, it's just not very economical. There's a reason why light rails never break, say, 2% ridership in terms of city population: it doesn't go everywhere. Roads do. Even the New York subway breaks maybe 50% of the population, and that's a huge number.

Exactly. I actually meet all of IronTiger's criteria except for one, having a job along the route. I'd like that last bit to change, but even then...something I discovered back when I used to live within a ten-minute walking distance of my employer was that although I found walking enjoyable, I'd often take the 90-second drive instead.

What if I had a meeting with a client, a vendor, a bureaucrat, or some other stakeholder to a project? What if I had to go out and check up on a property in Waller? What if it happens on short notice? Perhaps I checked the weather before leaving and thunderstorms were blowing through mid-day, preventing me from retrieving my car in order to go on to the meeting. Perhaps it blew through afterhours and I hadn't anticipated staying late, and then I had to stay even later. Co-workers didn't seem to mind me bumming a ride to go to happy hours or during inclement weather, but you can only get away with that so many times before it gets old. And what if I had scheduled a date, and it was less than a mile away (within walking distance), but I didn't want to show up sweaty...and also didn't want to have to bum a ride if it went further from there? Lets say that she lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Montrose and I live in the Museum District. I'm going to drive the two-mile distance to visit her. It's faster, cleaner, more secure, has air conditioning, has room for a complete change of clothes, and can be relied upon at any hour of day or night to get us where we want to go...even if that ends up being Chinatown at 3AM.

Transit use just isn't very convenient to people with an active lifestyle, whether its because of their job or their personal lives. The private automobile still equates to freedom, convenience, and security.

Then why is nearly every major city around the world adopting transit initiatives? Is Houston some special case? If LOS ANGELES can extend its system to Santa Monica, Houston can't build a university line?

Houston has transit initiatives. However, comparing to a metropolitan area that has triple the number of people confined within a smaller urbanized area due to the mountains and the sea...well, its just self-explanatory why we don't look alike. Open your eyes, man.

Sometimes the tail wags the dog. City of Houston imposing minimum parking lot requirements for restaurants and bars creates vast expanses of concrete that a pedestrian has to walk past to get where he's going. Car culture is promoted and enforced, so of course it's most convenient.

You've missed the point. Nothing about that comment was unique to the City of Houston. Try again.

Automobile is NOT ideal. Get your head out of the sand Niche.

Then we should expect to see small and mid-sized communities that stopped growing at a walkable pre-war density and scale adopting and operating mass transit. We don't, of course, for the obvious reason that transit is an expensive and inconvenient measure whose principal purpose is to alleviate congestion and save the time of people commuting in private automobiles.

In those places, ideally suited for affordable and convenient transportation, we find that mass transit isn't that.

Much worse things could be said about Houston.

Say them.