TheNiche

"Trap" is a figure of speech.

I'm browsing the economic impact reports at UNT's Center for Economic and Development Research, but they don't seem all that more useful than studies conducted by the Port of Houston or other entities in assessing the economic feasibility of any particular thing. The analysis of capital and operating expenditures only indicates the amount of money that changes hands is not an indicator of net benefit. Someone may as well try to argue that when the government gives away money as welfare, the economic impact is equal to the amount that was given and the amount that was spent giving, when in reality, those resources had to have come from someone else in one form or another. The fiscal analysis of transit oriented development (which was not considered in either the Railway Age magazine or the METRO blog, although it actually is somewhat relevant as an indicator of social benefit) is also superficial. It cites the impacts to the tax base of development along the rail line, but seems to operate under a fundamentally flawed assumption that the development would not have taken place at all if DART hadn't been built. In truth, Dallas' economic growth would have likely justified the same projects, even if they had occurred elsewhere and in a different form. To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that TOD is lacking benefit of any sort, but am just making a case for marginalism. In any case, I have difficulty justifying the claim on the METRO blog using the Railway Age magazine article that used UNT's research conclusions.

Say you can pick up an extra 10-20 MPH with a train. Is that worth a massive investment in infrastructure when it entails removing ROW from use by private vehicles and the routing limitations of a fixed-guideway system? The key to viable public investments is marginal impact above and beyond what is available at present, the no-build scenario.

"Just as fast" does not warrant an enormous expenditure of resources on new infrastructure. Rubber tires are less expensive, run on existing road surfaces, and allow for other vehicles to use the guideway when the space is not occupied by the transit vehicle. And with commuter rail, transfers are all but absolutely certain. With busses, there's much more flexibility, and while transfers will never go away for many if not most people, quite a few commuters can enjoy curbside service to within a few blocks of their final destination.

Yeah, my point is kind of that at the time, you're right that that's how it was considered, but it is perceived of much differently in a present-day context. Peter Brown falls right into that trap.

You bring up a good point, and one that stirred a memory. Several years ago, I was having a discussion with a METRO VP and he more or less made the argument that METRO can and is presently attempting to facilitate employment growth within the central city to the exclusion of the suburbs by providing disproportionate and in many cases exclusive service to the Central Business District. It blew me away that they were willfully neglecting transit to many employment centers throughout the region, but based on what's on the ground, he clearly was being honest.

Ran the stats using the Census data. This thematic map uses bubbles to indicate the spatial distribution of jobs to which residents of League City commute. Galveston has some big dots, especially over UTMB, but the island still only accounts for 6.0% of all jobs, as indicated by the report below. For comparison's sake, 9.3% of all jobs are in the 77058 zip code, which encompasses a little bit more than the Johnson Space Center, and is mostly within the City of Houston. Downtown Houston accounts for 2.8% of all jobs. The City of Houston as a whole accounts for 35.4% of all jobs. Texas City accounts for 6.0% of all jobs. League City itself accounts for 11.3% of all jobs.

My claim was that, "they were developed at a time when population growth was not as rapid, so that they had an evolving character contained within a relatively small geographic area (especially noticable in the Heights)." In terms of the absolute number of homes built in any given year in Houston (a function almost entirely of the number of new residents per period and average household size), the slow-growth development pattern of places like the Heights is to be expected. Its really simple. And today, in large part because of the factors that Red mentioned, among other underlying supply and demand factors, Heights-like development is impossible. I'm really not sure what is so difficult to understand.

Unless you bring it to their attention, they usually use the outside dimensions of the home to calculate floor area. Unfortunately, this means that space in between the walls gets included. They are supposed to leave out porches and garages, or at least count them as seperate from the main area of the house, but they aren't perfect about that.

With two lanes in each direction, emergency lanes or other space for broken down vehicles to pull off onto, an EZ Tag-based system, and congestion pricing, the managed lanes will only back up under pretty extraordinary circumstances. And since P&R busses are flexible in the sense that they can get commuters not just from point to point, but exit along the freeway and then drive a circuituitous route through a fairly spread out employment center, like the Energy Corridor, Westchase, the Galleria area, or other areas, without making their passengers transfer modes. Likewise, when there is new construction, they can adapt their routes without almost any infrastructure investment. It really is a superior service at lower cost.

Whatever. What I said is the truth. I could care less if you find it entertaining or not; I've made my point. [shrug]

OK, I know what you're getting at now, but it isn't very much related to what I'm talking about.

This is true, and with congestion pricing in the managed lanes, building out the hard infrastructure required for rail will mean that P&R service enjoys the ultimate advantage. The caveat of course is that congestion pricing must be well-managed to prevent a repeat of the Westpark fiasco.

There are lots of ways, very few of which are desirable. We could set a price ceiling and create a rationing situation as we have done during some 20th century wars and during the 70's. We could implement a quota on automobile imports and production, thus limiting the growth of our demand. We could outlaw the use of non-commercial trucks, SUVs, vans, and any car that isn't a hybrid or that doesn't have an otherwise gay-looking body style. We could sabotage our own economic growth in any number of ways, for instance by abolishing property rights, thus removing much of the incentive to produce and our ability to consume goods and services, and thus consume gasoline. Or we could simply plant tactical nuclear devices throughout those highly-populated parts of India and China that don't have refineries, and eradicate the economies that are growing so rapidly and creating so much demand for gasoline. Take your pick. Or we can just create a guaranteed lax regulatory environment in some part of the U.S. that no one seems to care about, perhaps Puerto Rico (since they can't vote), to accomodate lots and lots of new refineries with very little red tape, but all the benefits of political stability and protection by the U.S. military. That would be a very pragmatic solution. Realistically, though, if you just wait five to ten years, new refineries will be built and completed elsewhere to accomodate global gasoline demand. They won't be built here because our regulatory environment is too strict as compared to that of places like Mexico and other parts of Latin America, and as we become an import-dependent nation where refined products are concerned, you'll probably never see an inflation-adjusted $1.34/gal. price again, but it might get pretty close.

I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at. I'm talking about the spatial geography of housing construction. Key variables are the numbers of new residents per discrete period, average household sizes in each period, and the amount and physical arrangement of developable land in each period.

http://www.ridemetro.org/pdf/routes/tmccirculator.pdf http://www.ridemetro.org/pdf/routes/320-tmc.pdf Interestingly, the Red Shuttle seems to have been reconnected back to Smithlands, creating one parallel service. I don't recall that being the case the last time I looked at these routes, which was almost a couple years back, and unfortunately I do not have saved versions of the old system maps. All of the shuttles and circulators seem to provide service that is overlapping to some extent. But it is easy to justify them, as people would otherwise have to use the rail exclusively, which doesn't effectively serve many central and eastern parts of the TMC within a distance that most pedestrians would consider acceptable. Remember that rail is not accessible along a corridor, but from nodes where there are platforms. The positioning of those platforms greatly influences the level of service provided by LRT.

I figured someone might make an error like that. But where development patterns are concerned, the numerical growth is more important than percentage growth. For instance, from 1950 to 1960, the population increased by 342,056, a 57.3% increase. But between 1900 and 1910, although the population grew by 76.4% (i.e. faster by one measure), that only amounted to 34,117 people, about one tenth of the population increase of my first example. Population growth has been geometric, so the pattern of development has changed to accomodate that.

There are dozens of factors, many describing the differential sources of ridership in a build vs. no-build analysis that have small incremental effects, but that far exceed just the ridership figures by themselves. For instance, with the folks that used a shuttle to get from Smithlands to the TMC, they receive relatively little actual time savings from the LRT being in place, and in fact many that don't work immediately along the LRT line still have to transfer to a shuttle at the TMC Transit Center--and that they have to use multiple modes to get where the could previously go with only one mode actually makes them worse off than before. So what was the marginal benefit for the average Smithlands-to-TMC transit rider by implementing LRT? VERY LOW, if any. Yet, the cost of providing that service was quite high. Cases like that can create situations where the cost/benefit ratios are really very low even with high levels of ridership. The same applies to a lot of Midtowners that had their trolley service cut. And frankly, any good analysis would include a measure of the net differential impact to congestion levels. Frankly, if you want a single variable that is more important than ridership in the analysis, cost is it. There are just way to many contributing variables to the benefit side of the equation. I could be far more explicit and pedantic, believe me, but I am not so inclined. If you don't get at least the jist of what I'm saying by now, with as many posts as I've already made explaining these points, fine. Feel free to wallow in dull simplicity. I can't help you.

^Brown is framing the debate improperly. Gattis and Kotkin each recognize that urban environments appeal to some people, but their position is to allow each individual household to choose how and where it wants to live without systematic government intervention one way or the other. Crossley wants the government to tell people where they can or cannot live, and he wants the government to endorse and enforce his development philosophy. This isn't urbanist vs. suburbanist. This is part of a debate that is rooted in the founding of our country. It is about strong government versus weak government. It is about property rights. It is about economic and social freedom. And although I will concede that there are advantages to strong government, even to dictatorship, it is my absolute belief that the government will never be as good a judge of my happiness as I am, and furthermore that their pitiful attempts at attempting to maximize the social benefit tend to simultaneously remove the incentives for individuals to provide for themselves as well as provide opportunities for individuals granted powers over others to engage in bureaucratic waste and massive corruption. That is my position.

This is the kind of **** that pisses me off. It is one thing for METRO to make poor decisions where major transit investments are concerned...it is a whole other thing to pay $10 million dollars of public funds for improvements and fail to simultaneously enter into a contractual agreement with the owner of the ROW to assure that the investment can be utilized at METRO's discretion, subject to reasonable limitations.

Your argument was that there was high ridership and therefore that the line was successful. You didn't mention other factors in your premise, so... They put emphasis on ridership studies because that is how federal funding can be obtained and rankings are often shown on the basis of ridership because the issue is far too complicated for laymen to wrap their mind around, and ridership is an intuitive measurement. But the Feds don't make sense, and intuitive measures aren't by themselves indicative of an objective outcome.

I've got family that lives up the road from you, in Bacliff, and my uncle has officed downtown for as long as I can remember. ...but I'll gladly grant you that he isn't typical, especially in his little nook of the world. On the other hand, while there is a pattern in effect for Galveston's workforce moving onto the mainland, that is only one employment center of many that influence demand for housing in League City. If you remind me, I'll run the Census commuter stats on Monday when I get to work and can tell you what percentage of folks in your area commute to Galveston or any other part of the Houston area. I expect there to be a lot of employees of NASA/Clear Lake, Texas City, central Houston, parts of the Ship Channel area, and even of the League City area itself, but we'll see. As for quality of life, I wasn't talking about that. Me personally, I'd pay a premium to live in La Porte, Seabrook, Bayview, San Leon, Dickinson, Hitchcock, or Galveston, but would have to be given a discount to live in Sugar Land or most of League City. Just not my style. ...to each his own.

Adjusted for inflation, which occurred at a 2.8% average annual rate, you paid $1.34/gal. I paid $2.79/gal. earlier today, which is 2.08 times as much (or a 108% increase) as it was in 1990...but I could've gotten it at a lower price if I weren't along the Katy Freeway at that moment.

There's a place on Kirby in the end-cap space of a retail center nearest Reliant Stadium called Coozan's that does excellent boudain balls. I think that they were 50 cents each, and worth every penny. Greasy, fatty, soft, and a thin maleable crust. The wings, which are supposed to be their bread and butter, are decent, but I wouldn't go there almost at all if it weren't for the boudain.

I'd beg to differ. Ridership is not the sole figure that determines the success of a public investment in transit infrastructure. Ridership by itself isn't even the sole determinant of the benefit side of the cost/benefit calculus.