livincinco

A jail is used for temporary detention. A prison is used for people serving long term sentences. There's certainly an advantage to having the jail so close to the courthouse, but I would think that, as others have noted, the value of the land is going to get high enough at some point, that it's going to make sense to move it.

From the New York Times article that I attached, but you didn't bother to read. The program, called Create (an acronym for Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program), is intended to replace 25 rail intersections with overpasses and underpasses that will smooth the flow of traffic for the 1,300 freight and passenger trains that muscle through the city each day, and to separate tracks now shared by freight and passenger trains at critical spots. Fifty miles of new track will link yards and create a second east-west route across the city, building redundancy into the overburdened system.

Both Lowe's and Home Depot have experimented with urban formats, but they've generally tried to locate in areas that are more similar to Midtown than Downtown. Any area that has a high percentage of renters is tough for those chains because renters are so much less likely to do "home improvement" than owners are.

Actually, given that the rest of their offices are located in the EC, they would be keeping their offices together if they located there and would be SprawlOCo if they located in Downtown and made people drive between them. Of course, they might put the buildings 270 feet away from each other and make people walk between them. That would clearly be unacceptable.

The original reason for this thread was to look at the comparison between Charlotte and Portland which are two cities of almost identical size with very different approaches to planning. I think that it's relevant to point out that Charlotte was listed at #28 in overall congestion.

Los Angeles has the lowest number of freeway miles per person in the US (52 miles per million people as of 2000) and had less than half of the national average of freeway capacity per capita at that point. They have been investing in rail for 25 years and are #1 in traffic congestion. I'd also note that the worst congestion in the world was in European cities that are frequently lauded for having great rail systems. More than half of the 10 worst cities for congestion in the world are in Europe. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-25622364

You're right that Chicago is the biggest freight bottleneck in the United States and one major reason is because freight and passenger trains share the same track. METRA trains are given priority over freight, which prevents freight from operating during morning and evening rush hours. The CREATE project that you reference is designed to undo exactly what your suggesting. The investment is to "separate tracks now shared by freight and passenger trains at critical spots". The fact that both government and the nation's biggest railroads are actively working to undo track sharing is a pretty compelling reason not to do it here. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/us/chicago-train-congestion-slows-whole-country.html?_r=0 http://www.asce.org/cemagazine/Article.aspx?id=23622327986#.UxmsqIWp4XE

[quote name="editor" post="452020" timestamp="13941425 Almost every freight train company in America needs more capacity (especially east-west). Metro, or whatever agency will eventually operate commuter rail in Houston, should split the cost of new track with the freight companies. That way the track gets built at a cheaper price than if it was paid for by taxpayers alone, and the freight companies get to use it somewhat during the day, and pretty much without limit overnight. Everybody wins. Except the car dealers and concrete companies that fund the politicians. The problem with a sharing agreement is future demand. Houston is expected to continue to grow in terms of freight demand. Sharing capacity looks great today, but negotiating an agreement that adequately accounts for future demand is much more challenging. Bottom line is that future demand out of Houston is expected to be high enough that I doubt that any company would agree to limit future capacity of a line especially during the day.

The correlation is that transit becomes attractive when traffic gets sufficiently gridlocked that it becomes preferable to driving. Direct correlation to the amount of transit development in these cities. As long as the option to drive is less painful, the vast majority will choose it.

Interesting paper talking about the impact of mobility and commute times on labor markets in cities. Lots of interesting insights on mobility implications in Houston as I would argue that Houston is an example of what the author terms as a polycentric model. http://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/%20Cities%20As%20Labor%20Markets.pdf

The advantage of flexibility is if you're looking to build an extensive network. As I mentioned previously, my feeling is that Houston is best served by having a multi-hundred mile network of bus/BRT which is more focused on providing extensive coverage than it is on generating high ridership on any individual line. In that scenario, utilizing the multiple levels of BRT makes a lot of sense. A line might be a standard bus line today, but based on potential could be upgraded to a Quickline service. Additional upgrades could be added incrementally. A good example would be a potential BRT line down Westheimer. I would suggest that you would want something similar to Quickline west of Hwy 6, some further upgrades toward Beltway 8, and dedicated lines as it moved closed to the Galleria and inside the loop. I think that there's a number of other areas that would fit a similar model.

I agree that there's a huge difference between BRT in San Antonio and Bogota and that's been exactly my point. BRT can be implemented at many different levels with or without separation from traffic. Regarding your analysis of the uselessness of BRT without separation, both the GAO and the FTA disagree with you. You would know that if you actually read the report. Regarding highways and tollways, you might notice that virtually every new highway that is being built in Houston is a tollroad. Those are profitable entities. This is really becoming quite tiresome.

Every number that I provided was either from the DART FY 2012 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report or the DART FY 2014 Business Plan. Both of those documents can be found at the below link. I'd suggest that anyone who is interested should review that information and draw their own conclusions. http://www.dart.org/debtdocuments/investorinformation.asp?zeon=investorinformation

The definition of BRT that I gave is the definition that is given by the GAO and FTA. If you would like to inform them that their definition is wrong you're welcome to do so. For reference, I've once again attached the GAO analysis of BRT. I would suggest that you read it. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-811 The definition of a tollway according to the MacMillan dictionary is a highway that you have to pay to drive on. The definition of a highway by the same source is a wide road built for fast travel between towns and cities. Based on those definitions, not sure how you can consider the Beltway to not be a highway. Interesting to note that the Beltway is apparently not only profitable, but is apparently too profitable for your tastes.

The construction costs of Beltway 8 have been paid off by the tolls collected and has been highly profitable. The tolls collected are far higher than the maintenance costs for the highway. http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/13_undercover&id=8674303

That's completely incorrect. There are many levels of service that are considered BRT and they can include no separation, partial separation, dedicated roadway, and grade separated. Read the GAO analysis of BRT.

Joel Kotkin writing about all the energy companies moving to Houston. http://www.newgeography.com/content/004199-energy-running-out-california

In complete agreement, it would make no sense for the city to provide incentives for retail development until the residential base is in place. To your point, once that residential base is sufficient, low level retail will develop and that's a really good time to look at how to develop retail.

Bus/BRT is far more flexible than rail because you have the option to initiate a number of different levels of service on it utilizing either dedicated or not dedicated right of way considering the amount of congestion or demand in the area. Additionally, BRT allows the ability to add features to individual stations progressively if volume increases on a particular route. As a result, it's much more cost-efficient especially when trying to build a large network.

Agreed and that's why I'm such a big fan of BRT. There are multiple levels of BRT and that provides a high level of flexibility in development. It can be enhanced at relatively low cost to match the relative demand. If demand is demonstrated to meet sufficient levels, the corridors can be further adapted to rail. If you build rail, you're locked into a big upfront cost without substantiated demand and potentially end up in a Dallas situation. It's nice to think that Houston would get all the money that it wants to build the perfect system, but the reality is that isn't going to happen and that we should look at the best way to utilize the funds that we do receive.

I agree on most of your points. There's certainly a requirement for arterial corridors in any transit system, the question is whether you try to funnel traffic to those corridors, which is the current bus/rail methodology, or maintain multiple corridors that exist with lower traffic. I tend to feel that multiple corridors is a better approach. I don't mean to minimize Downtown Houston at all. My point is more that METRO currently indicates that about 40% of the Downtown population currently utilizes METRO to get to work. If transit penetration is about 2.5% through the region and Downtown is at 40%, that indicates to me that Downtown isn't really the problem and that solutions should focus on the balance of the region rather than taking Downtown from 40% to 60% (which would only be about 30,000 additional users). Regarding LA traffic, certainly agree with your points and in fact, left LA because of how horrible traffic got. I'd also point out though that Dallas built their system in advance of need and their traffic is horrible too. I honestly don't know of anywhere that a good transit system has improved traffic. Everywhere that I know of that has successful transit has high density; is completely gridlocked; and derives high usage because driving is so painful. I'd also point out that at no point did LA's traffic problems really impact its growth. If you look at population levels by decade, it continued to grow rapidly throughout that time period in spite of its horrible traffic. You might be right, by 2030 there might be enough ridership to justify commuter rail on multiple routes. I just question the value of building it before there is a quantifiable need for it. There are plenty of immediate needs. Let's address those first.

Actually a lot of traditional "big box" retailers have been looking at different formats that are better suited to urban environments for the last couple of years, but the results have been pretty mixed. Very difficult to get the same level of profitability from those locations that they do from their suburban locations. That being said, I agree with you that mundane stores are the most likely result. I'd expect to see a lot of the same kind of stores that are found in suburban strip malls - dry cleaner, nail place, coffee shop, etc. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/business/retailers-expand-into-cities-by-opening-smaller-stores.html?_r=0 http://plannersweb.com/2014/02/walmart-stores-go-small-urban/

Appreciate the opportunity to have a serious discussion about this as it seems that you are clearly interested in discussing the nuances rather than just posting rhetoric as too frequently happens in this forum. I think that you raise valid points regarding building earlier vs. later, however I do think that there are additional costs related to building early that you might not be considering. The first is that while rail's operating costs are clearly lower than bus, I do think that they are frequently understated by rail proponents. In keeping with the focus on Dallas, I agree that there's some advantage to having built the system early and the lower construction costs that were incurred, but it's also relevant to consider the operating costs that DART has to absorb on an annual basis. In 2012 (the most recent full year financials available), DART generated $80m in operating revenue and suffered an operating loss of $565m across the year. Their financial projections don't look like they improve anytime in the near future either. So you can argue that maybe they save a billion in capital costs by building their system before there was sufficient demand to support it, but I'd argue that it's costing them multiple billions to support that system with minimal return in revenue to due insufficient ridership. I'm not necessarily opposed to subsidizing the operating costs of a transportation system, but $80m in operating revenue and $645m in operating costs is pretty extreme. I understand your point about Dallas having their system in place, but I do think that it's very relevant that most of us agree that they built the wrong system and that's my concern with rail in Houston. I completely agree that rail is the right approach for cities that have dense employment centers that are concentrated in a downtown area, but I don't see that ever happening in either Houston or Dallas. I would expect that employment in both cities (and throughout most Sunbelt cities) will continue to fragment through an increasing number of job centers as long as those cities continue to grow. In my opinion, both cities really need a transit network that looks more like a spiderweb than a hub and spoke system. Which allows multiple points of access to any job center rather than a single line of connections from point to point and that kind of system is much better served by bus than by rail. That type of system generates lower traffic on any single corridor, but provides better access to most locations. Building that kind of system by rail would be both prohibitively expensive and would provide honestly more capacity than the city needs. Bus provides far more options because of the lower up front investment. It's very easy to convert a standard bus line to a "Quickline" type of service and then continue to upgrade features to various levels of BRT, until you move to a dedicated BRT if ridership demands it. If ridership gets really strong, then you already have ROW to build rail. The same is true with commuter rail - Carpool lanes and Park & Ride already service a far higher percentage of the population than transit does and they have corridors established. It wouldn't be difficult to convert those corridors to rail, but why do it if there isn't anywhere close to sufficient ridership to support it? Why not take LA's much more successful approach of establishing transit once the demand actually exists? LA built it's first rail line in 1990 and then has built their system out from that point with great success. However, the population of the Greater LA area in 1990 was 14.5 million, more than double the current population of Houston. Their system has been successful because their population and density was sufficient to support it at the point that they built it. As I've mentioned before, I just don't see rail as being the right tool to improve Houston's transit issue in the forseeable future. We would be much better served by providing reliable extensive coverage that while it wouldn't generate the same ridership in individual corridors, it would provide higher overall ridership numbers at a lower cost.

Actually, it seems that your argument is that it's vitally important to get people out of cars and into trains and that this is a fact beyond any discussion. Therefore, any point that supports that conclusion is accurate and any point that refutes it is wrong regardless of whether the points are factually correct or not. The funniest part of that is that you are basically an ideological twin to John Culbertson in a yin/yang relationship.

Mods - I would suggest that this get moved to a separate comparative advantages of BRT vs. LRT thread so that this discussion doesn't continue to sprawl over every transportation thread. OK, here's Denver's experience for one. http://www.planetizen.com/node/65550 The next segment, 11 miles "from Westminster to Broomfield could cost as much as $681 million while about 100 miles of enhanced bus service [aka, BRT] in the northern suburbs would cost roughly half that and serve nearly eight times as many passengers, according to an analysis (PDF) for the Regional Transportation District", writes Whaley BTW, in case anyone has any interest in actually understanding the issue. Attached is the GAO report on BRT. http://www.gao.gov/assets/600/592973.pdf