livincinco

Fair point, but it was also a major transit hub so it got a ridiculously high level of foot traffic. It's also relevant that it was directly under a major tourist attraction.

That might work as a short term strategy, but now you're making your customer feel like they need to rate shop everytime they consider you and that will probably backfire in the long term. All they're doing is creating opportunities for other companies to come into the market and compete against them.

Park & Ride is actually the part of the METRO system that is experiencing the most growth at the moment (3.4 increase over LY), but even at those rates it isn't big volume. The entire system generates approx. 33,000 average weekday boardings and that's spread over 30 different locations. Even if you assume exponential increases it's hard to get to ridership numbers that require commuter rail on any single route.

METRO indicates that the Park & Ride system currently carries 29% of downtown workers, and another 8% of downtown workers utilize other means of public transit for a total market share of 37% of the downtown workforce. http://downtownhouston.org/site_media/uploads/attachments/2013-02-15/Mechanics_and_Cost_of_Transit_Service.pdf If you look specifically at Park & Ride on the Katy Freeway, it currently has three locations which have a combined average weekday ridership of approx. 5,500 people. You're proposing a system that would move 12,000 people/hour which would be approx. 36,000 people during a three hour peak rush hour period, but the statistics from METRO don't indicate that kind of demand. Their statistics indicated that there's only (rough math) about 18,000 people that are going from those locations to downtown. That's admittedly a very rough analysis, but I'd be very curious to see some statistics that refute it. The base assumption that you're making is that a high percentage of the people that are riding the Katy Freeway are going to downtown but METROs statistics seem to indicate otherwise. They indicate that the people riding the Katy Freeway are highly fragmented in their destinations and that's a huge concern when discussing rail on that corridor.

One of the major advantages of autonomous cars is the fact that it doesn't require car ownership, but instead lends itself perfectly to ride sharing capabilities. You call a car when you need it. Pay for the use of it while you have it and then it goes to the next person. It's a pretty natural evolution of services like Uber and ZipCar. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2014/01/what-will-happen-public-transit-world-full-autonomous-cars/8131/

Morgan Stanley is predicting 100% market penetration of autonomous cars by 2026. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/27/morgan-stanley-autonomous-cars-prediction_n_4867613.html

Its a very hazy metric that's pretty much impossible to substantiate. I'm not aware of any data that substantiates why people move to a specific location. I'd also question the long term sustainability of having a bunch of people without jobs moving to your city.

Fair enough, so if your goal is to provide transportation for those without cars and to provide access to the highest percentage of the people in the city, then you're with me and Mayor Parker in calling for the vast majority of transit resources to be dedicated to improving the bus system at this point in time. I'm not anti-transit by any means and have never argued that point. My point has consistently been that, given that there are a finite amount of transit funding available, the most pressing transit need for Houston is to develop a highly effective bus system. It provides access for a higher percentage of the population and it provides transportation for those who are most in need in our society. Rail comes later, at a point that there's higher density and greater ridership for individual routes. Buy right of ways now and build lines in five-ten years when the density requires it and when the bus system has reached a sufficient level of efficiency. In routes that have good ridership currently, build BRT to provide higher efficiency and maximize network miles per dollar to allow a bigger transit network. Regarding transit speed, I agree with you to a point. Yes, we have a lot of road infrastructure and that can't be ignored, but it's just a fact that the cities with the largest mass transit share are the cities with the longest average commutes. As I've said previously, there are many arguments in favor of both rail and mass transit, but point to point speed isn't one of them and the statistics prove that. New York has the most effective and comprehensive mass transit system and one of the worst road systems in the US and it has the longest average commute. I'm not sure how you can attribute that to infrastructure that's weighted in favor of roads. It's just the nature of mass transit because it's not point to point. If you commute from Long Island, for example, you're talking the Long Island Railroad in, transferring to the subway, and then walking to your office. That all adds up to a much longer commute. Nothing wrong with living without a car, however there's two types of people that live without cars - those that choose to not drive a car and those that can't afford a car. I'm much more concerned about those that can't afford a car and believe that the majority of transit dollars should be allocated to that group.

Sure - there's always a number of factors in something like this. Downtown workers, convention traffic, tourist and entertainment traffic are all factors so it's clearly a simplification to just say 10,000 residents is the magic number. The point is more around having a base of continuous traffic during non-business hours that a retailer can expect. Workers provide minimal uplift during evenings and weekends. Convention and entertainment is event driven and can be heavily cyclical. Residential is more even and even more importantly provides that off hour volume that retailers (and restaurants) need.

I honestly just have no interest in conversing with you any further. You don't read what I write, have no interest in rational discussion and aren't interested in considering any complexities regarding transit. Have a nice day.

Official announcement on Torchy's Tacos opening in La Centerra http://blog.chron.com/primeproperty/2014/02/retail-wrap-torchys-tacos-in-cinco-ranch-yogaone-studios-in-the-heights-tommy-hilfiger-in-katy-mills/?cmpid=businesshcat

Sorry guys, I'm just not buying this argument that's now been raised by a couple of people that individual private costs that people incur related to the ownership of cars should be attributed to the cost of the project. While I agree that there is an element of necessity to a car purchase, but car purchases are for the most part, driven by discretionary income. People buy the kind of car that they want to drive, not a strictly utilitarian car that just gets them from point to point. It's also a completely known cost that is directly paid by the user. When you buy a car, you know you're putting gas in it. You're not getting gas for free and then paying taxes to the government to underwrite gas for everyone. The last point is you again state the fallacy of light rail and "faster ways" to get to places outside the loop. There are many strong arguments for public transit, but faster isn't one of them. With the exception of rare direct point to point connections, intracity public transit increases commute times, it doesn't decrease them. Improving public transit to those areas is beneficial in many ways, but it won't make it faster to get there.

That's actually extremely poor especially for a location of that size. Macy's per store average is right about $30 million. If it's true that they were only doing $17 million, then its not surprising at all that they closed.

Got it. The Katy Freeway expansion received $1.4 billion in federal financing and $1.1 billion in state financing. The local cost of the project was $255 million with $238 million of that funded from toll revenues.

Totally agree with you and that's obviously a huge factor in the retail that exists, but I'm not sure what percentage of workers shop near their job vs. the percentage that shop near their houses. I'm sure that data exists, I just haven't seen it.

I'm going to ignore your obvious trolling and will merely point out the 1.4 mile stretch of I-345 under discussion carries 135,000 vehicles daily. The entire DART network carries 95,000 people daily.

The reason that a residential population is so important to retail is more about evenings and weekends. Most retail businesses do a high percentage of their volume on weekends and are generally reluctant to open in areas that they don't generate that volume. Very difficult to be profitable as a retailer off of daytime, weekday business. Look at Wall Street which has an extremely dense office population, but virtually no residential in the immediate area. It has a much lower retail presence than the rest of Manhattan and virtually all businesses located there close on weekends.

I think you're right and believe that the city has been doing the right thing by focusing on residential incentives to get the population up. The retail demand will come with the population. I'd be really surprised though if the downtown population gets even close to 25-50k in the near ten years. Consider that the population of Midtown isn't even 10,000 yet and that's been developing for years.

Personally, I don't think that the amount of residential population in downtown impacts office development in that area that much. Right now at least, that seems to be much more heavily driven by cost judging by the developments that are underway. I do think that residential population is huge in driving the kind of retail development that people are looking for downtown and would agree that something around 10k is the right number. From what I've read from various sources, that seems to be the tipping point in being able to support basic neighborhood retail.

Cost is cost regardless of the source and if anything I've presented a conservative cost for DART and an extremely conservative traffic count for I-10. My count is based off of estimated cars at a single point and doesn't include cars that don't pass that particular point so the total usage is likely to be much higher. Regarding freeway removals, no one has attempted anything remotely close to the scale of what your suggesting. And regarding your admonitions to stay on topic, sorry I'm to busy hysterically laughing at your hypocrisy to answer.

And it conservatively moves 350,000 people a day. DART light rail cost over $5 billion and it moves 95,000 a day.

So do you guys remember that scene in Bruce Almighty where Bruce gets everything he wants and the world turns into this complete hairball? Yeah, me too.

And in the meantime Terminal A sits off in the corner with no renovations scheduled.

When I lived in California, there were always news teasers about different seismologists predicting that California would have a major earthquake "soon". Then if you watched actual story, they'd explain he meant geologically soon, meaning sometime within the next 200 years.

If we're talking perfect world then I'm holding out for personal jetpacks.