livincinco

I agree with you that urban freeways could have been better planned, but it's always easy to look at things that were built 60 years ago and criticize the way that they were constructed. I doubt that many people at that time expected that the Houston of 500,000 people at the point that the Gulf Freeway opened was going to grow to a regional population of 6,000,000.

And just as quickly rational conversation goes back out the window.

Agreed with your points and that's why I get testy when its suggested that there are simple answers to very complex issues like mobility. I think that everyone here has good intentions, but history is littered with good intentions that have gone awry due to poor execution and/or poor planning.

Another good analogy would be comparing this discussion to a rational conversation.

Last time I checked, Houston just completed construction on one light rail line and is currently constructing two others. That's the strangest form of resistance that I've ever encountered.

I think that you might have accidentally posted this on the wrong thread...

It skews the balance pretty heavily toward coastal cities without a question. Let's be honest here, I don't think that there are a lot of people that will say that if money was no object, they wouldn't want to live along the beach on the West Coast instead of living in Houston. Most of us though have to consider cost as a factor and choose the highest quality of life based on what we can afford. That's kind of the equivalent of arguing that people will buy a Mercedes instead of a Toyota if cost is not a consideration. Incidentally, there's a huge discussion going on in San Francisco about the continued gentrification of the city and the strong opposition that's starting to develop to that. The increasing belief is that San Francisco is becoming very homogenous (young rich tech workers) and that it is fundamentally changing the nature of the city by driving out a lot of long time residents. http://www.salon.com/2014/02/16/san_franciscos_rightward_turn_why_it_may_no_longer_be_americas_iconic_liberal_city/

Austin light rail - 1 line - 9 stations - daily ridership - 3,500 Houston light rail - 2 lines - 24 stations - daily ridership - 38,300 Austin bus - 112,000 daily boardings Houston bus - 221,000 daily boardings Please explain why this is considered far better. Regarding San Diego, you'll notice that the comparison was with Dallas not Houston. Care to comment that perhaps there may be differences in natural surroundings that contribute to Seattle and Vancouver ranking highly in quality of life surveys?

Removing a freeway that's a throughway with 160,000 cars that travel it daily would be a very interesting social experiment that I'm sure would be studied heavily as most prior removals have been stubs not throughways. Your comment appears to assume that removing the freeway and encouraging DART ridership would not have an adverse effect on economic growth in the Dallas area. Given that vacancies in the CBD are currently in excess of 30% with the existing freeway and DART in place, I'm think that it's reasonable to question whether restricting ease of access to the CBD would have a positive impact on that area and whether it would lead to your desired result.

We're using quality of life in a generic sense which makes it something that is not definable. However, many published surveys that provide quality of life rankings do not actually consider transportation as part of the criteria to determine quality of life. To state that high quality of life scores are based on something that isn't considered as part of the ranking system is a highly questionable conclusion.

Vancouver - as described on their tourism website Oceanside location...mountains 20 minutes north of downtown...temperate climate, surrounding snow-covered slopes for winter sports and breathtaking views of the city below. Vancouver is one of the few places in the world where it's possible to ski in the morning and sail in the afternoon. Gee! Sounds just like Houston! Clearly based on the above description there is no question that any difference in quality of life ranking is due to differences between the transit systems of the two cities. Seattle - from the New York Times "36 hours in Seattle" - This is one of the rare American cities where you can be outdoors year-round without either shivering or sweating... stunning natural beauty... Well that certainly wouldn't have anything to do with quality of life rankings. I hear people talk about Houston's stunning natural beauty all the time. Seattle must have higher rankings because of its transit system. Since all quality of life rankings are based entirely on transit, I bet that Dallas has a really high rankings on all those quality of life rankings and cities like Austin and San Diego must do really, really bad because they have no transit. Wait...these rankings must be wrong. Austin and San Diego rank in the top 10 and Dallas doesn't. Don't these people realize how bad transit is in Austin and San Diego?????

San Francisco - #3 worst commute in the United States - http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/05/04/worst-traffic-cities/2127661/ Vancouver - worst traffic congestion in all of North America - http://globalnews.ca/news/949901/vancouver-has-worst-traffic-congestion-in-north-america-report/

Or it tells you that no one knows where to route the 160,000 cars that travel that highway daily if it's not there.

What city has the highest rail ridership in the US? New York. What city has the longest commute in the US? New York. This is not a coincidence.

Pretty much without exception in the US, a transit system becomes "massively crowded" when the functional "cost" (in either time or money), becomes so high that users find transit to be preferable. Systems that are located in cities that don't have those constraints rarely generate large amounts of ridership, Dallas being a perfect case in point. The other problem is that the idea that transit improves commute times is really not accurate. Commute times generally highest in cities with extensive transit systems, not the other way around and that's due to the logistics of following a fixed network. One of the big problem that I've personally experienced with rail networks is the hub and spoke design that most follow is not particularly suited to Houston. Take the example of running commuter rail from Katy to downtown. Nice in concept to run rail directly to downtown and then connect to a fully built out light rail network, however the actual logistics get pretty problematic. If you live in Katy and work in Greenway Plaza would you take rail to downtown, transfer to the Main Street line and then transfer again to the University line in order to get to Greenway Plaza? Probably not and that's the problem with rail in a decentralized city. The network looks great on paper until you start to consider the transit times involved in getting from point to point if you're not moving to the hub. Regarding I-10, I tend to disagree with you that businesses would have focused closer in. A couple of assumptions here, first is that we've clearly seen that increased demand inside the loop has a dramatic impact on prices. The appreciation of the last couple of years has clearly shown that. The second is that the office market in Houston is price sensitive. The last couple of years have shown that as well as a high percentage of businesses have chosen to locate in the periphery rather than centralize which I think can pretty directly be attributed to the difference in prices between those areas. So let's assume for a moment that I-10 doesn't get widened and overall demand in the Houston market stays consistent. Per your theory, more development gets concentrated in central areas which per our assumption will increase prices even more significantly than current trend. Failure to built I-10 decreases the attractiveness of suburban areas because of the higher commute times associated with getting to jobs (both because they're concentrated in the urban core and because of decreased capacity), which drives the prices in the urban area another level higher. In the meantime, competing markets do not suffer the price pressure that Houston does and are able to offer significantly lower prices for both office and residential. The question then becomes whether the companies that we're talking about are willing to absorb these additional costs to be in Houston. I would argue that most of them wouldn't. I don't think that Houston has the appeal to demand the kind of increased costs that San Francisco or New York does.

Agreed, but the big question is given that there is a finite amount of resource to be allocated to transportation in the foreseeable future, what is the appropriate way to allocate that resource? As I've mentioned before (many many times), my opinion is that the primary need in the city of Houston is to provide usable mass transit to as high of a percentage of users as possible with a specific preference to ensuring that people with the highest need for mass transit (i.e. the most economically disadvantaged). Rail is effective at moving a large number of people along a defined corridor and, in my opinion, that's a secondary need for the city of Houston right now. My stance has continually been that Houston needs to focus resource to building the most effective bus system that it can prior to significant investment in rail because it will provide the largest benefit to the population that has the biggest need. Once that's in place, then focus on specific corridors that generate sufficient demand for rail. In my opinion, focusing METRO resource today on building 2-3 rail lines that will serve a very small portion of the overall population is not a good use of finite resource.

I question everything I agree with too. There's a large amount of data/studies that are biased to support a particular conclusion. Bad data leads to bad conclusions. I'm not any rail by any means. I'm just pro-reality and I think that a large amount of the tranportation discussion that happens on this thread has no interest in reality. If you want the world to be exactly like you wish it would be, go play SimCity. Otherwise, you have to question your assumptions as to why things happen the way they do.

I'm not convinced that those things are getting built because if the rail line by any means. It's really a stretch to credit a burst of activity to the rail line when that burst occurs 10 years after construction was completed. Apartment buildings have gone up all over Midtown without any real concentration on the rail line, so unless you're going to credit all development in Midtown to the rail line, which I would again find to be a stretch, then it's hard to find a pattern. Regarding DART, we've already discussed that on another thread. I have questions about the investment figures provided by the study that DART commissioned to identify development along the rail lines because it doesn't consider subsidies provided to projects. That's going to skew results pretty heavily because it makes it very difficult to understand what was built because of incentives and what was built because of rail. Regarding rail bias, I have no interest in transit for people that are too good for the bus. I'm interested in transit for people that need it because it's their only choice. Once those people have their needs covered, that's the time to consider transit for people that own cars, but don't want to drive them.

I would question that list, but it's an interesting point that you bring up, because mosg of those cities and many more are making major investments in highways. If your measure of whether a project makes sense is the number of cities that have active projects, then you must be a huge proponent of highways, unless you think that all those cities are clueless.

Agreed that an expansion of P&R would be beneficial including increasing the size of the parking lots in the outlying regions. Regarding BRT vs. LRT, recent studies have found that BRT provides the same development benefits of LRT and I really question how much of the development in the Main Street corridor can be credited exclusively to LRT. Development along the line has been concentrated pretty heavily in the vicinity of Market Square Park and really didn't take off until that park was completed. Given the amount of development that Discovery Green has driven (with no proximity to rail) and the development of the Market Square area, I think that there's a pretty credible case that can be put forward regarding how much development parks have driven downtown. Once you get out of that area, development along the Main Street line has been pretty sparse and I think that it's questionable to consider either Main Street Square or Houston Pavilions a transit success story. To me the question of LRT vs. BRT though comes down to a question of scarce dollars. Given that there's an extremely large area to cover with transit and given that LRT costs approx 4x as much as BRT per mile. My personal opinion is that the city would be better served at this point with a 100 mile BRT network than a 25 mile LRT network. I'm sure that the immediate response is going to be that the city would be better served with a 100 mile LRT, but I'm personally of the opinion that in about 5 years we're going to start reading a lot about the financial problems that DART is suffering from based on the massive long term debt problem that they've created. Houston has enough problems related to METROs past mismanagement already to add that layer.

You're right. I meant weekday. I blame autocorrect.

I think that it would be more appropriate to say that Houston is not investing in commuter rail than it is to say that Houston is not investing in infrastructure. There has been considerable investment in infrastructure in the Houston Metro recently including major highway projects, significant improvement to drainage, large investment into the Port system, and a major push to improve the parks system across the city (which I would consider infrastructure). It's valid to question whether infrastructure improvements are being focused in the right areas, but pretty questionable to say that Houston isn't investing in infrastructure.

That's fair, but these are METRO's numbers not mine. Not sure when these numbers were calculated, but it seems like they should have already been aware of the experience of the Main Street line at the point that these projections were made. I can't find projections for the East line, but the METRO projection for the Southeast line was 17,200 average weekly boardings for year 1.

I think that's an interesting point, but I generally find that no one is willing to provide reasons that this will occur. It's great to speculate that people (and businesses for that matter) shouldn't move to the suburbs, but I've yet to hear tangible reasons that this is going to occur that consider economic realities. As more people move and development occurs inside the loop, prices rise, which makes surrounding areas more attractive. As more people move into the metro, demand continues to increase in surrounding areas which makes exurban areas more attractive. Urban growth boundaries then increase prices across the region and decrease incentive for people and businesses to move into the metro. I see no signs whatsoever that the Houston region has any interest in taking any measures that are going to reduce the attractiveness to people and businesses to move here, so I'm not sure why we would expect a major change in development patterns.

Excellent points. The fact that the Houston metro area is more than 6 million people in nine different counties and an area of over 10,000 sq miles is a challenge. The fact that the population is growing so rapidly and that the city is so organic in its development are additional challenges. We're projected to add almost 1.5 million people to the region by 2025. That's going to have profound impact on everything. The rate of growth is a huge point of differentiation between Houston and static cities. I know that many people in this forum like to talk about urbanization and it's importance. I'm all in favor of the way that the inside the loop area is gentrifying, but that doesn't address the issues of the vast majority of the regional population and doesn't address how the region is going to deal with an additional increase of 1.5 million population of which a very small percentage is going to locate inside the loop. As I've pointed out before, the widening of I10 had everything to do with the continued dynamic growth of the Houston metro area. There is no reason to believe that the construction that occurred in the Energy Corridor would have happened inside the loop if access to the Energy Corridor had been restricted. This is not a zero sum game. Cities like San Antonio and Oklahoma City compete just as hard for major companies to relocate there as Houston does and it's a pretty delicate tipping point. It would only take 4-5 such companies relocating to OKC before it would be legitimate energy hub and a serious competitor in those kind of decisions.