David Crossley

The Waller folks don't want it to be on 359 or 362 because they don't want a lot of traffic on either of those. They see those as local roads. So they basically want a brand new 4-lane highway right between them, in farmland and prairie. Somebody has some land along there they want to develop with houses. I've been told the Waller County folks view sprawl as growing their tax base, but of course houses under a certain property value cost more in services than they deliver in taxes. So there's a lot of mythology and conflict of interest going on here. 

I've used transit in other cities, particularly London. It gets people where they need to go, but during peak times, it's crowded, smelly, and very uncomfortable. If you have to stand for an hour in a crowded train car, it's really no better than driving, and no less stressful. I'm tired of hearing transit proponents prattle on about how great it is, when the reality is generally far different.

 

Why would you be amazed that non-proponents of transit want to engage in dialog about it? All of your grandiose plans involve our money as well, and we don't think spending bilions on poorly designed and implemented plans is a good idea, especially when there is an undercurrent of doing nothing to improve roadways that will continue to provide the bulk of our overall transit capability.

It's the comments about how nasty it is to be in close contact with other humans as the reason not to ride transit that misses the point that too many people want to use transit so it's crowded. It's a Yogi Berra thing. Obviously, it would be more comfortable if there was more of it, but as long as people are arguing against transit and for diverting money to poorly conceived road projects that do no one any good, there won't be more and better transit.

The plan I'm arguing for is almost out of desperation, realizing that there isn't going to be any money for perfect transit and that many people who argue passionately for transit technology have insufficient basis in understanding the system or even where the people are.

I'm always amazed when people who don't want to use transit, for whatever reason, want passionately to engage in dialog about it.

 

 

David,  what do you propose?  

I propose a regional base network in the existing highway infrastructure that connects job centers and eventually evolves to dedicated right of way in those facilities. The map I posted shows how that would work.

Then it's just my opinion that the right technology for that is buses and I think they should be as high end as we can stand, knowing that we tend to choose less interesting hardware. 

I should add:  This is not a college course, none of us are 100% correct, no one really knows what the next decade or two decades will bring.

 

All we are doing is hypothesizing what "could be," not "what will be."  So its safe to dream big... afterall small dreams are seldom worth pursuing.

Yes, I completely agree with this. I much prefer to dream big. But in Houston we're reduced to just table scraps, so I guess, while I've done a lot blue sky stuff about transit, right now I'm trying to get into dialog about something that's possible and soon. But it's true the title of this thread is "ideal transit plan" so why not go for it?

Maybe we need to start over with something like "What your best possible transit plan for Houston considering the politics of a region determined to grow at the edges and reduce the population of the towns and cities? Or maybe something not so incendiary, but still in the realm of near term (20 years) possibility.

Should we do that?

Never implies an impossibility.  Nothing as commonplace as heavy rail (excuse me...ahem: Commuter Rail) is impossible for a metropolitan region of 6+million.  And anything in my post was hypothetical, and it was not an "overnight."  And that also goes for the light rail connectivity of the suburban job centers.

 

David,  what do you propose?  Your constant critiques of everything else posted by everyone else on here has grown tiresome.

Sorry to be tiresome. But I'm trying, in my annoying way, to help bring some clarity to this discussion. Most of the posters I'm agreeing with or having small discussions about small definitions.

Heavy rail and commuter rail are not interchangeable terms. Here's APTA on that topic:

Definition: Commuter Rail

Commuter rail refers to passenger trains operated on main line railroad track to carry riders to and from work in city centers. The trains are normally made up of a locomotive and a number of passenger coaches. The coaches are dimensionally similar to intercity (Amtrak) coaches, but typically have higher density seating as the average ride is shorter.

Definition: Heavy Rail

Heavy rail refers to traditional high platform subway and elevated rapid transit lines. Principal characteristics are operation over rights of way that are completely segregated from other uses, with the track placed in subway tunnels, on elevated structures, or on fenced surface rights of way, free of grade crossings with roads. Trains consist of anywhere from two to 12 cars, each with its own motors, and drawing power from a third rail (or in some cases from overhead wire).

So when we talk about commuter rail, we're usually talking about long trains pulled and maybe pushed by a diesel engine. Heavy rail, such as the DC, New York, and Atlanta trains, are usually electric and are just a different kind of beast.

Now, can heavy rail deliver commuter service? Of course. But so can light rail and BRT.

Sorry, I can't find the "overnight" thing so I don't know what that refers to.

 

"Transit" is not necessarily "mass transit" and CAN mean other forms of transportation, which includes highways and things like tollways and HOV lanes. The backbone of any mass transit system involves roads of some sort, and if you don't figure highway builds and expansions into the future of the city, fine. I'm cool with that. This is a subjective thread, remember?

Okay, it's a fine point, but you're right that the term "transit" as defined in Wikipedia includes everything. So let's say the topic of this thread should be "...ideal mass transit plan..." to avoid that confusion. 

The only places that need more roads - and there are no places that need new highways - are sprawl cup de sac areas where people are forced in collector streets and transit is terribly costly to deliver for that reason. Breaking up cul de sacs is nearly impossible, I think. So, new roads are not part of the solution.

Right, heavy rail configurations usually have higher average speeds than LRT/BRT because of stops and grade separations, but it is also more efficient on a cost-per-rider basis, and can travel up to 85mph. 

 

But of course it's a lot more expensive.  Kind of wish we got started on heavy rail when Kiepper proposed it in the 80s when the feds were handing out money for transit systems. 

 

We are going to have to build a ton of BRT for it to be as effective and transformative, and I don't see how we can even afford that with METRO's financial structure the way it is. 

I don't know that there's any reason light rail vehicles couldn't travel at 80 or 90 or whatever, but they don't largely because there's no need. The Main Street train can travel 66 mph but doesn't because of the close spacing of stops.

Metro's financial structure is entirely the produce of elected officials in suburban cities and Harris County, plus the Mayor of Houston, who takes the most money from Metro. Plus, the voters in 2012 voted to continue taking all that money from Metro, and while they were at it ended light rail expansion. 

Congestion is not a product of freeways, but rather the product of badly designed roads and city streets that then enter/exit said freeway.  Take for instance the Gulf Freeway between FM 528 (aka Nasa Road 1) and Eldorado... the traffic on the freeway is horrendous 90% of the time.  Why?  Because of the over populated (for lack of better word) main roads feeding into/out of the freeway.  Better engineered main roads and side roads - and by engineered I mean designed to handle future traffic - would reduce a good amount of that congestion.

 

Ideal transit plan would have better non-heavy rail options for certain districts (eg: Pearland, Sugar Land, The Woodlands etc) that would eventually be built to connect to a transit hub that would allow access to Houston/other "satilite cities" and airpots etc.  Obviously Pearland is not going to build a standalong LR, but they could work in unison with Island Transit/Sugar Land area transit and build a comprehensive plan to eventually turn the buses/bus routes into dedicated lines sometime later.  Eventually these will connect to HR that will move people to Downtown/Uptown/TMC/IAH etc.

While those design issues may be real bottlenecks, it is freeways and other free roads that cause congestion. There's a market principle that if something is free people will use it until it's gone. Likewise if a road is free, people will use it until it's full. Unless, as someone pointed out, you're building new freeway capacity in markets that are declining in population and that's just stupid. Of course there won't be congestion there, but there already isn't.

Actually, to be fair, it's elected officials that cause congestion because for political reasons they want to encourage sprawl in the unincorporated areas and do so by funding roads in those areas instead of transportation options where people already are, or relative to jobs.

Sugar Land and Pearland and the others need to greatly grow both their jobs and their populations before you can talk about adding high-capacity transit. And except for Pearland none of the places people think Metro should deliver transit are in the Metro service area, again thanks to local politicians.

I like the dreaming about heavy rail and so on, but I'm sorry, that is never going to happen in Houston. We might get some commuter rail, which is not heavy rail as that's defined, but that would only be because suburban politicians found some significant money to waste. The 5-line commuter rail system recommended by H-GAC would cost $3 billion and carry 41,000 riders a day. That's approximately what the Main Street light rail line carries now, and I suspect now that it goes up to Northline mall it carries more than already.

That's a very unfortunate reality and a huge shame.  IMO heavy rail technology would be the best way to gain the most ridership, cover the largest areas faster, and overall make the biggest impact of any new construction on the transit system. 

 

LRT and BRT are great in shorter corridors, but when you try to cover vast distances with them (something that is necessary in a comprehensive transit system in Houston) their effectiveness is limited due to slow speeds.  In order for BRT/LRT to be faster they need their own ROW and when it's not in the middle of a freeway it's extraordinarily expensive. 

It is a shame. But heavy rail is not inherently any faster than light rail or even BRT. What makes it fast is dedicated right of way and minimal stops. Denver and Dallas and LA have LRT running in long dedicated corridors and it's as fast as any heavy rail anywhere. So dedicated ROW for heavy rail is just as expensive as for LRT. 

I was going to refute your first statement, but then I realized that I was saying this earlier:

More transit, whether it means bus, highway, or rail, IS necessary, but specifically what we think is needed (or isn't needed) is rather subjective. I think we could all agree on that.

I"m not going to participate in this transit/no transit argument any more, but when you say "More transit is needed" and you include highways, are you defining drivers in cars on highways as transit? Let's not do that, okay?  Transit is transit, highways are not, although they could carry transit as they do now. But we definitely don't need more highways in order to have more transit.

So BRT specifically references a non-highway corridor solution that has multiple stops and is essentially light rail without the rail?

 

Not quites. it can and does operate in freeways and highways.  Let's just start with the Wikipedia definition:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

TransMilenio buses in Bogotá, Colombia

Transfer station in Curitiba's Linha Verde

Metrobüs in Istanbul

Bus rapid transit (BRT, BRTS) is a bus-based mass transit system. A true BRT system generally has specialized design, services and infrastructure to improve system quality and remove the typical causes of delay. Sometimes described as a "surface subway", BRT aims to combine the capacity and speed of light rail or metro with the flexibility, lower cost and simplicity of a bus system.^{[1][verification needed]}

To be considered BRT, buses should operate for a significant part of their journey within a fully dedicated right of way (busway), in order to avoid traffic congestion. In addition, a true BRT system will have most of the following elements:

• alignment in the center of the road (to avoid typical curb-side delays)
• Stations with off-board fare collection (to reduce boarding and alighting delay related to paying the driver)
• Station platforms level with the bus floor (to reduce boarding and alighting delay caused by steps)
• Bus priority at intersections (to avoid intersection signal delay)

The first BRT system was the Rede Integrada de Transporte ('Integrated Transportation Network') in Curitiba, Brazil, which entered service in 1974. This inspired many similar systems around Brazil and the world, such as TransMilenioin Bogotá, Colombia, which opened in 2000. As of November 2013 more than 166 cities have implemented BRT, accounting for 4,336 km (2,694 mi) of BRT lanes.^[2] It is estimated that about 27 million passengers use BRT worldwide everyday, of which about 17 million are in Latin America, which has the most systems, with 55.^[2]

Due to the many differences and distinct features among existing BRT systems, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy formed a BRT Standard Technical Committee in 2011, and in 2013 it set a minimum definition of what features must be part of a system to qualify as BRT and created a BRT Standard to rate existing systems.^[3]

 

uptown is doing a great job of this by moving forward with their BRT lanes on Post Oak since they didnt get funding for rail. and like SlickVic was saying, whenever funding does eventually materialize for rail then it will be very easy for Uptown to convert the BRT to LRT since the ROW is already there.

exactly. the major hurdle is acquiring ROW. Technology is secondary. Although I don't think we'll ever see rail on the freeways, and I hope we never see any significant commuter rail.

If we have congestion pricing on the tollways (which we do) and, as David said, it is a proven way to reduce congestion in freeway lanes, then what would be the overriding advantage to setting up a true BRT system vs using P&R buses and just increasing their frequency, size and destinations?

 

Absolutely, that would be helpful, but those are one-way buses. In the morning they make about 20-minute trip to downtown and a 40 minute trip in regular traffic lanes to get back out there to get more passengers (except on I-10, where the facility is the minimum I would expect for the whole system, and is probably good enough for a while, until Harris County forces the buses out of the right of way, which they can do, and will if the bus traffic threatens the revenue stream).

The minimum system, I think, is ROW like I-10, with flyovers into each of the job centers, perhaps a couple of stops on the street in each of those centers and then back on the system to the next place.

BRT means dedicated ROW with high-capacity low floor buses with multiple doors and external ticketing, operating just like light rail, but on rubber tires. Eventually we could get there.

However, just as Harris County took away Metro's ROW in I-10, TxDOT is preparing to do that on 290 and 45, so over time all possibility of useful transit goes away. Unless, as I say, the demographics change and urban dwellers - who are already the majority in Texas - get some clout in the State and County governments. 

To be fair the Istanbul BRT is too crowded, i took it last year and the buses are standing room only. I missed a few until I could get on one with space. Istanbul's metro system is far faster and more efficient.

So does that mean that, for instance, the New York subway system is a failure because too many people use it? And remember, having a "metro system," if you mean heavy rail and subways, is not in the cards for Houston, period. The politics are opposed to that for at least another decade and maybe beyond, and by that time it's just too expensive. What we need to address is, if we can't have any more rail at all, then what should we do?

Or look at this picture from Istanbul. The 4 Mercedes double buses are carrying 200 people, way more than all the cars you can see in the picture. And carrying them in comfort and safety in a stress-free environment. And if you can read the table you'll see that the system carries 700,000 passengers a day. Metro carries 230,000.

Sorry, that should have said 200 people each - 800 people.

yes i agree the energy corridor is doing better than ever but you cannot continue destroying all the developments that line the highways to widen the ROW.. there were only a few obstacles for the last katy freeway expansion. just imagine all the obstacles along the edges of the freeway that are in the way of a future expansion. eventually that corridor needs a commuter rail or as David suggest a full fledged BRT system to accommodate for the increase in population/traffic.

David, the more i think about your system using BRT, the more it makes sense. while i (and countless others im sure) would love rail, you are right.. its too expensive to put all over the city and not flexible enough for changing demands. admittedly i still hope to see commuter rail along certain corridors though. heh

The only way to increase highway capacity without destroying economic assets and inducing congestion is to increase the number of people in the existing lanes. That means more people per vehicle (or automated driverless cars, and eventually that doesn't work either).

Look at this picture: the number of people in the bus is the same as the number in the cars with the red line around them.

Pearland needs a freeway, but it will require demolition. Adding new highways and widening them DOES in fact reduce congestion and make commutes easier, certainly at least more than adding mass transit does. The "induced demand" is a popular argument for anti-highway advocates but (and this is mentioned on a previous post, not by me) the demand was already there. The developments between Katy and Cypress (not literally between them, but I'm talking as a system here) was pent-up for a new freeway, and the continuing growth of Houston (and other city-systems in Texas, for that matter). If that theory was true, all they would need to do for states with declining population (Michigan, Louisiana) is add more freeways and new growth would occur like mushrooms after a rain.

The "wiping out significant parts of our economy" is also nonsense. The widening of Katy Freeway was painful, yes. But it didn't damage the economy in the least: sure there were some 1980s era office buildings lost (but office space isn't particularly tight in Houston), some fast foods and hotels (nothing to worry about unless you get particularly weepy over demolishing that sort of thing), a few hotels (also not a problem), a handful of houses, a few tiny strip malls (like we don't have enough of those), and the Igloo plant (which relocated). In fact, the REI building that was demolished ended up moving to a vacant Albertsons a few miles south. And even if you were worried about economy, the "Energy Corridor" is doing better than ever.

No, you don't. In New York City, long a favorite example for mass transit enthusiasts, the other way of getting around the city involves taxis.

Awesome, that makes highways only accessible to the rich. The "commoners" are forced to ride mass transit.

There is no evidence in science or the practice that anything reduces congestion other than congestion pricing. Highway space creates congestion and this is very well known and proven. Transit, on the other hand, clearly takes drivers off the road and so is helpful in reducing the growth of congestion. Induced demand is not a "popular argument," it's a proven dynamic. Please see Cervero on induced demand and congestion and the TTI Mobility Report on the effect of transit in Houston.

The widening of I-10 removed 90% of the tax base of Spring Valley and shuttered more businesses than I can recall. The 290 expansion is going to move hundreds of acres of productive property from the economy. The idea that TxDOT gets to decide who stays in business and where is outrageous and I'm amazed that conservatives buy the idea that it's appropriate for a government agency to choose winners and losers among economic players.

The topic here is some sort of ideal transit system, and your insistence on trying to change the topic discourages others from entering into the discussion, which i assume is your purpose. It might be helpful even to you to move your arguments to a topic that's about highways or not having transit.

No one here is with an "ideological bias against transit", not even me. However, you don't condemn anyone with an "ideological basis against freeways", which some people do have. As painful as it is, we could use more highways. But we could also use more rail.

Where would you put more highways? We're already wiping out significant parts of our economy with widening and we're replacing about 1,000 square miles of prairie, forest, and wetlands with SH 99 development, and none of that will reduce congestion or make commutes easier. You might be able to make a case for more local streets to improve connectivity and give people options, but I can't see where you'd put a new highway other than to induce sprawl.

There are several things that need to be clear before having a lot more discussion about Houston transit:

1. We might not see any more rail here for a decade or more, and maybe never. So we have to move on to Plan B, like it or not.

2. There is discussion within Metro of center to center transit service and has been for at least a decade.

3. The common refrain that people won't live anywhere except out at the fringe because of housing costs and schools ignores the fact that, as the map shows, 88% of all the people in the 13-country region already live in that purple area surrounding the jobs, and that about half or more of all the top schools are inside the City of Houston.

4. This is not a contest to see which mode wins, at some point requiring the loser to close up shop. If the majority of people will continue to drive it's only because people who live close to jobs or people who use transit make it possible for others to use the freeways and streets. See Texas Transportation Institute's annual Mobility Report.

5. Kimley-Horn's Sam Lott, who is an expert modeler, is saying we are approaching a time when all the streets and roads in the region look like rush hour freeway traffic all day long and the system is headed toward failure. 

6. Having an ideological  bias against transit or for highways means you're not in the main discussion, which has to focused on reality and what's possible.

Might be a little big for streetcars, given that the green dots are 10 miles across.  Still, I wonder if Metro could end up revising it's local routes such that each center becomes it's own local hub, much like downtown is currently for the whole system.  Then you might have some sort of rapid transit between centers instead of the current out and back to downtown we have now.

 

Don't know about the streetcars (we'd never build the system if it required rail) but the rest of what you suggest is spot on. This is a regional plan, and there need to be local bus routes that provide service within and around the centers (and could connect to other centers as well)

David, did the original source mention how many jobs are represented by the smallest purple dots, medium orange dots, and largest red dot? That would be interesting. (Not a complaint about accuracy or anything, just wondering if this information is available.)

 

Also interesting would be differently sized radii depending on the job center size. For instance, the job center at Tidwell and 290 has the same concentric circles that downtown has, but the need to transport in workers is not the same as it is downtown. Therefore, mobility needs in the western part of the loop are more of a concern and a challenge than they are within Tidwell/290, or "crosstown" from Friendswood to League City, etc.

Yes, we have that data, and the hierarchy you see in our map just addresses the biggest 4 centers. We've just begin to look at this new data from H-GAC and all this needs a little refining. But the picture is pretty clear.

When we look at the green circles, we're interested in how possible it is to live near some good-sized job center. The people who do, and it's quite a few, could gradually have less and less need for cars as their center evolves and we begin to focus our transit service on those people.

If you look at that map I posted you'll see the top 25 job centers and you'll see that they are not focused on the Central Business District. I think I recall that the CBD has 7% of the jobs. So the spread has already happened and some of those job centers  have more jobs than downtown Miami or San Diego or a bunch of other downtowns. Here it is again

I like what you've done here, but I would extend the 1960/hwy 6 route down to 59/Sugar Land Town Center.  I'd also have extensions out into the purple areas since those areas already have substantial and growing populations.  The more convenient you make it, the more people will ride.  I'd also tend towards P&R rather than BRT either in parallel or replacing so that you can have more seamless routing to the major employment centers.  For instance, from the same station/P&R in The Woodlands run to the Energy Corridor, Downtown, TMC, etc.  That way riders would be able to get on one bus for most if not all the journey.  I suspect that likelihood of riding decreases as the number of connections increases.  Also, though the system should be set up mainly to serve workers goiing to and from work, having easy connections to shopping and other destinations would help with non-peak mobility as well.

 

One of the things we need to come to grips with eventually is that about 80% of our trips each day are not commuting. Even at rush hour, the majority of the vehicles on I-10, for instance, are not carrying commuters. 

The Main Street rail line is busy all the time. So the BRT, or whatever, wouldn't just be carrying people to and from work.

The beauty of the P&R buses now is that they're mostly nonstop trips, so they're very fast. I think any such system as I describe would have to include frequent express buses at rush hours.

One interesting side note is that the concept of driverless or autonomous cars is moving along pretty fast and of course buses could operate the same way. This would mean very tight headways would be possible, just seconds apart, so capacity would be pretty spectacular.

And the file is now attached.

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