Bad transit investments, Econ 101 for planners, expensive liberal cities worsen income inequality and reduce standards of living, and more
- TXDoT has changed the 290 plan from 3 reversible HOT lanes to one. At first I was pretty disappointed in this, but a friend pointed out that the upside is that it may accelerate building of the parallel Hempstead Tollway, which would be a good thing. If 290 had 3 reversible lanes, I'm not sure Hempstead would ever get built.
- The Atlantic on Why Middle-Class Americans Can't Afford to Live in Liberal Cities - Blue America has a problem: Even after adjusting for income, left-leaning metros tend to have worse income inequality and less affordable housing. Hat tip to Jay.
- Continuing the theme, Wendell Cox discusses Paul Krugman and "wrong way cities" that are killing their standard of living by making housing unaffordable.
- The Antiplanner with ten economic principles for planners, part 1 and part 2. This is pretty basic Econ 101, yet he's right that a lot of urban planners ignore it. Economic principles should be added to the core curriculum of all urban planning degree programs.
1. Capital costs are costs.
2. Maintenance costs are operating costs.
3. Economic growth requires new economic activity.
4. New economic activity requires lower costs or higher quality.
5. Whenever possible, user fees are the best way to pay for infrastructure.
6. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
7. If you subsidize something enough, people will come, but that doesn’t make it a success.
8. If you create of shortage of something, the price will go up, but that doesn’t mean you have increased demand.
9. Demand is a line, not a point.
10. If most people who like something fit a certain demographic, that doesn’t mean most people in that demographic like that thing.
- Those principles lead directly to this post with 4 logical arguments against rail, and this post with a pretty comprehensive and devastating case for why BRT is superior to light rail in almost every way. Light rail is slower, lower capacity, less flexible and yet far, far more expensive!
- And now taking those arguments to our local situation, it looks like we're getting dramatically reducing returns from our new rail investments, just as I feared. METRO released statistics on the expanded Red Line (known to most people as the Main St. Line), and they're grim. Back when it was only 7.5 miles, it got 1,162,000 boardings/month, and after increasing the length 73% to 13 miles back in December, ridership only increased 22% to 1,419,000 boardings/month in September. This means that the new miles are generating far, far fewer trips than the the original length, and does not bode well for the future lines if they're just as unproductive at generating new trips.
- Great presentation on the future of self-driving cars and their impact, including on transit (presentation link came from this blog post). This story asserts that it could more than double freeway capacities, which would be a godsend for us.
- Great graphic from the Houston Planning Facebook feed showing that Houston is still more affordable than comparable sized cities.
Labels: affordability, commuter rail, home affordability, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies, planning, rail, toll roads
posted by Tory Gattis @ 2:40 PM
2 Comments:
In Mexico, train-related procurement contracts endure public scrutiny for possible corruption:
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2024992604_mexicopresidentxml.html
Here in Houston, though, Metro charges taxpayers over a hundred million bucks per mile of light rail expansion. Meanwhile cost-overruns and delays continue to accumulate...
It's just silly to say one transit is better than the other. It all depends on the context as all modes work well in particular contexts.
I think the only LRT Houston needs for the foreseeable future are the Uptown, University, and Main St lines. These lines would provide reliable and high capacity service directly to Houston's largest and/or densest employment centers, major cultural institutions, all major league stadiums, major parks, and major educational institutions. Not to mention how these lines would greatly help our growing tourism industries by connecting the dots.
BRT is great too, and we need more of it. I think a Westheimer line from way out west to HWY 6 all the way east past UH to I45 would be a grand slam. We need BRT down Bellaire (we can do better), Gessner, Bissonnet, Richmond, etc., I'm mostly familiar with SW Houston. We need the re-imagined bus system which might be a great turning point for our system overall.
Lastly, we need regional P&R and HOV lanes to feed into our LRT system and bus system. It will take an actual plan and money to accomplish this. We can't keep repeating the same mistakes and we keep adding a million people per decade.
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