Houston Strategies

Why LA tourism is exploding and might help Houston too, flood overregulation, Houston and transit, and more

Some good items this week:

• Reason: Stop Trying to Get Workers Out of Their Cars - "Smart growth" is dumb about commuting.  Makes very similar arguments to my opportunity zones.
• Seven observations about transit, including #7: Houston is bucking the trend:

"Houston is one of the few regions where transit ridership is still growing. From 2012 to 2017, when San Antonio ridership declined by 23 percent, Houston ridership grew by 7 percent. In the first four months of 2018, when San Antonio ridership fell another 3.2 percent, it grew by 3.5 percent in Houston. (Houston’s market share still declined despite ridership growth because ridership didn’t grow as fast as driving.) 

Houston’s success appears to be due to a major reorganization of bus routes. Instead of operating buses on a hub-and-spoke system focused on downtown, Houston rerouted them into a grid system. Since most jobs are no longer located downtown, a grid bus network allows more people to get to work with fewer transfers and out-of-the-way trips. 

Houston’s success is not a complete victory. Houston-area transit ridership was much higher before the 2008 recession than it is today. Ridership peaked in 2007 at more than 102 million trips per year; in 2017, it was just 89 million trips per year."

• Could this fight come to Houston when METRO releases their new plan next year? NYTimes: How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country
• METRO take note: Seattle's 8-mile light rail plans have just ballooned from a crazy $1.2 billion to an absolutely insane $3.2 billion!! That's $400 million per mile folks!  Will the insanity never end?!
• Texas Monthly: Goodbye to Anthony Bourdain, a Chef Who Understood Houston - Through the food he sought out, Bourdain recognized the particulars that made a city unique, rather than what the city aspired to be.

"It ain’t the heat here, Bourdain realized, it’s the humanity."

• Bill King: City’s New 500-Year-Plus-2 Flood Ordinance Will Be Severe, and in Many Instances Unnecessary, Burden on some of the City’s Most Disadvantaged Neighborhoods. I'm hopeful it will get fixed in the next couple of years as the negative ramifications become more clear, including stagnant neighborhoods, declining home values, and reduced city property tax collections. Check out the floodplains in your neighborhood at the map here.

Finally this week, an older item I'm finally getting around to from the LA Times: Los Angeles, Houston and the appeal of the hard-to-read city:

"Houston is casually written off even more often than Los Angeles, which is saying something. Now the fourth largest city in the country in population — and gaining on third-place Chicago — it's an unruly place in terms of its urbanism, a place that (as Los Angeles once did) has room, or makes room, for a wide spectrum of architectural production, from the innovative to the ugly.
...
Roughly one in four residents of Houston's Harris County is foreign-born, a rate nearly as high as those in New York and Los Angeles. Houston's relationship with Dallas, the third biggest city in Texas, is something like L.A.'s with San Francisco; the southern city in each pair is less decorous, less fixed in its civic identity and (at the moment, at least) entirely more vital."

Speaking of LA, an observation that came out of my recent vacation there.  It relates to this Cranky Flier post showing the dramatic increase in LAX traffic from 2009 to 2017, growing by more than 50% (!) in those 8 years. Why? My hypothesis: before the smartphone (circa 2007), vacationing in a city like LA was pretty nontrivial, involving a rent car in a large unfamiliar city and a lot of paper maps and planning - unlike New York, DC, San Francisco, London, Paris, Rome, and other older, more concentrated tourist cities with subway transit where you can just show up and figure it out without too much trouble.  But now with a smartphone, LA is a whole lot easier to "wing it" on vacation: driving and exploring, finding good restaurants on Yelp or tourist attractions in TripAdvisor and navigating there easily (avoiding traffic!) with Google Maps or Waze.  I think people have discovered this and LA has become a significantly more popular tourist destination.  Maybe Houston will do the same on a smaller scale??

Labels: identity, Metro, mobility strategies, opportunity urbanism, resilience, smart growth, tourism, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:52 PM