Houston Strategies

First reactions to the preliminary METRONext 2040 draft transit plan

On Thursday the Metro board got their first look at a preliminary draft of the 2040 METRONext transit plan leading up to a 2019 bond election.  Unfortunately, there are no public maps or slides to share (UPDATE: now there are here), just the 1.5 hour video you can find here - look for the METRONext Board Workshop on July 26, 2018 (I recommend adding the Video Speed Controller extension to your Chrome browser which will allow you to watch it at a much faster but still perfectly understandable speed - or you can just jump to the time points I list below). I should pass along that Chair Carrin Patman is super careful to emphasize at that this is very preliminary and subject to change based on feedback and better financial projections (which are all over the place due to high economic uncertainty), and they expect to hold a second board workshop on the plan next month.  She also points out the substantial uncertainty around technology change (mainly autonomous vehicles), which makes a lot of this subject to change over time.  This plan is based on current technologies.  With all of those caveats out of the way, let's dive in.

I think they've done a very clever thing, which is create a fantasy plan with everything they'd love to have to meet the region's mobility needs through 2040 (including plenty of rail, ugh), but then they scale it way down based on financial reality, which I really applaud. I say this is clever because when they show the plan to the public and someone says "why doesn't it have X?", they can say "here's X over in our dream plan, but we can only afford the projects with the absolute highest bang for the buck," - which will either be mollifying or inspire them to lobby for more resources for Metro, a win for Metro either way.

First the $35 billion (!!) dream plan (UPDATE: complete presentation here):

• Map at the 17:28 point.
• Starting at 19:26 they build up the layers one at a time to show how they got to that dream map.
• I will quibble with their assertion that light rail (LRT) is fast. Maybe compared to buses, but net speeds under 20mph with stops is not fast compared to 60+ mph express buses in MaX Lanes. This is particularly relevant to airport service.  Who will ride rail from Hobby airport to downtown that is likely to take an hour?!  And IAH will certainly be longer than that!
• Extensive improved bus network which they call BOOST.  Good stuff.
• Great regional express service at 25:05 - essentially MaX lane express bus services.
• Metro makes it very clear they need financial partners to step up for a lot of the services that go outside their service region, including proposed rail along 90a.
• At 28:47 they quickly build the master map with all the layers.
• At 29:30 is a great summary stats slide: 200 miles of 2-way HOV (MaX Lanes!), 100 miles of LRT (!! - minimum $10 billion, probably more like $15B or closer to $20B with future cost inflation), 90 miles of new BRT, and more.
• Benefits slide at 29:39, including 460% increase in people served and 120% increase in employment served.

I'm actually not going to bother spending any time critiquing this plan, as it gets radically slimmed down after the financial check.

At the 30:40 point, the CFO comes in for a harsh reality check: Metro can only realistically afford 3-8% of the $35 billion dream plan.  That leads to two new versions of the plan, optimistic Plan A and pessimistic Plan B (a literal "Plan B" - nice humor Metro ;-)

UPDATE: Metro has now posted good slides with Plan A and B details here.

Plan A (~$2.5 billion?)

• Map slide at 1:03:58
• Universities line converted to BRT (smart as long as it doesn't disrupt the already heavy-and-growing-heavier traffic loads on the north-south streets like Weslayan, Buffalo Speedway, Kirby, Shepherd, and Montrose)
• BRT from downtown to the northwest transit center and the new high-speed rail station at 290 and 610. More on this later
• Extend the Uptown BRT down to Gulfton (high transit ridership there)
• LRT extension on the north Red line up to a Tidwell transit center. This is pretty short and reasonable.
• LRT connecting the south ends of the Red line (near the old Astroworld site) and the Purple line (Third Ward past UH) out to Hobby airport through Sunnyside.  While I can see a little bit of the logic (connect downtown, UH, and the Med Center/Rice to Hobby), it's a lot of money over a lot of miles through a very low-density part of Houston.  And as I mentioned before, the trips will not be fast.  I think this would be very expensive for pretty low ridership.  Airports are not as great connections as people think: the slow trip times and hassle of hauling baggage are discouraging vs. family or leisure travellers getting picked up or dropped off by friends/family or parking or using Uber/Lyft, and business travelers are usually happy to expense a faster taxi/Uber/Lyft ride (or rent a car depending on how much they're getting around).  Here's the question I ask everyone when they suggest rail to the airport: Metro needs to put limited resources where it will do the most good. With that in mind, how many times per year do you commute to work vs. commute to the airport? (probably 100-to-1 for the average person)  Connecting job centers makes far more sense than airports.
• IAH connection converted to express bus. Smart.
• Misc other improvements, including improved bus network (BOOST).
• Summary stats slide at the 1:08:19 point, including 12 miles of LRT and 34 miles of BRT.

Labels: MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, rail, transit, transportation plan

posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:18 PM 0 comments

The Rolex of transit, the logic of Houston's sprawl, millennials seek community, interactive flood risk map, and more

Apologies again for the growing delays between posts - it's been a busy summer with a lot of travel.  Getting on to our new items:

• A great piece from my COU colleague Anne Snyder: Millennials Reinvent Localism in their Search for Community.
• Nolan Gray: How Much Should We Blame Planners for Sprawl? Extensively discusses Houston, mostly defending our built form (Nolan is very thoughtful and supportive of Houston's model). Hat tip to George.
• This Dallas News article reports on a comprehensive survey by Zillow which concludes that the vast majority of people in North Texas (including millennials) still want a home in the suburbs with 81% preferring a single-family dwelling.  Hat tip to Oscar.
• Fantastic interactive map for checking out the real flood-vulnerability of your home or other neighborhoods in Houston, including how badly they flooded during Harvey and some pics/images from the flooding.
• San Francisco: Where a six-figure salary is 'low income'. It's nuts there. Hat tip to John.
• Great quote: "I think of light rail as the diamond-encrusted Rolex watch of transit. It’s something that doesn’t do as much as a real watch can do. It costs a lot more. And it serves solely to serve the ego of the people who are buying it." -Randal O’Toole, transit expert for the Cato Institute
• Redesigned Bus Routes Won’t Save Transit, with an extensive excerpt on Houston:

"With many major urban areas seeing ridership decline by 20 to 40 percent in the last few years, however, transit agencies are desperate for new ideas that can recapture some of those lost riders. The changes they will make, however, are most likely to be too little, too late.

On close scrutiny, Houston’s story isn’t as compelling as some claim. In 2012, Houston buses carried 66.1 million trips. After revamping the system, they carried 68.6 million in 2013. So far, so good. But by 2015, the number had fallen to 66.5 million, and in 2017 it was 66.4 million — barely 1 percent above the 2012 level. One reason for the 2015 decline was that Houston opened new light-rail lines that year, which no doubt captured some previous bus riders. But, if anything, the real story is that bus ridership hasn’t declined as much since 2012 as it has in other cities such as Los Angeles.

Houston’s real problem was that it built light rail in the first place. In 2002, as it was starting light-rail construction, buses carried 94 million riders. After the light rail opened in 2004, bus plus rail together beat the 2002 number for three years. Then ridership began to collapse, falling to 77 million in 2010, possibly due to a 12 percent decline in bus service. With the revamp of bus routes and opening of new rail lines, ridership grew to 85 million trips in 2017 — which is still 9 percent fewer than bus alone in 2002.

But that growth is mainly due to the new light-rail lines. Since 2012, light-rail service has nearly quadrupled from 0.9 million to 3.4 million vehicle-revenue miles. For all that, they got a 65 percent increase in light-rail ridership. From 2012 to 2017, bus vehicle-revenue miles grew by 5 percent, but ridership grew by only 1 percent — and bus ridership in 2017 was less than in any year from 1984 through 2011. Since Harris County’s population grew by 9 percent between 2012 and 2017, a 1 percent growth in bus ridership is hardly something to cheer about."

Labels: density, market urbanism, Metro, rail, resilience, sprawl, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 8:53 AM 5 comments