Houston Strategies

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