Houston Strategies

How Metro should spend $400m, what brings people here, gentrification helps residents, expanding market-based parking, realistic Dome plans, Newsweek on HTX

This week the Metro board will be meeting to discuss what to do with $400 million in savings recently created in the MetroNext 2040 plan by consolidating two light rail lines to Hobby into one.  The initial ideas are a new park-and-ride for Kingwood (looks good) and extending the Hobby rail line to the Monroe park-and-ride (~$350 million!).  That extension is super questionable.  I have trouble understanding who exactly would use it? Anyone at that Monroe park-and-ride will be able to choose between a fast express HOV bus ride downtown (maybe 10 or 15 mins?) or a 45+ minute light rail ride - who's going to take the rail? Maybe to go to Hobby or UH, but if you're already in a car, why wouldn't you just go the rest of the way to their parking lots?  I just can't see a compelling use case. I'm curious what kinds of marginal ridership gains the Metro staff predict for the extension.

My own alternate suggestion: reduce rides system-wide to $1, including commuter buses. Any ride anywhere within Metro would only be $1.  This would attract a ton of riders to the park-and-ride express buses (which cost several dollars each way now, depending on the route), and reduce congestion on the freeways - a huge winner with voters across the Metro service area whether they ride transit or not.  Certainly, a lot of commuters now do the time+cost+parking math on park-and-ride commuter buses vs. driving and end up picking driving.  This would strongly tip that value equation back over to commuter buses for a *lot* of people.  If you're interested in putting in your two cents, the Metro board meeting is at 10am this Wednesday.

More on my Metro Moonshot proposal here.

Moving on to this week's smaller items:

• Kudos to Houston City Council for expanding market-based parking (i.e. no required minimums) from downtown to include big parts of Midtown and EaDo.  Here's to hoping they continue to expand.  My own suggestion I've mentioned here previously: knowing that autonomous vehicles are coming and parking needs will be much lower in the future, set parking minimums to automatically ratchet down by some small incremental amount (5%?) every year.  Not enough to scare the neighborhoods, but with a real impact over time. It's the same strategy HCTRA uses to regularly increase tolls in small nickel and dime increments - not enough to upset anyone, but enough to stay ahead of inflation over time.
• Newsweek: Houston, We (Don't) Have a Problem: In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a spotlight is on the renewed and reinvented Houston.
• Could the Astrodome become Houston's Eiffel Tower? Nice renderings and ideas, but they need to be integrated into a *climate protected/controlled* Dome where the space will get used year-round. We don't have CA weather like this architect ;-) The County plan is a good start until there's budget for air conditioning in the future. At least it would be usable 7 months a year, including the Rodeo and OTC.
• Wow. This one will break your paradigm. Turns out gentrification actually helps existing residents in a neighborhood more than it hurts them.

Finally, a couple of links related to Houston's identity.  First, this local NPR Houston Matters episode on "What Brings People To Houston?"  Some great keywords you'll hear in it: opportunity, diversity (and how that spawns the amazing food scene), and a welcoming friendliness (Houspitality!).  And then this NY Times piece on "Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii -The “aloha spirit” may hold a deep lesson for all of us."  Again, I think Houspitality is our version of the Aloha Spirit, and something we should definitely hold on to and actively cultivate (starting with Houston drivers! ;-).

Labels: Astrodome, development, identity, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies, perspectives, transportation plan

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:53 PM