A better alternative to channelizing Buffalo Bayou, VC leaving CA for TX, top life science and entrepreneurship rankings, big solar, and more
My lead item this week is my proposed alternative to channelizing Buffalo Bayou or an expensive tunnel to better drain the westside reservoirs and avoid a future Harvey flooding tragedy: a 27-mile drainage trench or pipeline(s) using power-line right-of-way, satellite mapped here. I got inspired after reading Jim Blackburn's Chronicle interview about how bad the Army Corps of Engineers study was. And if a trench is problematic for some reason, maybe giant pipelines like these could work for a small fraction of the cost of a bored tunnel? Or the trench could be covered? Would genuinely love to hear feedback in the comments on the feasibility of this from people more knowledgeable than I...
On to this week's smaller items:
"Houston is on track to be a top market for life sciences. The report factored in size and growth of life-sciences employment, venture capital and National Institutes of Health funding, and more."
"California’s restrictive zoning laws make it nearly impossible for many essential low- and middle-income workers to live anywhere near major cities. In Texas, permissive zoning allows every member of our staff to live close to work and spend time with friends and family instead of enduring grueling commutes."
Labels: economic strategy, energy, entrepreneurship, home affordability, infrastructure, land-use regulation, rankings, resilience, TMC, tunneling
Planning Starts for Houston's Managed Lanes Network plus Covid impact on Metro Ridership
This week we have a great two-part guest post from Oscar Slotboom of
Houston Freeways fame, starting with some fantastic news on an interconnected managed lane network for Houston!
Planning Starts for Houston's Managed Lanes Network
The Houston Chronicle recently reported on initial planning for a comprehensive, interconnected managed lanes network for Houston (print edition pdf). Regular blog readers are aware that Tory and I have been promoting this concept - including the MaX lanes report we released in 2017 (blog post, report: lowres, highres) - which we believe could eventually support one million jobs in Houston's core job centers.
A key feature of our proposal is the "Core MaX Central Connection Loop", which is intended to connect all the MaX lanes and enable maximum accessibility to activity centers. Using this loop, anyone coming in on any of Houston's spoke MaX Lanes will be able to access any of the core job centers (blue circles are job centers with their total number of jobs).
We were pleased to see that the preliminary plan shows a connection loop on the same location which the Houston Chronicle calls the "Box" and a preliminary planning document calls the "Core Central Connection Loop".
Recent online documents at H-GAC reveal more details about the initial concept.
- The Inner Katy and West Loop segments appear to be the first priority. The IH 69 and downtown segments are not yet conceptualized.
- The Inner Katy segment appears to be targeted to be the system backbone. It is listed as a planned $2.2 billion addition to the 2045 plan. Presumably this cost includes the already-planned Metro BRT. The planning document states "TxDOT wants [this project] to be in the same fiscal year as inner Katy BRT to construct these projects in conjunction with BRT." The BRT is currently listed to start in 2023 or 2025.
- This H-GAC presentation (starting at page 63) shows preliminary concepts for the West Loop, including potential mobility hubs at Westheimer. The planning document lists the West Loop segment at $553 million in 2026.
This is all very exciting! Let's hope TxDOT and H-GAC can continue to move the planning process forward and identify the needed funding.
Covid impact on Metro Ridership
Covid 19 has reduced public transit ridership
62% nationally. The plot below show's Metro ridership for the last
year, with overall boardings down 56% between September 2019 and September
2020.(
Metro data)
Park & Ride service has suffered the the most, down 88%. In the depths of
the Covid shutdown in April, Park & Ride ridership dropped to 1090 daily
trips, a 97% drop, before starting a very modest recovery. Of course, many
Park & Ride customers are now working from home, and they have the option
to drive to work to reduce their risk of exposure, and reduced traffic makes
driving faster than pre-Covid trips. Buses mainly serve transit-dependent
populations, and bus ridership shows the smallest percent loss.
Dallas
has experienced a ridership drop of 57%, nearly identical to Houston. We
probably won't see a rebound in transit ridership until there is widespread
vaccination and rush-hour traffic congestion returns to pre-covid levels.
I could not find recent highway traffic data for Houston, but nationally highway
traffic rebounded sharply during the summer and is now mostly reported to be
between 90 and 100% of pre-covid levels. (
1,
2).
Dallas highway traffic is down 8% in September 2020 compared to September 2019. (
ref)
This table summarizes the data for September 2020 versus September 2019.
| Houston bus | -51% |
| Houston light rail | -56% |
| Houston park & ride | -88% |
| Houston Metro overall | -56% |
| Dallas public transit | -57% |
| USA public transit | -62% |
| Dallas highway traffic | -8% |
| DFW Airport passengers | -45% |
Labels: MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, pandemic, transit, transportation plan
TXC HSR looking for federal loan guarantees, HTX City of the Future, energy transition, covid migration, and more
If you're burned out on election news, I've got some totally unrelated items for you this week... ;-)
"To repay $30 billion in loans, 6m annual riders would have to pay $255 a ticket on top of whatever it costs to operate the trains."
Compare that to typical Dallas-Houston airfares of around $100, and the math does not look good at all...
"I think oil and gas is going to be with us a long time. And Houston has a comparative advantage against every other city in the world.
If you get beyond the rhetoric about the energy transition and projections, what is it really about? It’s about infrastructure. It’s about an investment. It’s about technology. And it’s about scale. And those are all things that the energy industry is good at doing. So I think that Houston and the oil and gas companies here will be very much at the center of that. We’re starting from a point where 84 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels today. So you’re talking about a huge infrastructure of investment and embedded activity that just doesn’t change overnight. If you’re going to power what is an $87 trillion economy that’s going to be a $100 trillion global economy, you’re going to need a lot of engineering and a lot of technology and a lot of equipment. And that’s what Houston and energy companies bring to the table." ...
"...if you did have big restrictions on our domestic oil industry, it would simply mean that we would import more oil. That’s because there’s still 280 million cars in the United States, almost all of which run on petroleum."
Yet another reason to support an OPEC tariff over a fracking ban!
"Americans generally don’t give much thought to energy policy, except when they stop at the local gas station for a fill-up. But if state and federal leaders who want to ban fracking and “transition” away from oil prevail, that complacency will change quickly.
You may not think about energy policy, but it thinks about you. Energy is the foundation of society. Everything—food, clothing, shelter, your iPhone, you name it—requires energy to produce. When it costs more to supply that energy, the cost of everything else increases. The OPEC oil embargoes in the 1970s, for example, ushered in an era of double-digit inflation."
“...the most dynamic cities have been like Tokyo in the post-war decades, in a state of restless metamorphosis.” He later adds that “messiness is something to be embraced, especially for a fast-growing city: it is a dynamic feature of urban development.”
- Remote work will increase migration in the U.S. Between 14 and 23 million Americans are planning to relocate as a result of businesses’ increasing acceptance of remote work. As a result, near-term migration rates could be three to four times what they normally are.
- Major cities will see the biggest out-migration. 20.6 percent of those planning to move are in a major city.
- People are seeking less-expensive housing. More than half (52.5 percent) of those planning to move are seeking a house significantly more affordable than their current home.
- People are moving beyond regular commute distances. 54.7 percent of planned moves are to locations more than two hours away from their current location, which is beyond most people’s tolerance for daily commuting.
- The highest-priced housing markets are taking the biggest hits. Rental data from apartments.com shows that the top 10 percent most-expensive markets are losing tenants at a much greater rate than markets in the bottom 10 percent.
Labels: development, economic strategy, economy, energy, entrepreneurship, high-speed rail, home affordability, identity, land-use regulation, migration, pandemic, quality of place, rankings
Upward mobility report, high-capacity transit deceptions, NIMBYs saving cities? covid moving, and a sports play you have absolutely never ever seen
A few small items this week:
- Our think tank, The Urban Reform Institute - A Center for Opportunity Urbanism, released its newest report on upward mobility, with best city rankings for different minority groups: Hispanic, Asian, and African American. You'd think the deep blue coastal cities would be the best, but in fact it's the opposite (with the exception of well-paying government jobs in DC).
- Antiplanner: High-Capacity Transit Deceptions. "Transit advocates routinely make deceptive claims about the advantages of transit over cars or rail transit over buses. Often those claims deal with the capacity of different modes of transportation to move people. This policy brief will scrutinize some of these claims."
- The American Conservative: Did NIMBYs Save Cities? In many ways, slow-growing suburbs encased in regulatory amber function the way greenbelts or urban growth boundaries are supposed to. Houston is a counter-example to what he’s saying, since we have a pretty free market in both the suburbs and the city and we’re getting good growth in both. Hat tip to Judah.
- Bloomberg: New Data Shows Just How Much Americans Moved Temporarily During Covid. 3 of the top 10 cities gaining new move-ins during the pandemic are Houston suburbs: Katy (#1), Richmond (#2), and Cypress (#7). I suspect they already planned to move but just took advantage of the pandemic downtime and low mortgage rates.
Finally, I have to end with this absolutely unbelievable you've-never-seen-it-before-and-will-never-see-it-again recent video of a Rice kicker hitting all three field-goal crossbars a total of four times! The only thing that could have made it any cooler is if it had landed on the other side of the final crossbar!
Assuming the republic is still intact, I'll see ya again next week (or possibly even if it isn't).
Labels: affordability, home affordability, migration, opportunity urbanism, rail, rankings, sports, transit
