Houston Strategies

Next big moonshot for Houston? TX will pass CA and HTX will pass LA, auto vs. transit job access and realism

 A few smaller misc items this week:

• Texas will surpass California, and both DFW and Houston will pass LA in population over the next 40 years. "The American future seems to be more Lone Star State than a Golden one."
• Houston Public Media/NPR asks "What could be the next big moonshot for Houston?" Among the answers, clean energy struck me as the most ambitious and most appropriate for Houston (ideally cost-effective carbon capture!). My own suggestion for a Houston moonshot? METRO could aspire to offer half-hour or less express trip times from every park-and-ride and transit center to every major job center and both airports using a network of MaX Lanes. A high goal but very achievable and it would support Houston's growth for decades to come. More on it here.
• New Geography: Auto vs. transit job access ratios for the top 50 metro areas (hat tip to Bill). Essentially comparing how many jobs are accessible by car within 30 mins (the typical commute) vs. by transit. A Houstonian can access 97.3 times (!) as many jobs by car than by transit within the same commute time. Even in NYC with excellent transit a car can still reach 9.7 more jobs than transit in the same time. The conclusion is compelling:

Where for Transit from Here?

With this minimal transit use relative to the auto and especially in view of the huge transit market share losses since the pandemic, it would seem useful to rethink the role of transit.

Transit does well for work trips to the largest downtown niche markets (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and San Francisco), though pre-pandemic market shares are unlikely to be replicated in the future because of the popularity of hybrid and remote work, lower office occupancy and the likely improvement in virtual meeting technology.

The reality is that transit is not a substitute for the auto and there isn’t enough money to make it one. Professor Jean-Claude Ziv and I found that making the auto a genuine alternative to transit could be prohibitively costly, annually requiring the entire metropolitan area gross domestic product in some cases. This would leave nothing else for anything else.

It would be foolhardy to suggest that transit is an alternative to the auto (despite this having sbeen implied by federal, state, and local policy for decades of decline), In a non-utopian world, no reasonable increase in subsidies could make it so.

It may be best to identify the small areas within metro areas where transit could actually be an alternative to auto. This would be in neighborhoods where automobile ownership is particularly low, which, in most metros are also areas of greater economic need. Investing billions more to coax middle class commuters off the roads seems a daft approach given the realities.

Labels: census, growth, MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, perspectives, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 4:43 PM