Houston Strategies

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:

"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

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:03 PM 1 comments

HTX top five global city in America, big SWA increase at Hobby, Dilbert vs. city red tape, big growth, and more

 Lots of interesting items this week:

But mainly I expect everything to (eventually) get more affordable under covid (see previous item). It will certainly free up a lot of workers from service industries for construction, which has been a major issue for builders. And people being free from commutes reduces price premium of close-in properties and opens up exurban ones.

#12. Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX

3-year population growth (percent): 5.11%

3-year population growth (total): 340,438

Cost of living (compared to national average): +1.8%

Median home price: $221,426

Average 2-bedroom rent: $1,096 per month

Click to enlarge

Labels: affordability, aviation, corruption, development, growth, home affordability, land-use regulation, TMC, world city

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:29 PM 3 comments

Discouraging panhandling, airport wag brigade, 6-figure incomes, Grand Parkway size, TAMU TMC growth, and more

Big Idea of the Week before getting to our smaller items: I think the City needs to hang signs over major panhandler intersections saying:

"Please give to charity, not panhandling."

I think this could make a major positive improvement in the city over time, both at the intersections and among the panhandling population which would have to go to charities with real comprehensive services rather than just unsafely collecting dollars in the middle of busy roadways from intimidated motorists and doing who-knows-what with it.

One key: making sure to hang them high up near the traffic lights.  If they're down low, the panhandlers will either tear them down or deface them.

Moving on to this week's items:

• Houston has the 9th-most six-figure jobs in the country, 8th if you combine San Francisco and San Jose.  We're the 5th-largest metro, so we're punching a little below our weight, with Boston, Seattle, SF+SJ, and DC pushing us down. On the plus side, we still edge out DFW even though they're a bigger metro than us.
• Super cool: Texas A&M to Build $550 Million Project at TMC
• New Geography: The limits of being "near transit" for low-income workers
• This is pretty freaking cool: See how big the Grand Parkway is compared to other land formations. "Grand" is an appropriate label. Almost all of London, Paris, Chicago, DFW, Mexico City, Rhode Island, DC-Baltimore, or the SF Bay Area - among others - would fit inside!  Towards the end, they compare Texas to other landmasses.  Spoiler alert: it's big.
• Man, I hope these babies are cruising Houston streets soon: GM and Honda unveil self-driving car with no steering wheel or pedals. Cool video.

Finally, can we *please* get a wag brigade at Houston airports?!  Get a small army of these cuties wandering the terminals and it will give Houston a PR buzz that money can't buy.  It would also encourage more people to connect on flights through Houston as well, which would stimulate United and Southwest to add more service.

Labels: affordable proximity, autonomous vehicles, aviation, economy, homelessness, quality of place, rankings, TMC, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 3:52 PM 7 comments

Building to the Grand Finale - An updated analysis of the 45N rebuild

Happy Independence Day! (a bit of that theme in the post) I'm finally back from my travels. This week we have a guest post by Houston Freeways author Oscar Slotboom on plans for the 45N project, which was recently featured in the Chronicle where I was quoted.

In May TxDOT  posted updated schematics for the inner loop section of the North Houston Highway Improvement Project on the official project site. This is the second update after the seriously flawed original design released in April 2015 and the first update in September 2015.

The good news is that TxDOT and their engineering consultant HNTB continue their steady progress of improving the design, and my updated analysis now contains only four serious design concerns, down from sixteen in the original release and seven in the September 2015 update. See the September 2015 issue status list for the improvements in the latest version.

For the latest project design:

• Three of the four remaining concerns are related to access to the northbound MaX (managed express) lanes from downtown, including the poorly situated proposed slip ramp, the lack of access to the MaX lanes inside the loop, and reducing northbound IH 45 to three main lanes at the Loop. TxDOT has agreed that the design in the area can be improved and is currently studying options.
• TxDOT made a huge improvement in the latest design by restoring the on-ramp to northbound IH-69 from San Jacinto, which currently exists but was removed in the first two versions of the plan. But the new design does not restore the currently-existing southbound exit to Fannin, and still requires vehicles to exit to Almeda and then proceed west through Midtown, where the streets are not designed east-west traffic. So half of this problem is solved, and I propose possible designs to fix the other half.

Overall we’re very close to getting a plan which will be just about the best it can be within the already established framework and constraints. Let’s continue the ongoing refinement to get a plan worthy of a fireworks grand finale, with no remaining serious design concerns.

The MaX Lane North-South connectivity issue
TxDOT and HNTB say that their traffic model indicates that traffic will move through downtown much better, an average of 24 miles per hour faster, and touts the huge benefits for IH-69. But we all know that future traffic often exceeds projections as economic and population growth push volumes higher, and latent demand also consumes newly added capacity. In the larger perspective, north-south travel has become one of the most serious travel challenges at rush hour, with downtown, the West Loop and West Sam Houston Tollway all typically heavily congested.

With the IH-45 MaX lanes in this plan, construction soon to begin on the SH 288 managed lanes, existing HOV lanes on the Southwest, Gulf and Eastex freeways, the planned Hardy Toll Road extension into downtown, and possible future MaX lanes inside the loop on the Katy and Southwest Freeways, there will be a huge number of managed lanes converging into downtown with no dedicated path for managed lane traffic to get through downtown.

Ideally, this plan should have included a MaX lane connection through downtown on a north-south axis, both for transit and to give an option to motorists. The biggest beneficiary of the connection would be the Texas Medical Center, since downtown congestion limits their access to the workforce on the north side of the city.

While it may be too late to include a north-south connection in this plan, it is important that future options are not precluded by the project design. Within 6-9 months, it should be possible to do the following:

• Launch a short-term technical study to identify future volumes of demand for MaX lanes in all directions around and through downtown, based on current and potential future MaX corridors. Also identify possible future long-term connection corridors, which could be tunnels.
• On the section of IH 69 between Spur 527 and SH 288, consider a right-of-way set-aside for one or two managed lanes. Even if a north-south MaX lane connection is determined to be infeasible, this connection could serve as an extension of the SH 288 managed lanes to connect to the Southwest Freeway.
• Based on the study results, adjust the design so as not to preclude potential future MaX lane connections. This could mean preserving space for an additional lane on the downtown spur (on the west side of downtown), or preserving space for connections between existing HOV lanes and lanes going through downtown, for example, allowing the Eastex Freeway HOV lane to connect into the IH-69 main lanes near IH-10 to allow passage through downtown to the medical center.

Very Nice, but Expensive
The most recent cost estimate places the overall plan cost at $7 billion, with the downtown improvements costing $4 billion.

TxDOT has fully accommodated the wishes and desires of downtown and north side interests, leading to a very ambitious downtown design which is very expensive. To put things in perspective:

• The 35-mile-long US 290 project currently in progress from 2013 to 2017 has a total cost of $2.4 billion and a construction cost of $1.3 billion.
• The 25-mile-long Katy Freeway expansion built from 2003 to 2008 cost around $2.7 billion, which would probably be in the range of $3.2 to 3.5 billion in today’s money.
• At current funding levels, this project will consume virtually all funds for new construction for a period of around 10 years, or the construction could drag on for a very long time, 15 years or more

What does this mean?

• There will probably need to be an increase in funding at the federal and/or state levels to complete this entire project in a reasonable amount of time, which I would say is seven years or less after construction begins since we don’t want downtown to be a construction zone any longer than necessary. 
• Looking at the benefit/cost ratio of separate independent sections will be necessary if funding is short, rather than plunging straight into the entire costly downtown rebuild.
• Independent sections which could offer the most benefit to relieve bottlenecks include the section of IH 69 between Spur 527 and SH 288, IH 69 on the east side of downtown, and the IH 45/Loop 610 interchange and adjacent sections. 

Looking Ahead
While the funding issue can be worked out in the next few years, getting the federal “record of decision” (ROD) is the top priority, since nothing can move forward until the ROD is received. Houston is a can-do city, and by getting this project done we’ll have perhaps the best, most urban-friendly downtown freeway complex in the United States.

• Make the final needed refinements to the design as soon as possible, including adjustments to ensure any future north-south MaX lane connections are not precluded.
• Get the record of decision by 2018, which is TxDOT’s stated goal
• Start work on sections with the most benefit as soon as 2020.

Labels: infrastructure, MaX Lanes, mobility strategies, TMC, transit, transportation plan

posted by Tory Gattis @ 8:42 PM 3 comments

America's Housing Crisis, new hurricane surge maps, techies escaping Silicon Valley for Houston, affordable housing, and more

Before getting to the big backlog of items this week, I should mention that our Center for Opportunity Urbanism recently held a very successful and well-attended luncheon event to release our newest report on America's Housing Crisis.  Chronicle coverage here, and coincidentally it got reinforced by this story at NPR about millennials moving to the suburbs.  The report is packed with interesting stuff - definitely worth at least a skim.

Moving on to this week's items:

• Just amazing animated maps of different scenarios where hurricanes hit Houston, including some very scary ones. The newest study on dike options is out as well.  Let's hope they move forward on some sort of dike plan soon.
• Houston #5 for job searches by techies wanting to escape Silicon Valley! Not bad - ahead of Chicago, Dallas, and Portland.
• Katie Couric featured Houston in her latest Cities Rising episode, with a pretty awesome 12m video focused on quality of life amenities, the med center, immigrants, and restaurants. Worth watching.
• What Liberals Don’t Get About Affordable Housing: Filtering 
• That theme is also supported by the Washington Post: The poor are better off when we build more housing for the rich
• Who Plans?: Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian critique of urban planning
• Despite billions in rail spending, LA Transit ridership has fallen even farther than the LA Times recently reported.  Quite the cautionary tale for Houston.  This was followed by a story on LA reaching "peak mobility" with the following opening paragraphs:

"When trains start running on 11 new miles of Gold Line tracks this weekend stretching eastward to Azusa, will they carry any passengers? Ridership on Metro's buses and trains has been not just stagnant, but shrinking for nearly two years. At the start of 2014, there were on average 1.45 million bus and rail boardings on weekdays. A year later, it was 1.38 million. By January 2016, weekday boardings had further slipped to 1.27 million. 

Even given transfers and round-trips, it would appear that upward of 130,000 Angeleno commuters have abandoned mass transit."

• Laolu Davies-Yemitan just published an impressively comprehensive affordable housing plan worth checking out: Improving Housing for Working Class Residents: Houston 2025 Workforce Housing Plan (please pass it along if you know the right officials).  He also did this much shorter but in some ways more impressive piece of writing with his cycle tracker. How awesomely cool is that?!

Labels: affordability, economy, home affordability, hurricanes, land-use regulation, mobility strategies, opportunity urbanism, planning, quality of place, rankings, TMC, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:46 PM 0 comments

METRO improvements, MaX Lines, UT vs. UH, Houston > Toronto, regulation trying to solve over-regulation

This week I got to attend a blogger lunch meeting at METRO (pic here) to get an update on things over there, which are definitely on a strong upswing (note to the new Turner administration: please be careful not to screw it up with bad board changes).  The good news:

• Ridership is already up 10% since the redesigned bus network started a few months ago. Transit agencies all over the country are asking how they can do it too.  Nice to see Houston a real innovative leader here rather than a follower.
• Low-demand neighborhoods like the new "flex routes" once they get used to them.
• They are continuing to tweak routes to improve service, including a new set of changes this week.
• They're simplifying transfers with unlimited transfers in any direction for 3 hours, which will even allow people to do short errands round trip with one ticket.
• They now offer a Park-and-Ride lot at Space Center Houston as I suggested long ago, allowing tourists downtown (or connecting from elsewhere) to use transit to visit our most popular tourist attraction.
• Better technology options, including texting for next-bus timing, service alerts, and a better phone app.  Ticketing on your mobile phone is coming soon.

Labels: downtown, education, land-use regulation, MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, planning, TMC, tourism, transit, transit-oriented development

posted by Tory Gattis @ 8:14 PM 4 comments

610W express lane flaws, HSR terminal debate, maximizing opportunity circles, TX drains CA, and more

Apologies for not posting last week - the whole world seems to want to pack a month's worth of meetings and work into the first 2.5 weeks of December.  On to the big backlog of items:

• I attended TXDoT's public information meeting on the proposed 610W elevated express lanes (details), and as supportive of the idea as I am, I'm concerned about the details of this plan.  It would allow express elevated travel along four lanes from just north of I10 to just south of 59, but the problem is that they can only find space for single lane entrances and exits, which essentially cuts the throughput in half.  Hopefully someone can come up with some potential alternatives - let's hope so or I have trouble seeing good cost-benefit here.
• Speaking of traffic, here's the simple, universal solution: congestion pricing.  And it actually doubles throughput!

"As the paper shows, a freeway lane can typically move up to 2,000 vehicles per hour, but when traffic slows due to congestion, this can fall below 1,000 vehicles per hour. The net result is that road pricing can paradoxically double road capacities, thus giving everyone more options to get where they want to go, not less."

• Reason discusses the transit synergies of congestion-priced express lanes:

"From the perspective of a transit agency, an express toll lane provides it with an uncongested high-speed guideway at zero capital cost (other than the cost of the buses). And a seamless network of ETLs, as planned in most of these metro areas, provides transit with the infrastructure for region-wide express bus service—again, without the massive infrastructure cost that a rail system of comparable geographic extent would entail—if it could somehow find the umpteen billions of dollars to build such a rail network."

• The Dallas Morning News examines companies moving from CA to TX and asks "Is Texas the new California?"
• Scott Beyer in Forbes on "The Texas Medical Center: Houston's Medical Mini-City"
• Kinder: Houston one of the more affordable cities in the SunBelt.
• I also agree strongly with Kinder's call for instant-runoff voting.  It just makes so much sense.
• Pretty cool maps showing just how enormous the Grand Parkway is.  It could encircle DC and Baltimore *put together*. Or Dallas + Ft. Worth.  Or London. Or Mexico City (population 21 million!).
• Reason discusses new academic research on Commuting, Land-Use, and Urban Economic Productivity, which includes a discussion of "opportunity circles" that I started talking about here almost 10 years ago!  Excerpts:

"Much of today's urban transportation planning focuses on transit and "smart growth." According to this set of ideas, suburbanization (aka "sprawl") is bad and should be discouraged, while higher density is good and should be increased, so that "we can get people out of their cars" and do other good things like enabling lots more people to walk or bike to work. But what if this set of policies turned out to be a recipe for urban decline?
...
If their analysis is correct (and I think it is), much of current transportation and land use thinking is mistaken.
...
The main implication of this research is that "the more integrated metropolitan labor markets are, the more productive they are." And therefore transportation policies should promote:
- Speedier rather than slower commuting;
- More rather than less commuting; and,
- Longer rather than shorter commutes. 

These policies expand the "opportunity circles" of both employees and job-seekers. But they are the opposite of what those who are promoting "jobs-housing balance" try to achieve: to get people to work closer to where they live, accepting a convenient job rather than the best (most economically productive) job.
...
In order not to undercut metro area economic productivity, transportation and land-use policies should enable people and companies to maximize the size of their opportunity circles, by facilitating faster, longer-distance commuting. 

Everyone concerned with transportation and land-use policies should read these important papers."

Finally, a thought I had this week on the debate about terminating Texas high-speed rail at 290 and I10 vs. bringing it all the way into downtown: if you look at the most likely sources and destinations for HSR business riders, it's likely to be a zone from downtown out west through Uptown to Westchase and the Energy Corridor. The easiest and most central arrival and departure point is 290/10 at 610, not downtown. Forcing everybody to go downtown may actually suppress HSR ridership, especially for those going to/from the west side.

Labels: affordability, commuter rail, congestion pricing, economy, governance, high-speed rail, home affordability, infrastructure, mobility strategies, opportunity urbanism, smart growth, TMC, toll roads

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:50 PM 1 comments

Houston dominates America's growth corridors and makes the case for the world's highest standard of living

The Manhattan Institute has just released a new report by Joel Kotkin on "America's Growth Corridors", which outlines four key corridors that are still growing strongly in an otherwise anemic U.S. economy: the great plains, the Gulf coast, the inter-mountain west, and the manufacturing belt of the southeast.  Houston figures into the report quite prominently as the largest city among the four growth corridors.  If you don't want to read the whole pdf, I recommend searching on "Houston" to find the key elements.  Here are some of my favorite Houston excerpts:

In Houston, for example, the massive Texas Medical Center is now the largest concentration of medical facilities in the world. [It] now ranks as the country’s 12th-largest business district in terms of square feet, ahead of downtown Los Angeles, with plans to expand so that it will rival Philadelphia’s (the seventh-largest) in size by 2014. 

Houston, the clear center of the Third Coast economy, has emerged as one of the country’s megacities. Over the past decade, Houston has had one of the largest increases in employment of any major metropolitan area—up 15 percent between 2000 and 2011.
...
Houston, Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Tampa have seen stronger rates of growth in the numbers of educated people moving into their areas, more so than such cities as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco.
...
Houston and Dallas already have a higher rate of international immigration than such traditional magnets as Chicago, Washington, and Philadelphia. A recent Rice University study found that Houston now surpassed New York as the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse area. 

Today, Third Coast ports Brownsville, Tampa, and Houston have some of the highest rates of foreign immigration in the nation. Traditionally, this migration has come largely from Mexico and Latin America, but newcomers are increasingly arriving from Asia as well. Over the past decade, Houston’s Asian population has expanded by 160,000, or 70 percent, and the city is now home to the eighth-largest Asian population in the nation. Houston’s Asian migration is growing 50 percent faster than migration flows to such established Asian hubs as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
...
When adjusted for cost of living, wage earners in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, as well as most corridor cities, earn much more than residents of New York or Los Angeles.
...
This is particularly notable in Houston, which has had one of the strongest increases in manufacturing over the past decade of any major city
...
The region is now home to several of the country’s leading ports, led by Houston and New Orleans, which also boast the first- and second-fastest growth in custom district traffic among the top five districts, outpacing New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit.
...
In the future, many Third Coast ports will likely increase trade with Asia. The scheduled 2014 opening of an expanded Panama Canal, with double its current capacity, will likely shift some Asian trade from America’s West Coast ports to its Third Coast. Houston will likely benefit most; the city expects a 15 percent jump in Asian trade after the canal expansion project is complete. In contrast to ports in the Northeast and California, virtually all the Third Coast ports—and many on the southeast littoral as well—are in the process of large-scale expansions.

But, by far, the most important and interesting tidbit in the report is the chart at the bottom of page 15:


As you can see, Houston simply dominates it at #1 with $75k (!!).  DFW and Austin are a distant second and third at $63k, and they fall from there.  This is reinforced by a similar statistic in a recent City Journal article on the Texas Growth Machine (hat tip to Jessie), which notes:

"Adjusted for cost of living, Texas’s per-capita income is higher than California’s and nearly as high as New York’s. Factor in state and local taxes, and Texas pulls ahead of New York."

This further backs my argument that Houston has the highest standard of living in the U.S. (and likely the world) among major metros.

Of course the dominant factor in cost of living is housing, so this strongly validates Texas' free market approach allowing supply to meet demand (if avoiding the housing crash didn't already prove that point).  And Houston's very substantial $12k advantage over even other Texas cities points to the incredible value of no-zoning in keeping housing and other costs of living low (including commercial office and retail costs).  For more on how that works, check out my Opportunity Urbanism op-ed here.  And that leads me to end with this awesome graphic that I just love (hat tip to Josh).


UPDATE: I'm often sharing the linklove with CultureMap, but they're not sharing back :-(

Labels: affordability, demographics, economic strategy, economy, growth, home affordability, identity, land-use regulation, opportunity urbanism, port, rankings, TMC, world city, zoning

posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:20 PM 9 comments

The Ultimate Houston Strategy

Labels: Astrodome, economic strategy, education, highlights, identity, infrastructure, NASA, TMC, tourism, world city

posted by Tory Gattis @ 9:59 PM 9 comments

Next great global health hub, TX vs. Midwest, luxury buses vs. trains, and more

Another stack of smaller misc items this week:

• Very unfortunately, Metro's future is almost certainly going to be the same as Denver and most other transit agencies in America: Build Trains = Raise Fares + Cut Bus Service.  It's the clearest case of "the emperor has no clothes" that I've ever seen.  Everybody can clearly see the long-term financial train wreck Metro is embarking on, but they all just shrug their shoulders and nobody tries to stop it.  So frustrating and sad.  So many better things could be done for the city with that money.  Any brave officials out there to rally the cause of Houston's long-term transportation future?

UPDATE 8/25: Bill King's excellent Chronicle op-ed today - "Metro federal rail funding is resting on shaky ground" and BlogHouston recap.

• From the UN Dispatch: “Houston, We Have a Solution.” Why The Texas City Could Be the Next Great Global Health Hub.  An excerpt:

Nope. Those places are major global health hubs for sure. But the emerging story is further south. In Houston, Texas to be precise. 

Houston is well-known for the Texas Medical Center (TMC), which is comprised of 49 institutions and describes itself as the largest medical center in the world. The Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative is highly regarded for its leading role in the global fight against HIV/AIDS. Beyond HIV/AIDS however, Houston hasn’t really featured prominently on the global health community’s radar. 

That is about to change.

• Joel Kotkin defends Texas against the detractors that have come out of the woodwork since Rick Perry announced for President.  He's not as big a fan of Rick, but he makes a strong case for the state's very successful model.
• The Wall Street Journal also has an interesting op-ed on how the Texas model beat the Midwest model:
  
  To understand the political economy of the Midwest, it helps to put it in historic perspective. Originally the Midwest's economy was built on its farms, then later on its factories. The long farm-to-factory migration lasted from roughly 1890 to 1970. At the end of that period, when I was working on the first edition of "The Almanac of American Politics," it seemed there were two models for the U.S. future. One was the Michigan model, which prevailed in the industrial Midwest and the factory towns of the Great Plains. The other was the Texas model, which prevailed in most of the South and Southwest.
  
  The Michigan model was based on the Progressive/New Deal assumption that, after the transition from farm to factory, the best way to secure growth was through big companies and big labor unions.
  ...
  The idea that the wave of the future is an ever-larger public sector financed by a more or less stagnant private sector looks increasingly absurd. The Midwest's public sector has, as Margaret Thatcher put it, run on "other people's money." Meanwhile, Mr. Obama's trip to the Midwest has been preceded by Texas Gov. Rick Perry's foray into Waterloo, Iowa. Mr. Perry points out that his state, with low taxes and light regulation, has been producing nearly half of America's new jobs. The Texas model may be sweeping the Midwest, not vice versa.
  
  
• HGAC has put together a video on the regionally coordinated transportation plan here.  It's the most exciting, amazing video you will ever watch.  Or maybe not.  In fact, quite possibly the opposite. But they do deserve kudos for reaching out beyond the typical public information meeting.
• Reason's Surface Transportation Innovations newsletter surveys some strong data on how inter-city buses continue to challenge Amtrak - and make high-speed rail plans expensive boondoggles.  What I can't figure out is why none of them have set up in the Texas Triangle yet?
• The Urbanophile also touts how awesome the Megabus inter-city model is, and why the arguments against it are bogus.  Did I mention I can't wait for the Texas Triangle to get it?...

Finally, a gorgeous video of the lights of LA.  Watch it full size if you can.  Somebody should definitely do something similar for Houston.  Any ambitious aspiring videographers out there?...


LA Light from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

Labels: economic strategy, economy, high-speed rail, Metro, mobility strategies, rail, TMC, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:47 PM 0 comments

Dropping JV crime, new flights, Metro press, nanomedicine, and more

A few smaller and mid-sized items:

• A story on the dramatic one-third drop in juvenile crime since 1997.  My theory: the rise and now ubiquity of the internet, cell phones, and video game consoles have got to be a big factor here.  Youth don't get bored and cause mischief as much anymore - there's always something entertaining to do close at hand.  Or with texting, IM and social networking, they're always informed of the latest social events to go join.  While I don't think a continuous stream of novelty/entertainment/socializing is the ideal way to grow up, it's better than some of the darker alternatives like drugs and crime.
• A YouTube video visualization of planned improvements to the 290-610-10 interchange.  They can't happen soon enough.  Hat tip to Gonzalo.  And here's a video on the plans for BW8 and 290, along with the new Hempstead Tollway.
• Some of my long-time readers probably know I'm also a bit of an aviation nerd, so I got pretty excited by the Continental announcements of new 787 service from IAH to both New Zealand and Nigeria in the fall of 2011 (once they get the planes).  Nigeria is all about the oil industry, but New Zealand is all about the feed to and from Star Alliance partner hubs at each end: Air New Zealand to points all over NZ and Australia, and Continental to the eastern US, Latin America, and even Europe.  The only other US service to Australia or New Zealand is from California, but Houston can offer a lot more connections than LA or SF can.  I was a little disappointed Continental is not offering thru-service from IAH to Sydney with a stop in Auckland, but evidently it's a crew-rest issue (you'll be able to easily connect on Air New Zealand).  I also understand that the schedules allow them to use just three 787s to provide a circulation of flights covering both destinations (usually it would require four, since each leg is over 12 hours).  Anyway, all in all it's pretty cool and a nice feather-in-the-cap for Houston (take that, DFW!), as is this designation from the press release:

"With the addition of flights to Africa, Houston will become one of just four cities in the world - and the only city in the Western Hemisphere - to have nonstop service to every inhabited continent on the globe."

Well, that's if you assume New Zealand is part of the Australian continent, which is debatable, but I'll buy it.  For the curious, the other three cities with similar service are Doha, Dubai, and Johannesburg.

• The Austin American-Statesman reports on Metro's problems and how they're factoring against Bill White in the governor's race.  White was pretty hands-on early on in his administration, and I was a big fan when he converted some of the planned lines to cheaper BRT (which were unfortunately later switched back to LRT), but then it didn't seem to be high on his priority list after that.  The Houston Press also has a cover story on the "Train Wreck" at Metro, although there may be some errors of fact (see the comments).
• A story on Houston's rapidly developing Nanomedicine industry (hat tip to Justin). Excerpts:

Houston’s position as a hub for nanomedical research has also spawned a number of startup spinoffs in the private sector, including Leonardo Biosystems, with which Ferrari is affiliated. The company is developing a technique to deliver drugs that would fight refractory breast cancer.

The Texas Medical Center continues to grow and provide great high-tech diversification from energy, space, and the port for the Houston economy.

Finally, I've mentioned before that I also have a companion blog at the Chronicle called Opportunity Urbanist.  Some of you may be interested in a new series I've started running over there on Friday afternoons where I re-post (and occasionally update) highlight posts from the archives at Houston Strategies.  I've started at the beginning in mid-2005, and am moving forward from there.  You'd be amazed how many readers front page placement on Chron.com can bring in...

Labels: aviation, crime reduction, economy, Metro, TMC, transportation plan

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:39 PM 11 comments

Toll plans, TMC problems, empty nesters, Ashby regs

Yet again I've let the backlog of smaller items get too large, so I'm going to have to break them up into a couple of posts.

• If you missed it, here's my reaction over at my Chronicle Opportunity Urbanism blog to the front page story on the survey desiring more land-use regulation, mainly based on the stream of Ashby high-rise stories over the last two years. Also, Kendall Miller of HRG has an excellent response letter in the Chronicle (4th letter down).
• A cold splash of reality from a recent Wall Street Journal article on urban living without a car:
  

...demographers and economists have predicted that many aging baby boomers would opt for smaller, easier-to-manage dwellings once their children left home. Those predictions helped spur a surge in loft and condominium developments in many U.S. cities, as well as efforts to develop so-called walkable communities.

So far, the bet hasn't paid off. "The developers that anticipated a big increase in condominium living in center cities are sorely disappointed," says Gary Engelhardt, a professor at Syracuse University who's studied the influence of boomers on the housing market. The housing bust has led many people who might have sold their suburban homes to stay put. But even when the market recovers, Mr. Engelhardt says, "I don't foresee a massive movement back in center cities for older individuals."

Why not? From what I've heard, it's what you'd expect: not only do empty-nesters have deep ties to their current suburban community (church, friends, etc.), but they also want a home big enough to welcome their children and grandchildren for frequent visits.

• While listening to a pros vs. cons lecture on the potential Rice-Baylor merger, I heard about this recent article in Nature on the financial troubles in the Texas Medical Center.
• More on the Med Center: NY Times Sunday in-depth piece on MD Anderson cancer hospital here in Houston.
• If you're interested in HCTRA's long-term plans for new toll road projects, they're detailed here, including a nifty map (pdf is best for detail). Hat tip to Triton at HAIF.

UPDATE: Evidently the Fairmont Parkway has been taken off the current version of that map. Details here. It implies they may do it non-tolled. I hope they definitely keep the RoW here for a future freeway at some point. Tolled or not, it will be needed, if only to take some of the load off of overcrowded 45S. And the population out there is exploding. It's a great alternative to the waterfront and one of the Port terminals. Hat tip to Eric for the update.

The rest next week.

Labels: demographics, land-use regulation, TMC, toll roads

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:14 PM 0 comments