Houston Strategies

Houston Metro vs. Dallas DART: Houston wins as costly light rail nearly destroys DART

Labels: autonomous vehicles, commuter rail, Metro, mobility strategies, public debt, rail, transit

posted by Max Concrete @ 9:32 PM 0 comments

The Benefits of Congestion Relief

The Antiplanner has an excellent post that deserves its own dedicated post over here because it gets at what's wrong with one of the most pernicious fallacies regarding highway congestion relief. Key excerpts (bold highlights mine):

"Data published by the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory a few months ago reveals some of the benefits of congestion relief that resulted from the COVID pandemic. I’ve used 2019 data in the past to show that residents of U.S. urban areas can reach far more jobs in a 20-minute auto drive than a 60-minute transit trip. The latest data for 2021 reveal that the number of jobs reachable by transit or bicycle was about 9 percent greater in 2021 than 2019, but the number reachable by a 20-minute auto drive was 66 percent greater.

On average, over 50 urban areas and for trips of 10 to 60 minutes, auto users were able to reach 48 percent more jobs in 2021 than in 2019. Solid lines show 2021 and dotted lines show 2019.

The Texas Transportation Institute documents that congestion in U.S. urban areas dramatically rose between 1982 and 2019. The average number of hours of delay imposed on individual commuters grew by nine times. This growth was because many cities had made a deliberate decision not to try to relieve congestion under the argument that increased capacity simply leads to more driving.

The response to this should have been: So what? Very little driving is frivolous. Instead, most of it is people trying to get to work, school, shopping, health care, friends and relatives, or recreation activities. Then there are trucks moving freight, bringing construction materials and services to work sites, and so forth. Anything that results in more such travel is a good thing because it means more economic activity, more income for people, and more access to better housing, lower-cost consumer goods, and other benefits. The sign of failure is if the new road capacity isn’t used, not if it is.

...

Since 1992, the earliest year data are available, U.S. transportation agencies spent more than $320 billion ($420 billion in today’s dollars) constructing and reconstructing rail transit

On the other hand, if cities had spent even a quarter of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on rail transit projects since 1992 on highway improvements instead, the congestion relief those improvements would have provided would have allowed far more economic activity, giving low-income people access to better jobs and everyone access to more affordable housing and other benefits. Like most wars, the war on the automobile has done far more economic harm than the negligible benefits it provided."

Labels: commuter rail, costs of congestion, infrastructure, mobility strategies, rail

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:10 PM 6 comments

Transit in crisis, great train robberies, NIMBYs are killing America, why 15-min cities are flawed, and more

 Just clearing out some backlogged misc items this week:

• WSJ: Public Transit Goes Off the Rails With Fewer Riders, Dwindling Cash, Rising Crime - When riders stop taking subways and buses, it’s harder to keep up service. ‘It’s becoming a vicious cycle.’
• Matthew Yglesias: American transit agencies should prioritize ridership over other goals - It's the only way to get costs under control. Hear, hear METRO! This might sound like "stating the obvious" to the lay reader, but transit agencies get pulled into all sorts of alternative goals from prestige rail and BRT projects to geographic coverage, regardless of whether or not ridership justifies the cost. Hat tip to the anonymous commenter that sent me this.
• Kotkin: The Great Train Robbery:

"Much of the national media, in chorus with urban political and economic leaders, have been pushing these train-focused approaches since the days of Jimmy Carter. The stated aim is usually to move Americans away from their supposedly evil and pernicious love of the private automobile. Americans drive not because they irrationally love cars—although some do—but because it is simply by far the best way to get around. 

We know this because for the most part, train-heavy investments have reaped little in terms of riders and virtually no reduction in auto usage. Indeed, even before the pandemic, transit ridership, despite the creation of new lines, was sagging. Since then transit has continued and accelerated its decline. By the end of 2022, the transit market share had fallen 50%. Today, despite the end of the pandemic, that number has barely moved at all. It is into this fading market share that the current administration and much of the political class now wants to throw its money."

• Speaking of rail follies, I really wanted the private Brightline train from Vegas to outside LA to work, but this piece makes a devastating economic case. Bottom line: travelers will be able to fly from SoCal airports closer to where they live (than the Victorville end-station) for the same price or cheaper, or if they drive it will only take a half-hour longer than the train while saving the train ticket and taxis/Ubers getting around Vegas. Who's going to ride it given those alternatives?
• Fortune: It’s bigger than the housing crisis: An influential economist just blamed NIMBYs for American decline, and Elon Musk agrees.

“The country can no longer afford this form of “shadow subsidy,” Smith argues. If America continues on this path, standing by the “build-nothing” mindset, then the middle class will slip into “genteel poverty” and America will lose its leading position in the global economy, he claimed indirectly, albeit poetically: “Someone else will build the future on the bones of our civilization.”  

He urged America to slash the “thicket of red tape” around development, and it seems the world’s richest man agrees.”

• A takedown of the 15-minute city concept:

"If 15-minute cities were so great, we would still be living in them. But as soon as people got cars, they moved out of them and used their new-found mobility to get better housing, better jobs, and a wider variety of low-cost consumer goods.

Every city in America is a 15-minute city if you take automobiles into account. Thanks to automobiles, the typical U.S. urban resident lives within 15 minutes of more than 100,000 jobs, several different supermarkets that compete hard for their business, one or two shopping malls, parks and other recreation facilities, a variety of health care facilities, friends and relatives, and many other potential destinations and activities. Even the densest cities in the world can’t provide that kind of variety and opportunity within 15 minutes on foot."

Labels: commuter rail, high-speed rail, land-use regulation, Metro, mobility strategies, perspectives, rail, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:12 PM 3 comments

What the Katy Managed Lanes tell us about the NHHIP 45N expansion project

Labels: commuter rail, congestion pricing, MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, rail, toll roads, transit, transportation plan

posted by Max Concrete @ 5:32 PM 4 comments

HTX tops for millennials, startups, and middle-class home affordability; Houspitality support, highway vs. rail cost-benefit

So a sad week here at Houston Strategies: I have a draft post where I keep ideas for future posts.  It had gotten quite long over the last 14 years, with tons of good thoughts and links whenever I had time to get to them.  Well, that all came to a crashing end last week when I discovered a Blogger quirk: if you open a post, paste in some content, realize it's not formatted right and accidentally hit Undo twice, it *wipes out the entire post* then auto-saves the blank version (and unlike Google Docs, Blogger does not keep a version history of posts).  Then I unwisely compounded the error trying to close the browser tab before the auto-save instead of just hitting the redo button.  Regardless, it's all gone now - 14 years of potential post ideas... 😳😢

Moving on to this week's items... lots of kudos for Houston this week!

• An excerpt supporting the Houspitality brand in this month's GHP Economy at a Glance report:

"The region also has a reputation for welcoming newcomers, whether they’re from New York or New Zealand...a global city, with 90 consulates, two international airports, the second busiest seaport in the nation, and nearly 1,000 foreign-owned companies with HTX ops"

• Houston No. 1 Among Millennials New Study Finds:

"Houston ranked among the top three cities in several specific areas, including diversity, ease of meeting new people, fair income taxes, everyday expenses, salary potential and amenities for children."

More details here, including some cool comparative graphs (hat tip to George). Houston is a pretty dominant #1, notably ahead of #2 Atlanta and #3 Dallas in the overall value graph (also notably ahead of #5 Austin!).

• Houston gets the job done as one of the country's best cities to start a business
• Houston named the most affordable housing market for the middle class
• Reason: What If Highway Expansion Made America Better Off? "In nearly all cases, they found that the annual benefits were greater than the annualized costs."
• A Tale of Two Train Disasters: Denver FasTracks and California HSR.  Introductory excerpt:

"In 2004, Denver-area voters approved a sale tax increase to pay for “FasTracks,” a plan to build 119 miles of rail transit lines in the metropolitan area. In 2008, California voters approved the sale of bonds to pay for the construction of a 520-mile high-speed rail line between Los Angeles/Anaheim and San Francisco/San Jose. FasTracks is within a metropolitan area and high-speed rail is supposed to connect several metropolitan areas, yet there are a lot of similarities between these two projects. 

Both rely on technologies that were rendered obsolete years before they received voter approval. The agencies sponsoring both projects ignored early warning signals that the projects were not cost effective. Both had large cost overruns. Advocates of both lied to voters about the benefits and costs of the projects. Due to poor planning, both projects remain incomplete. Despite the failure of the projects to date, both have adherents who hope to complete them."

Labels: affordability, commuter rail, costs of congestion, entrepreneurship, high-speed rail, home affordability, identity, mobility strategies, rail, rankings, talent, world city

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:16 PM 2 comments

METRONext 2040 Transit Plan Should be Affordable, Adaptable, and Designed for the Future

Today's guest post is from Houston Freeway's Oscar Slotboom as a followup to my recent post on the early draft MetroNext plan.
How can very limited available public transit funds be used to achieve maximum benefit for the Houston area? I suggest that the guiding principle should be designing for the future, not the past.

The Past

Light rail is very expensive and very slow, with new mileage likely to cost in the range of $150-200 million per mile. Commuter rail (expected to be under the authority of an agency other than Metro) is expensive and slow, costing at least $50 million per mile. Both are fixed, inflexible and usable only by trains.

	Miles per hour	Cost
Metro Red Line	13.6	$143 million/mile (2013 extension)
Metro Green Line	12.3	Approx. $154 million/mile (2015)
Metro Purple Line	13.5	Approx. $154 million/mile
USA average light rail speed	15.8
USA average commuter rail speed	32
Houston 2015 commuter rail study Cost Estimates		$48 million/mile outside the loop $45-99 million/mile from Northwest Mall to downtown depending on route
Metro 222 Grand Parkway Park and Ride	44 (to first stop downtown) 33 (to last stop)
Northwest Freeway Expansion, including 1 reversible HOV and the massive Loop 610 interchange ($2.5 billion for 38 miles, with $1.27 billion for construction)		$66 million per mile Typical cost per lane of concrete: $6.5 million/mile Equivalent cost of 2-lane BRT (pavement only, no stations or buses) $13 million/mile

This table tells us three important facts

• Concrete roadway is vastly less expensive than rail
• The fastest transit service is achieved by bus-on-concrete express bus service with limited stops
• Light rail is extremely slow, suitable only for short distance travel like 5 miles or less.

The Future: More Job Dispersion

HGAC projections show the percentage of jobs inside Loop 610 will drop to 16.6% by 2045.

Employment, millions (HGAC, January 2018)
	2015		2045		Change
Region	3.2	100%	4.8	100%
Inside Loop 610	0.66	20.6%	0.79	16.6%	-4.0
Loop-BW8	0.85	26.6%	1.34	28.2%	+1.6
BW8-Grand Parkway	1.18	36.9%	1.82	38.2%	+1.3
Outside Grand Parkway	0.51	15.9%	0.81	17.0%	+1.1

This tells us that:

• A downtown-centric mass transit system will serve a declining percentage of overall regional travel, and the need to serve so-called long and thin routes (i.e. routes with low ridership) to points outside downtown will increase.  
• We don’t need more high capacity transit, but instead need more routes that can be affordably operated to more destinations with low rider counts at high service levels. 
• Transit technologies of the past cannot affordably meet the future need.

Transportation of the Future is Taking Shape Today

While the future of autonomous vehicles and their impact remain speculative, recent reports detail impressive progress.

• Google’s Waymo test program has logged more than 8 million miles of its vehicles driving in the fully autonomous mode in Phoenix, with around 400 people participating in the program for their daily transportation needs. An excerpt: (emphasis added)

"If self-driving cars make ride-hailing cheaper and more convenient, the research suggests, it could take a wrecking ball to public transportation. Strangely, the head of Phoenix’s public transportation agency agrees with that assessment.

'It will absolutely happen,' says Scott Smith, Valley Metro’s CEO. 'But I’m not scared, I’m excited. There will be a reduction in bus use, in subway use in some areas, but expanded use in others. This is real. We’ve got to be a part of it.'”

• Wired reports on Phoenix's efforts to keep public transportation relevant with coming automated transportation services

• Zoox (with impressive video report) is developing an all-electric robot taxi which is potentially highly suitable for transit service. The vehicle travels in both directions and can move sideways with its four-wheel steering. It is being tested in downtown San Francisco, and Zoox is among only three firms (along with Waymo and GM’s Cruise) that are currently known to be well-along in urban testing.

• At least 6 other major efforts are in progress (see chart), which currently are reported to be less far along than Waymo, GM Cruise and Zoox.

Being Adaptable to Whatever the Future May Bring

While decentralization of employment is virtually certain in the future, the impact of new technology on public transit is unknown but could but be hugely disruptive, potentially substantially reducing demand for traditional public transit. 

That’s why we need a plan which is adaptable to whatever the future may bring.

For future planning purposes and MetroNext, it really does not matter if autonomous vehicles become available in 5 years or decades in the future. Anything built in the MetroNext plan can be expected to be in service to the year 2100 and beyond. MetroNext needs to be ready for autonomous transit, if and when it comes, but also maximize mobility benefits of transit investments if autonomous transit is slow to develop or has a minimal impact.

• Scenario 1: A future with minimal influence of autonomous vehicles

In this case we need to serve dispersing employment with expanded service to more job centers at an affordable cost. Low-cost designs will maximize the number of these routes.

What we need: Concrete pavement for an expanded network of HOT lanes for buses and HOV

• Scenario 2: A future where autonomous vehicles and traditional transit coexist, each serving different segments of the market

In this case we can envision traditional transit serving mainly a few high-volume destinations such as downtown, but most other transit will be served with public or private autonomous vehicles.
 
What we need: Transit facilities designed to be used by autonomous vehicles, as these vehicles may start on regular streets, then enter a dedicated transit guideway for a segment, then switch to a HOT lane, then return to regular streets

• Scenario 3:  A future where autonomous transit vehicles are affordable and widely available, drastically lowering the demand for traditional public transit

In this case the focus of transportation agencies may totally change, perhaps with public transit agencies subsidizing fleets of autonomous vehicles to serve low-income communities, and perhaps shifting their focus to build and maintain autonomous vehicle guideways to provide premium high-speed service for robot transit taxis.

What we need: Transit investments that won’t go to waste when demand for traditional public transit collapses. We need transit facilities that are readily usable by autonomous vehicles and regular (non-transit) automobiles.

Implications for MetroNext

Metro could have as little as only $1 to $2.8 billion available for capital projects in the next 20 years. If new light rail costs $175 million per mile, that money could be burned up with only 6 to 16 miles of light rail. We can and must do much better.

The need for a transit system which is affordable, adaptable and ready for future leads to these conclusions and guiding principles:

• Rail-based fixed guideways are totally useless for use by autonomous vehicles

• Rail-based public transit, particularly light rail, is obscenely expensive and will likely suffer from low ridership, like we’re seeing on the Green and Purple lines

• New rail mileage should be eliminated or minimized in MetroNext

• Pavement-based transit is much less expensive to build than rail-based transit, is better-suited to serving future needs, and is adaptable to meet future autonomous vehicle needs

• All new transit facilities should be pavement-based and designed to be used by autonomous transit vehicles. This may mean design features such as frequent entry/exit points, and through-lanes on bus rapid transit guideways at stations

• MetroNext Plan B (or similar plan) should be adopted, since it is least expensive and most compatible with future needs and technology  

• Due to Metro’s limited financial resources, Metro should partner with TxDOT to build key transit links in our future system. TxDOT will do the financial heavy lifting, minimizing the cost to Metro, but full political support from Metro and the City of Houston will be needed.

Partnerships with TxDOT

Click for full size

• Interstate 10 Katy Freeway between the West Loop and downtown

Both Metro Plans A and B show BRT on this section. On the west end of this section are the existing Katy Managed Lanes, and on the east side new express lanes are planned as part of the downtown reconstruction project. These two sections of managed/express lanes need to be connected.

This section needs to be expanded, with four new MaX lanes and possibly a separate BRT as included in the Metro plans. I can envision a potential plan where the current westbound lanes are converted to MaX and BRT lanes, with new main lanes built on the north side.

• Interstate 69 Southwest Freeway, Uptown/Gulfton area to downtown split

Metro’s plan A shows BRT on this corridor and plan B shows a “partnership project”. This section is currently under preliminary study by TxDOT, and this corridor should be widened to add four MaX lanes and potentially BRT.

• West Loop

MetroNext has no new plans for this corridor, since the Post Oak bus lanes will open soon. TxDOT has proposed four express lanes on this corridor.

The express lanes should be designed to be usable by automated transit vehicles which need to pass through this congested area. This will involve connections at both ends, and possibly a third express lane in each direction for exclusive use by transit and automated vehicles.

Future Vision

MaX Lanes as proposed by Tory are ideally suited to provide the kind of service needed in the future. We can envision a future with buses, automated transit vehicles and HOV using regular streets, MaX lanes and dedicated transit guideways to serve a vastly expanded range of transit routes with high levels of service at speeds much faster than traditional transit.

Click for full size

Labels: autonomous vehicles, commuter rail, MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, rail, transit, transportation plan

posted by Max Concrete @ 4:07 PM 1 comments

The genius of Houston deed restrictions, micro-transit solution to rail fail, tech to end traffic, top rankings and more

My featured item this week is another in Nolan Gray's excellent series at Market Urbanism on Houston's unique and free market land-use regulation: The Case for Subsidizing Deed Restrictions, which Houston does with a City legal department enforcing them.  Highly recommend reading the whole thing, but he ends with this great conclusion:

"This is the genius of Houston’s unique system: Let those with strong preferences for tight restrictions have them and the city as a whole can go on operating under a largely liberal land-use regime. There is a valuable lesson here for other cities: when attempting to liberalize land-use regulations, consider strengthening the private (subdivision deed restrictions) and public (stricter local rules subject to local consensus) mechanisms whereby the most powerful opponents of liberalization can simply opt out. Houston figured this out in 1965 and again deployed this strategy to great effect in the 1998 subdivision regulation overhaul. In relationships as in city planning, sometimes you have to give a little to get a little."

Hear hear! Moving on to this week's items:

• Bill King - After Spending Over $2 Billion on Light Rail, Metro is Carrying Fewer Riders.  Great piece with a strong conclusion that will make you shake your head:

"In the meantime think about this.  What could we have done instead with the $2.2 billion that was spent on light rail?  The answer is lots.  Like solving most of our flooding problem or resurfacing virtually every street in the street in the City or repairing our dilapidated wastewater system or putting more police officers on the streets or demolishing some of the thousands of dangerous buildings in the City or any one of dozens of other critical priorities facing the City. 

The question is not whether light rail is a good thing or not.  The question is whether it was the best use of $2.2 billion of taxpayer money.  The answer to that question is pretty clearly, “No.”

• Building on that: 

"According to the American Public Transportation Association, the average speed of rapid rail (a.k.a. heavy rail) is just 20 mph, while the average speed of rapid bus is less than 11 mph. 

According to the 2016 National Transit Database, the nation’s fastest heavy-rail line is BART, which averages 35 mph. Atlanta’s is 31 and Washington’s is 27, while New York City subways average just 18 mph. Considering that most transit riders also have to take time getting to and from transit stations, none of these can compete effectively with door-to-door driving, which in San Antonio averages 33 mph."

• So what should METRO do differently instead?  Here's a must-read: How micro-transit could improve mass transit. Excerpt:

"For decades, cities have overseen transit monopolies that use heavy infrastructure, fixed routes and set schedules, under the premise that these will spur surrounding growth. And in many cities, they have. But thanks to the rise of the gig economy, workers often find themselves making multiple trips in a given day, and public transit has proven inflexible — unable to get them from point A to point B in a timely manner, or at all. As a result, even densifying cities have seen declining ridership. 

Contrast that with private transit, which has grown in success by pursuing “microtransit.” This model stresses malleable routes, on-demand service, smaller vehicles and minimal brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Companies include the bus services Via and Chariot; the ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft; and the bike-share services Zagster and LimeBike. Their flexibility lets them locate where demand exists, rather than counting on populations to come to them.
...
Indeed, these new microtransit companies could increase the flexibility of  transit, creating systems that are complicated yet smart, not orderly but dumb."

• Houston lands questionable No. 2 spot on list of America's most diverse cities
• Stanford Business: An End to Traffic Jams? It Might Not Be a Dream - Three new technologies could end the nightmare of commuting (congestion pricing, on-demand carpooling, autonomous vehicles)
• Houston #1 for minority entrepreneurs

Finally, building on last week's post, it turns out that not only does Houston employ more people inside its city limits than larger city Chicago, it even employs more than much larger Los Angeles!  Reasons: I'd guess good annexation and multiple major job centers. Again hat tip and graphics credit to George.  Click to enlarge.

Labels: autonomous vehicles, commuter rail, congestion pricing, deed restrictions, economy, entrepreneurship, land-use regulation, market urbanism, Metro, mobility strategies, rail, rankings, transit

posted by Tory Gattis @ 5:32 PM 3 comments

My interview on Houston's transportation future, our traffic is better and housing more affordable than you think, and more

Apologies for going almost a month without a new post.  The big new item is my interview with KPRC Channel 2 on Houston’s transportation future that finally aired this week, promoting MaX Lanes of course.  I start at the 2:29 point after Kyle Shelton from the Kinder Institute at Rice. On camera is not my strength, but I think it came out ok.  Oddly, they also included a separate 5m video with my complete raw interview (including some stuff that honestly should be outtakes), but the benefit is it includes many more of my points, as awkward as it is.  It was quite loud next to the freeway, and they were yelling questions from a good distance away.  Kyle also has his 26m raw interview video where he makes some great points.

Ok, getting to the backlog of smaller items:

• This is really encouraging! Houston population growth fueling expansion of commuter bus options. Great quote from Christof:

"Any rail system we build will not stop at the corner of McKinney and Main," said Metro board member Christof Spieler. "We are talking about a service that is better than commuter rail."

• The Antiplanner on transit ridership declines and the futility of rail building:

"Eventually, driverless cars are going to completely replace transit. Until that happens, it makes sense to only spend money on transit buses, which are inexpensive, flexible, can start new service tomorrow, and don’t require 30 years of debt payments. That’s a lesson most major American cities have yet to learn."

• Houston is much less traffic congested than you think according to the new INRIX study.  And getting better. At least relatively speaking.  We dropped to #37 in the world, and ten cities in America are worse than us, despite us being the 5th biggest metro area.  That's good vindication for our aggressive freeway building strategy.

"You Can Build Your Way out of Congestion 

Los Angeles is still the most congested urban area in the world, according to the latest INRIX traffic scorecard. However, what is more interesting is that congestion seems to be declining in several fast-growing cities in Texas, thanks to construction of new highways. 

Dallas is twice as big as Seattle and Houston is three times as big. The Dallas and Houston urban areas are both growing nearly twice as fast as Seattle’s, but Seattle is concentrating its growth in the city while Dallas and Houston allow more people to settle in the suburbs. INRIX found that congestion was worse in Seattle than either Dallas or Houston, which was a direct result of Washington’s growth-management policies. 

Moreover, while INRIX’s congestion index for Seattle — and most other cities — grew worse since last year’s scorecard, the congestion indices for Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso all improved."

• Hugh Pavletich (Christchurch, New Zealand) and COU Senior Fellow Wendell Cox published the 14th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, which evaluates house prices in relation to incomes (the “median multiple”) in nearly 300 metropolitan areas in 9 countries.  Houston has a reasonably affordable multiple of 3.7 with a median price $234k and a median household income $63k.
• Inclusionary Zoning Flops in Portland. It basically crashed their new construction rate.
• Is Zoning Popular? The Evidence is Weak - Market Urbanism
• Houston #2 metro for corporate growth.  Hat tip to George.
• Autonomous Cars Are About To Transform The Suburbs - Joel Kotkin

That's enough for this week - more next.

Labels: affordability, autonomous vehicles, commuter rail, companies, growth, home affordability, MaX Lanes, mobility strategies, rail, rankings, transit, zoning

posted by Tory Gattis @ 6:04 PM 5 comments

Two choices for Houston's transit future (Chronicle op-ed)

The Houston Chronicle featured my op-ed as the lead in their Sunday edition Opinion section yesterday.  Since I've had problems with the reliability of the Chronicle archives in the past (especially after a few years pass), I've included the full text below.  Looking forward to your thoughts in the comments!

Two choices for Houston’s transit future

As both H-GAC and Metro prepare new long-term transit plans, Houston is facing a critical decision point between two paths that will determine our transportation future for decades to come – and whether we continue to thrive and grow as a global city or we become another gridlocked, unaffordable LA.

The first path - sometimes called for by local officials - is the traditional approach of adding rail as cities grow beyond a certain size, with New York, Washington DC, Chicago, and San Francisco being the largest examples.  This is not only extremely expensive to build – New York is spending $2.7 billion per mile on the Second Avenue Subway – but expensive to maintain, with massive maintenance backlogs causing well-publicized chronic service problems in New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco. Even worse, it turns out adding rail to sprawling Sunbelt cities built in the automobile age has been a costly failure almost everywhere, including recent bad press on Dallas DART’s high costs and low ridership, Denver’s $4.7 billion FasTracks, and LA’s $9 billion rail investment leading to overall transit ridership declines.  If LA - with twice our density, far worse traffic congestion, and perfect walking/waiting weather - can’t make massive rail investments pay off, what chance does Houston have?

Beyond these issues, traditional transit is facing the same technological disruption as many other industries with the imminent arrival of autonomous vehicles.  Shared ride services like Uber and Lyft are already causing broad transit ridership declines across the country, and estimates are that their prices could drop even further to $0.35/mile once they go autonomous in the 2020s. Despite the high risk of building obsolete and costly white elephants with taxpayer dollars, some cities continue to plunge obliviously into this technological buzz saw with obscenely expensive old-school rail plans like $54 billion in Seattle, $5.2 billion in Nashville, and $10+ billion in Honolulu ($10,500 per Oahu resident!).  And we’re not immune to the insanity: some of the rail plans under consideration for Houston could easily run into several tens of billions of dollars.

So what’s a second path that rides this disruptive technological wave rather than drowns under it? There are hints of it in the Chronicle’s recent coverage of Metro’s commuter bus expansions and the Downtown Management District’s ‘Metro MAX’ proposal of two-way HOV-lane bus service connecting more than a dozen major job centers.  Houston is a dispersed city with many major job centers besides Downtown – like Uptown, the Texas Medical Center, Greenway, Energy Corridor, Westchase, Memorial City, etc. - needing commuter services that would be poorly served by a downtown-centric rail network feeding less than 7% of the area’s jobs.

Taking it to the next level would be our proposal of an expanded network of two-way Managed eXpress (MaX) freeway lanes connecting every job center to every neighborhood.  These lanes would be explicitly managed to move the maximum number of people at maximum speed, including converting to autonomous-only when the technology becomes available.  At that point, vehicles can run safely at much higher speeds while platooning more closely together to increase capacity. These lanes are far more cost-effective and flexible than rail, and we estimate that such a network could support a million commuters to a million jobs Houston’s core job centers – more core jobs than any other city in the country outside of Manhattan.

But what’s the experience like for the actual commuter?  With rail, it’s infrequent service (big capacity = longer waits to fill) with many intermediate stops, averaging 25-35 mph dropping you far from your workplace and requiring time-consuming walks or transfers in all sorts of weather.  With MaX Lanes you may be in a comfortable public or private Park-and-Ride bus or a smaller shared commuter vehicle that picks you up along with others in your neighborhood going to the same job center (such custom vehicles may even have private compartments).  As they enter the MaX Lanes, they go into autonomous “auto-pilot” mode (if they’re not already) and accelerate to high speeds – possibly as high as 100+mph! (can you imagine the global publicity for Houston and our image if we’re the first city on the planet to offer affordable 100+mph daily commuter services?!)  They then go nonstop to your job center wherever it may be, where they exit and circulate to get you right to your building – no transfers and no risk of walking or waiting in summer heat or downpours.  A faster, better experience at a far lower cost – it’s no contest.

Historically, Houston has always been comfortable ignoring the conventional wisdom and going our own pragmatic way - like being the largest city in the country without zoning and building an extensive HOV/HOT bus lane network instead of costly, inflexible, and slow commuter rail.  We should continue that iconoclastic tradition and publicly embrace the next generation of transit instead of chasing flashy, over-priced, ineffective rail projects like other cities (and put the savings towards flood control!).

Two paths forward – one looking to the past and one looking to the future. The choice is ours.

Tory Gattis is a Founding Senior Fellow with the Center for Opportunity Urbanism and writes the Houston Strategies blog.  His report on MaX Lanes for Houston can be found here.

Labels: autonomous vehicles, commuter rail, congestion pricing, MaX Lanes, Metro, mobility strategies, rail, toll roads, transit, transportation plan

posted by Tory Gattis @ 4:44 PM 4 comments