Hope you emerged from this crazy winter storm + power/water outage week relatively unscathed. I certainly learned the value of stockpiling water and draining water pipes (esp. with a power outage), and ERCOT learned that it's a bad idea to cut off power to natural gas pumps across the state during a winter storm. I hope they spend a bit of time doing analysis before jumping to expensive solutions like full winterization of all facilities. It's possible that if they had simply mapped natural gas pumps and compressors across the state and treated them as critical non-blackout facilities like hospitals, we might have gotten away with short-duration rolling blackouts that would have been far more manageable (like 2011).
"Solutions will have to be nuanced and incremental. Winterizing all power plants would be unnecessarily expensive, and so would a complete overhaul of Texas' market design, which is partly responsible for consistently low power prices compared with the rest of the country."
And an excellent idea: "One option could be rewarding liquefied natural-gas processing facilities in Texas to both curtail electricity usage and to redirect the feedstock natural gas for electricity rather than for exports."
"to equal the 80 Bcf/d of gas delivered during cold snaps, the U.S. would need an electric grid as large as all existing generation in the country, which is currently about 1.2 terawatts."
Unpopular observation: gas-powered cars, trucks, and SUVs were a critical source of resilience during this never-ending mass power-outage disaster by providing heat and recharging. If we all had electric vehicles, this disaster would have been epically worse. A hard truth.
"Grant Ruckel, vice president of government affairs at pipeline company Energy Transfer, testified that the biggest failure during the disaster was cutting power to gas pipelines, many of which are not listed as essential services, a designation made for hospitals and other critical infrastructure." ...
"Deshotel said he had asked generators how many plants would have gone down if they hadn’t lost gas pressure, and the answer was only a couple."
"Houston is a top U.S. city for STEM grads and engineering talent with more than 300,000 educated millennials and 240,000 STEM workers. STEM talent powers some of the largest industries in Houston, from energy to life science and manufacturing.
Houston also offers these UHD and other STEM students a top-tier job market. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center, Houston is the second best U.S. metro area for STEM workers.
Technology, in particular, is thriving. According to the Partnership's most recent edition of Houston Facts, with more than 223,000 tech workers, Houston has the 12th largest tech sector in the U.S. Nearly two-thirds of Houston’s high-tech workers are employed in industries other than computers and software."
"The Cascade Policy Institute released a detailed study of a road diet plan whose effects include worse traffic congestion, less transit service, and no significant increase in bike and pedestrian traffic that had been projected. The study, “The New Sellwood Bridge: Promises Unfulfilled,” is a valuable case study of how the local politics of transportation and smart growth led to unfortunate outcomes."
The age of winner-take-all cities. Cool graph of metros by GMP. Houston is 5th largest metro by population in the country, but drops to #7 ranked by GMP, getting edged out by DC and SF. Interesting fact: even with substantially fewer people, if you combine SF and San Jose's GMP they're notably larger than Chicago. That's the power of tech.
"The top 25 metro areas (out of a total of 384) accounted for more than half of the U.S.'s $19.5 trillion GDP in 2017, according to an Axios analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data."
Finally, I wanted to end this week's post with Metro's new MetroNext plan overview video, which I think is pretty well done getting it all packed into only two minutes. In particular, they do a good job explaining the MetroRapid BRT rail-like benefits, which the public isn't familiar with. Last week they officially approved the bond referendum for this November's ballot.
Mayor Turner and firefighters agree to compromise on Prop B
After several months of negotiating, Mayor Turner and the firefighters finally reached a compromise on implementing Prop B to get pay parity with the police. Given the City's tight finances, the creative solution involves substantially more paid time off instead of actual salary increases. The City saves money, and the firefighters work fewer hours for the same pay.
To make up for the reduced hours, firehouses will drop from 3 to 2 shifts a day covering 6am to 10pm daily. Fires reported between 10pm and 6am will be gotten to first thing in the morning. The City is recommending that all households add a good couple of garden hoses to their usual emergency supplies so they can keep any nighttime fire outbreaks contained until morning.
The limited hours will also affect emergency ambulance and EMT service. Nighttime emergencies will get service first thing in the morning, but after-hours 911 dispatchers are prepared to help citizens by Googling WebMD as well as finding good relevant YouTube videos to help them self-EMT.
Firefighters hailed the compromise, saying they're looking forward not just to the extra paid time off, but the improved quality of life from finally being able to get a regular good night's sleep. I'm personally pretty excited to stop having fire engine and ambulance sirens screaming down West Gray at all hours of the night!
Police were less enthusiastic, asking why they couldn't get the same hours? They're now considering their own version of Prop B for the November ballot to match the firefighters' paid time off and shifts...
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Hope you enjoyed this year's April Fools post ;-D
Here are previous years if you missed 'em and would like a chuckle:
NYT and COU on Houston after Harvey + the Transit Apocalypse
Before getting to a big backlog of items this week, my Center for Opportunity Urbanism post-Harvey paper with Wendell Cox got mentioned and linked in the NYT's lead feature story on Houston and Harvey last weekend! The reporter, Michael Kimmelman, spent a week in Houston, and I was able to speak with him a couple of times. Unsurprisingly, a NYT piece is skeptical of Houston's high-freedom/low-regulation approach vs. more centralized planning, but we just have to prove them wrong with a pragmatic response to Harvey that preserves the successful essence of the Houston model while increasing our resilience against future storms.
This week's items can all be grouped under the growing theme of "the transit apocalypse" and rail failures as transit ridership continues a sharp decline across the country:
"But the expansion plan, which caused CityLab to once dub Denver “the most advanced transit city in the west,” has yet to translate into greater transit ridership, or even reduced use of cars. In 2006, then-mayor of Denver John Hickenlooper described a hope that the city would reach 20 percent ridership by 2020. But in 2016, only 6 percent of people in Denver used public transit as part of their commute to work."
"Some regions have seen catastrophic drops in ridership since 2010: 30% or more in Detroit, Sacramento and Memphis; 20% to 30% in Austin, Cleveland, Louisville, St. Louis and Virginia Beach-Norfolk ; and 15% to 20% in Atlanta, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio and Washington.
Adding rail service hasn’t helped. To pay for new light-rail lines that opened in 2012 and 2016, Los Angeles cut bus service. The city lost nearly four bus riders for every additional rail rider. Atlanta, Dallas, Sacramento and San Jose have seen similar results. The rail system in Portland, Ore., is often considered successful, but only 8% of commuters take transit of any kind to work. In 1980, before rail was constructed, buses alone were carrying 10% of commuters.
...measured per passenger-mile, the subsidies for transit are more than 40 times as great as for driving.
The transit industry has compounded its problems by going heavily into debt, allowing unfunded pensions and health-care obligations to snowball, and failing to maintain the rail lines they already have. According to the Department of Transportation, the nationwide transit maintenance backlog is approaching $100 billion, causing exactly the problems you’d expect: derailments of New York City subways, slowdowns of Chicago’s elevated train, smoke in Washington metro tunnels, and other operational and safety issues. Even if all the money now spent on new construction were redirected to maintenance, according to the department, it would take 20 years to rehabilitate America’s rail transit systems."
"As transit gets squeezed from the outside by cheap and convenient competitors, transit agencies are buckling under the internal pressure of long-deferred maintenance and underfunded pension and health liabilities.
New York's subway system is looking at a $6.3 billion maintenance backlog. D.C.'s WMATA needs to spend $17.4 billion over the next 10 years to fix the maintenance backlog in Washington's Metrorail system. In 2015, the Federal Transit Administration estimated that the transit industry as a whole had a $89.8 billion backlog, a number O'Toole considers "conservative." ... As a fix, O'Toole suggest that transit agencies "stop wasting money on expensive and noncompetitive transit services and focus on providing basic, cost-effective services for those who need transit the most, while putting their economic houses in order by reducing maintenance backlogs, debts, and unfunded obligations." In other words: Stop building new rail lines, and replace the current lines with bus services as they outlive their usefulness.
Instead of grappling with these long-run problems, transit agencies are exacerbating them by building costly light-rail extensions that fail to attract riders. ... Seattle's $54 billion transit expansion is expected to net around 30,000 additional daily riders by 2040. That's $1.8 million for each new rider." (!!!)
"Back in 1980, Portland transit carried 10 percent of the region’s commuters to work. Since then, the region has increased its population density by 20 percent, spent $5 billion building nearly 80 miles of rail transit lines, and subsidized scores of high-density, mixed-use housing projects in light-rail and other transit corridors. The result is that, in 2016, just 8.0 percent of commuters took transit to work."
I've got a ton of other non-transit items, but this already seems like too much for one post. More next week.
Out of that work came some preliminary recommendations/ideas that aren't in the paper, but I'm interested in hearing feedback on in the comments. I'll be the first to admit that these are very high level, and that people far more qualified than I are looking into many of these at a much deeper level.
FEMA should accelerate programs to buyout homes that flood repeatedly. 7,000 homes could be removed for roughly $2 billion.
Jumpstart the Trump infrastructure plan with a FEMA infrastructure investment bank, since FEMA is best positioned to see the costs and benefits of flood mitigation infrastructure projects.
Review detention regulations, especially the 10,000 sq.ft minimum rule. Also consider increasing the detention standard so runoff is actually reduced by development vs. land left undeveloped.
Instead of an outright ban on floodplain development - which risks government takings lawsuits or very high costs of buyouts – enforce high elevation and detention requirements on such developments. Houston should be confident that every new outlying development is actually reducing the flow of water into downstream bayous.
Review reservoirs for upgrades and improvements. Evaluate the potential for additional new reservoirs and detention parks.
Consider cross-connecting reservoirs and bayous using high-voltage power-line rights-of-way so areas at risk for overflowing can have alternate drainage channels. One possibility would be to connect the Addicks and Barker reservoirs to White Oak and Braes Bayous to reduce stress and flooding on Buffalo Bayou (see power-line RoW map here and note the dotted lines on the west side near the reservoirs connecting to both bayous). If such channels had existed during Harvey, thousands of homes near the reservoirs would not have needed to flood during reservoir releases (as Dallas News exposed in this story about a never-implemented 1996 plan under I10).
Use Harvey as a new modeling benchmark for flooding. Projects can be evaluated on a cost-benefit basis for property value that would have been removed from Harvey flooding.
Reinstate ReBuild Houston, including a new ballot this fall if necessary. Popular support seems assured after Harvey.
Consider relaxing minimum parking regulations in favor of additional stormwater retention. Allow new developments or re-developments to tradeoff parking for additional stormwater retention.
Consider special purpose/TIRZ districts in specific watersheds for mitigation projects in those watersheds. These projects would be paid for by the tax-increment value increase of properties removed from the floodplains.
When adding new taxes or fees for drainage funding, consider market-based incentives that give property owners credits to reduce their tax with water retention improvements like green roofs, cisterns, water barrels, permeable pavers, and detention ponds.
Don’t let Harvey’s rainfall make us lose sight of Houston’s high storm-surge risk (especially in the industrial Ship Channel) and the continuing need for the Ike Dike or mid-bay solutions. Evaluate potential financing of these projects with the savings from resulting flood insurance rate reductions. Eric Berger also pointed out that we've grown complacent about the risks from very high winds, since nothing higher than a Cat 2 hurricane has hit us since the early 60s. Construction standards should be revisited.
Harvey exposed the need for elevated roads to help evacuations and first responders get around the city during flood events. As Houston further develops its network of Managed eXpress (MaX) Lanes (see below), consider elevating them to provide this network. This is the quote that made me think of it: "It seems like there would be a way to create an elevated road that helps people get out all the time [rather than rely solely on low-lying, water-conveying roads]." -Wesley Highfield, professor of marine sciences at Texas A&M University at Galveston who specializes in flood resilience in an interview here.
One thing Houston is really good at is engineering, and this is really just a large cost-benefit engineering optimization problem that should be manageable: calculating what $X investment will yield in $Y benefits in terms of property protected from future flooding. Figuring out the right answers should be complex but relatively straightforward. But I acknowledge the politics will be trickier. Fingers crossed our representatives are up to the challenge, even if it involves a few tax increases.
"While the average annual income in Texas is $45,330, only slightly above the national average, MoneyRates.com says "workers in Texas get good value from those wages." That's due to our below-average cost of living and no state income tax."
"Adding all of this early data up, these three new rail lines are attracting only between 10 – 35 percent of their predicted ridership estimates.
...
All of this for some $2.2 billion in local and federal tax money. If you apply the U.S. FTA formulas for grant consideration to current ridership on these three rail lines (total capital cost $2.2 billion, multiplied by 7 percent ($154 million), then add the annual operating expense of these rail lines at roughly $1 million per direction mile for $25 – 30 million in annual operating costs), it would work out to costing somewhere close to $50 every time a new rider boarded along these new rail lines."
Ugh. If that doesn't make you nauseous as a taxpayer, I'm not sure what will. Let's really hope the bus network redesign implementation and fall semester start at UH and TSU boost the ridership big time...
Houston ranked the #1 food city in America by Travel + Leisure, and I believe it! Was browsing my Yelp bookmarks the other day to recommend a place for some out-of-town visitors, and went through 150+ places I've bookmarked just within a couple of miles of Midtown! If you're curious why Houston has such an amazing restaurant scene vs. other cities, I lay out the reasons here.
Finally, this data shows that firefighters have increased as rapidly as fires have *decreased*, yet we keep finding new jobs for them to do. Maybe a solution for Houston's firefighter pension problem could be to scale back the department to just focus on fires and find more efficient ways to meet the other needs like emergency medical response?...
Forget the Ike Dike - love will save us from a hurricane
Over the years, I've noticed a phenomena that maybe you've noticed too: some issue becomes the "hot" issue of the moment (terrorism, Ebola, etc.) and then people jump on the bandwagon for that issue by trying to link it to whatever their pet issue is, no matter how tenuous the connection may be. "If you support my pet issue X, it will reduce the problem of hot issue Y." If they can successfully link the issues, maybe public support (or, better yet, taxpayer dollars) will swing behind their pet issue. Sometimes the connection gets stretched so far as to become utterly absurd. And that brings me to Exhibit A: this op-ed in the Chronicle ("How to protect our city against storms? First, make it lovable. Dikes and levees are secondary. What they protect matters more.") saying the key to our hurricane resilience is not something so pragmatic as a dike, but really about making our city more walkable and lovable. Wait... what? Really? Evidently, New Orleans' big failure with Katrina had nothing to do with being a city below sea level with substandard levees, but it wasn't walkable and lovable enough. Uh-huh...
Let me address some of the specific arguments in the piece:
Levees can fail: Sure, anything can fail, but how many times have levees and dikes successfully protected New Orleans or the Netherlands vs. the number of times they failed? Does one failure mean dozens of other successful protective events don't have value? And the nice thing about Houston over New Orleans is that we are *above* sea level, so if there is a failure, it will just drain right out as the tide recedes, as opposed to stagnating in the big bowl of below-sea-level New Orleans.
Levees cause stuff to be built where it shouldn't: Sorry Netherlands/New Orleans/Houston, you built stuff where you shouldn't have because once a decade mother nature is going to come at you with wallop. Rather than protecting yourself, you really need to just shut it all down and move somewhere else - nevermind the trillions of invested infrastructure. Wait, you say, it's kinda hard to operate a port without being connected to the ocean. Well, I'm sure you'll figure it out.
The key is lovability/walkability: I'm pretty sure New Orleans had that in spades, and it doesn't seem to have saved them from Katrina. Nor did it help the quaint walkable sections of Galveston during Ike. And I'm sure the Dutch will be disappointed to learn they could have saved billions on dikes over the years if they had just loved their country more, maybe with just a good handholding and kumbaya singing session every time the North Sea threatened?
His calling out of my op-ed with Joel Kotkin: "Walkability is not some concept being forced down our throats by elitist planners from the East Coast, as some suggest. (See, for instance, "Economic diversity helps Houstonians live well" by Joel Kotkin and Tory Gattis.)" Actually, if you look at the stated goals of those smart growth planners, they *are* trying to force dense urbanism down our throats, and they specifically call for restricting or eliminating suburban development. We are not opposed to walkability and walkable development like town centers, but we are opposed to forcing it on people by restricting other forms of development which leads to unaffordable housing, widening inequality, reduced opportunity, and a weakened middle class. I totally agree that some people love walkability (including myself), and we need to loosen any regulations that make it hard to develop (agreement with him on this point), but let the market decide how much demand there is and how much and where to build - not central planners.
"People in Houston currently spend as much on transportation as they do on housing. " Lies, damn lies, and statistics. As I've pointed out here before, when you have affordable housing like we do in Houston (albeit rapidly getting less so), people tend to splurge on very luxurious cars, trucks, and SUVs - but that does not mean that's the cost of transportation here. Everybody can get around Houston quite affordably in a Honda Civic, Toyota Prius, or plenty of other cars - they just choose not to. The 2013 C2ER ACCRA Cost of Living index takes this into account, and rated Houston 95.6 for transportation costs where 100 = the national average, so we're 4.4% below the national average. New York is at 110, Chicago at 124, DC at 106 - so much for dense transit cities reducing transportation costs.
"Spending less on transportation would mean you could afford more durable construction." While I agree we should have strong construction standards for wind, how does one build more durable construction for a tidal wave surge of water? Should we build everything on stilts? How incredibly expensive and inconvenient would that be, not to mention not very walkable? Maybe we should, um, build a dike so we don't have to worry about the surge in the first place and can build simply at ground level?
"Walkability means you might see your neighbors more often. Knowing who your neighbors are is a key element of resilience. Social capital is the glue that holds communities together, and places that have it back from catastrophe much faster." Does anybody else remember all the stories in Houston after Ike of people helping each other out and throwing block parties to grill meat before it spoiled in unpowered fridges and freezers? Does anybody remember our amazing response to the Katrina refugees? I think we're doing pretty well on the social capital front. And I'd like to point out that the most dense and walkable city in America, New York, is not exactly known for its friendly "social capital".
"Many people in New Orleans died because there was nowhere to run in a vast unbroken sea of single-family homes" Actually, the people that were stuck in New Orleans for Katrina where the ones without cars who relied on transit and walking. Just about everyone with a car got out successfully.
To sum up, walkable development is great, and we should certainly enable and encourage more of it, but it is absolutely no substitute for protecting our region from a direct hurricane hit with a strong physical barrier. Let's not mix up our priorities here. We know what we need to do - we just need the political and financial will to do it (and here's how to pay for it).
Alert reader Jessie sent me this article about Houston ranking "very low" on a "resilience capacity index". For real. I was dumbfounded too. And now I'm going to post out-of-character and get a little snippy...
Let's skip right past the parade of articles and data showing Houston and Texas weathering the great recession better than just about everywhere else in the country. It's so strong Rick Perry might win the Republican presidential nomination based on it. That alone should make them question their entire methodology. Go back to the dot-com and Enron crashes, and you'll find the same minimal impact. Sounds like we're pretty resilient to me.
Then there's their explicit declaration that it represents the ability of a city to weather the shock of a major storm or flood. I'll point to both Tropical Storm Allison and Hurricane Ike. Both were devastating - yet we bounced back relatively quickly from each one. You might note on their map that New Orleans ranks higher than Houston, yet Hurricane Katrina knocked New Orleans on its back for years. Maybe they need to add a "levees upkeep" variable to the index?
Let's look at some of the problematic variables that make up the index:
Economic diversification: I'll admit there's some value here, but it's also worth noting that some of the wealthiest and most successful cities in the country built that success around one strong, dominant industry: NYC and finance, DC and govt, SF/SV and tech, Houston and energy, etc.
Educational attainment, being out of poverty, and home ownership: a proxy for using tight zoning and land-use regulation to keep out apartments, new and affordable housing, and immigrants.
Metropolitan Stability: aka "stagnation". Cities that aren't growing have amazingly stable populations because nobody wants to move there and none of the residents can sell their houses.
My cynical side thinks that, since the University of Buffalo put this out, they intentionally chose variables that made Buffalo look good, even though it's one of the most stagnant metro economies in the country.
All in all one of the worst designed indexes I've ever seen - and there are some doozies out there.
OK, I feel better. End venting (and snippyness). Back to normal next week...
A crazy week, so just another pass-along article from the Wall Street Journal on the proposed 60-mile long, 17-feet high, "Ike Dike" defense around Galveston and Bolivar. Estimated price tag is $2 to $4 billion, which is a bargain compared to the surge damage from even one hurricane. Some key excerpts:
Dike supporters argue that the project has implications far beyond Texas. The area is home to three of the country's 10 largest oil refineries, 40% of its chemical manufacturing capacity and the country's second largest seaport, handling some 600,000 tons of cargo a day.
"It's a national-security issue," said Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership, a local business group.
Potential funding sources: Army Corp of Engineers and federal highway funds (set back from the beach).
Estimated completion time: a decade+
Bill Merrell, the Texas A&M University at Galveston professor who first proposed the Ike Dike, said he based the structure on existing designs, including swinging floodgates built in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in the 1990s. London has had closeable floodgates on the Thames since 1982, and the Russian city of St. Petersburg is nearing completion of its own massive gates.
"All the technology's proven. We're not asking for a miracle," Mr. Merrell said.
Dike supporters find inspiration in past disasters. After an unnamed 1900 hurricane nearly wiped Galveston off the map, island residents built a 15-plus-foot seawall along the island's east end, then raised the island itself by as much as 17 feet, jacking up more than 2,000 buildings and filling in underneath them with sand.
Compared with that project, Mr. Merrell said, the Ike Dike looks trivial -- at least from an engineering standpoint. But the perception that the project is too difficult could be hard to overcome. Mr. King, the former Kemah mayor, said he initially thought the idea was too far-fetched. But he said the simplicity of Mr. Merrell's plan, combined with the cost of leaving the coast unprotected, won him over.
"The elegance and the appeal of something like the Ike Dike is, with one swath, all the problems are solved," Mr. King said.
His biggest worry sounds like the Harris County Hospital District, and figuring out how pubic and indigent health care is going to be handled and paid for (details here). I think he's right that it needs to get figured out, but it might make sense to wait until after whatever Obama does on health care.
Transtar did well did Hurricane Ike, but needs some expansion and improvements to do better.
Ended with a great story of heroic all-night efforts by tug boat crews during Ike to keep a large ship that came unmoored from crashing into the 610 Loop Ship Channel bridge, which could have brought the whole thing down. He thought their story kinda got lost in the noise during post-Ike recovery. They have been nominated for U.S. Homeland Security Certificates of Valor. "It highlights our greatest strength - private individuals withe a work ethic and a value system that will see us through good times or bad."
Afterward during the press conference, I asked him about congestion pricing on toll roads. It sounds like they might wait a while to open up the new Katy lanes to toll-payers (he implied lack of demand because the free lanes move so well), and even then it will be a fixed-schedule of prices rather than real-time congestion pricing, which does have the risk of congestion and slow speeds when there is extra demand due to weather or accidents. He doesn't think they're ready for real-time. He know of no talks between HCTRA and Metro on HOV-to-HOT lane conversions, where it would make obvious sense to use HCTRA's EZ-tag, billing, and enforcement systems.
Speaking of Metro, I just came across this Chronicle story today that Metro only got half the federal stimulus funds they expected. They asked for $410 million for the north and southeast rail lines, expected $180 million, but only got $92 million. Given that those two lines alone are estimated to cost over $1.2 billion, I'm curious what Metro's plan is to fill in the budget gap. Are they just keeping their fingers crossed for more federal money for these lines in future years?
Finally, the item that really jumped out at me at the luncheon was this page of Houston #1's they included in our packets. It's kind of mind-boggling when you read it. We've been ranked the best city for living, working, playing, earning a living, keeping your job, buying a home, recent college grads, fastest job growth, hottest labor market, lowest cost of living, largest IT service economy, top U.S. manufacturing city, best cancer hospital, highest population growth, and more. This one came out today calling us the healthiest housing market for 2009 (hat tip to Christina), and the Texas Triangle cities made a clean sweep of the top five positions. Wow. Are we "world-class" yet? ;-) All, I can say is, be thankful you're in the right place at the right time during this global recession.
Canada fights carpools, TX economy and housing holds up, smart grid, and more
Some smaller misc items:
This is the kind of government regulation run amok that drives me nuts, as Canada beats up on a web site that helps people carpool! I've always liked Canada as a country and enjoyed vacations there, although I've heard they're over-regulated and over-taxed. This example drives that home.
This recent PMI report says Houston is one of the lowest-risk residential markets in the nation, along with Dallas and Fort Worth. CA, FL, AZ, and Nevada top the list of high-risk areas. Hat tip to Mark at PMI, which is holding a HOPE NOW foreclosure workshop for at-risk homeowners this Saturday at Lakewood Church (8am to 2pm, prep here).
"So, I’m a pragmatist. I don’t a vision of what a city should look like, I have a vision of a process that allows people to live in the kind of city they want to live in. There’s a significant amount of people that want to live in a city like Manhattan or San Francisco. And there’s a significant amount of people who want to live in a city like Houston. And what I want is a process that allows people to live in whatever kind of city they do want to live in. I think that if a process were implemented that basically allows property owners to do what they want with their property as long as they’re not directly harming other people, and basically allows people to decide how they’re going to get around based on the real cost of transportation – making sure that auto drivers pay the full cost of their travel and making sure that people who ride transit pay the cost of they’re transit, with, perhaps, subsidies for low-income people who need help – if they have that kind of system I think most American cities would look a little more like Houston and Omaha then San Francisco or New York. But we’d still have dense areas – we’d still have Manhattan, we’d still have downtown San Francisco, for the people who want to live in places like that. [for O’Toole’s thoughts on Houston, go here]"
Check out the whole thing, were he discusses the fundamental impracticalities, meager benefits, and tremendous waste of addressing the "evils" of cars with forced density and rail transit.
I wanted to record some stats from the Chronicle article on a smart power grid. The stats are not online, but I want to preserve them here from the print version for future reference:
CenterPoint estimates:
Overhead power lines with wood poles - $105,600 per mile
Overhead power lines with steel or concrete poles - $264,000 per mile
Underground power lines - $2.64 million to $3.7 million per mile
Ouch. I think that pretty much settles the "bury the lines" argument. The "smart grid" option sounds much more cost effective.
Sorry for the irregular posting schedule the last couple weeks. I hope to get back on track next week. Have a great weekend.
The smaller misc items have been piling up since before the hurricane, and now are so many I'll have to split them over a couple of posts this week. Before getting to them though, I wanted to throw out another plug for my solution to the national housing and financial crisis, after the bailout defeat in Congress today. Just hoping one of my readers out there has the ability to get it in front of the crisis-response decision makers in the government. On to the list, starting with a little good news to raise your spirits after today's depressing market crash:
Wendell Cox has a piece over at New Geography on how restrictive 'smart growth' policies drove the housing bubble and collapse that has national - and global - financial markets paralyzed.
More of the Austin Contrarian on how the thicket of development regulations in most cities creates gridlock, and how that favors big developers over the little guy. The regulations are always portrayed as 'the people' vs. 'the evil developers', but it's really the big developers trying to squeeze out the small business entrepreneurs.
Just wanted to pass along this email from a reader. The Hurricane Dean track forecasts from Drudge seem to indicate we're pretty safe for now, but better safe than sorry. Maybe a good opportunity to try out our extensive express HOV bus options for your commute?
Dear Mr. Gattis,
I wanted to let you know something about what's happening up here in Spring, Texas as a result of the threat of Hurricane Dean. I'm writing to you at 5:00 p.m., Saturday, 8/18/2007. Please be advised that Gasoline stations are already beginning to run short of fuel. My daughter who just left for Kerville for colllege tells me that some stations on FM 2920 are already out of fuel. As well, there has already been a run on the local Grocery stores and our Kroger is out of bottled water.
Based upon our experience during Hurricane Rita, this situation will only worsen during the coming week. Spring/Klein, as your well aware, are far enough north of the Gulf to be mostly safe during a Hurricane and many of us will not be subject to evacuation. However, the shortages will play havoc with gas supplies, water and hurricane preparedness materials and just getting to work this coming week could stretch our dwindling resources.
As a service to your readers and my neighbors, I wanted to remind everyone that as supplies tighten, they might want to consider transportation alternatives for the comming week, if for nothing else but to save gas.
For those living in the general Spring/Klein area, the 204 Park and Ride offers regular service between Spring and Downtown. Those living on the west side of I-45 will find the Kuykendal Park n' Ride convenient and for Humble/Kingwood riders, there is the Townsend Park n'ride. All three locations have buses leaving at 6:00 a.m. Also, the Kuykendahl Park n' ride has the 283 bus which goes to the Galeria area. For those living closer to the Spring Park n' Ride who need to get to places in West Houston, they can transfer to numerous buses from Downtown that go to the Galeria, the Medical Center and points west. For more information, you might want to direct readers to http://www.ridemetro.org/Schedules_and_Maps/system_maps.asp;
I mention this because saving gas and keeping our vehicles safe for the next few days might be very critical. I would add that I know from reading your blog that safety has become a concern of late. All of the Park n' Rides have Metro police watching the lots; Spring and Kuykendahl are limited access and are regularly patroled. As for ticket information, you might want to double check my information, but it used to be the case that people could buy tickets at local Kroger stores. Also, many local employers sell bus passes at a discount so people might want to check with their employers.
An open dialogue on serious strategies for making Houston a better city, as well as a coalition-builder to make them happen. All comments, email, and support welcome.
