Redeveloping the old Days Inn downtown, METRO needs to learn from Denver's failures, Texas' boom, and more
A few smaller items this week...
The Chronicle examines what's up with the abandoned shell of the old Days Inn high rise hotel downtown. TL,DR: it's uneconomic to do anything with it, esp. with low ceilings. I’ve hoped to see it redeveloped for a very long time. I always thought the best use was an off-campus student dorm for Rice and UH students, with rail access to both campuses. But I understand what they’re saying about the math not working, especially at these high interest rates, which would need to dramatically come down. Hat tip to Rich.
A simple solution to help Houston traffic, our tax-debt-spend problem, HSR bankrupted Japan, Austin builds towards affordability, METRO comedy!
Just a few small items this week:
Charles Blain in City Journal: Saddled With Taxes and Debt - Houston-area leadership is losing touch with the fiscal restraint and pragmatism that made the city an engine of growth.
"I worried from afar that my hometown would meet the same fate as San Francisco, the poster child of the housing shortage and all its associated woes. I feared that Austin would become known as a playground for the rich, a city where displacement and mind-boggling home prices marred the natural beauty that once made it such a draw. In my hand-wringing, though, I'd overlooked one crucial detail: Texas is better at building homes than almost anywhere else in the country.”
There are differences between Austin (and Texas) and San Francisco that, if not changed will continue to make it possible to build in Austin (and Texas) and nearly impossible in San Francisco (and California). Unincorporated county territory in Texas is unzoned. That means that, barring environmental difficulties, developers and builders can build. By contrast, in the San Francisco metro, and virtually all of California, draconian state and local regulations make it very difficult to build on greenfield sites, where land prices would be much lower if the market were permitted to operate."
Caught my eye from Y-Combinator Demo day: XTraffic
What it does: Reduces congestion and accidents with smart traffic lights
Why it’s a fave: Controlling traffic lights with AI sounds like the perfect application of this technology. XTraffic says that it’s already doing it in several cities in Texas. I hope they make it to my town in California, too, because I sure am tired of waiting for the light to turn green when there are no other cars around.
METRO+DART Ridership Update: summer slump and Beryl erase spring gains
This week we have another great analytical guest post from Oscar Slotboom. Dallas DART's extensive and expensive light rail strategy is looking more and more like a total failure as suburban cities try to reduce their tax subsidy to DART.
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When I last reported on Metro ridership in April, ridership had reached a post-Covid high in February, down only 14.7% from the 12-month pre-Covid average. An upward bump in April pushed ridership to another post-Covid high at only 13.5% below the pre-Covid level. Summer months are usually low ridership months, and Hurricane Beryl caused Metro service outages during the week of July 9-12. July ridership was 22.3% below the pre-Covid average. However, in spite of the substantial service outages due to Beryl, July ridership was only slightly lower than June. So we can probably expect a strong rebound, especially since September and October are normally the highest ridership months.
In Dallas, June ridership (page 55) was 23% below the pre-Covid baseline. As the plot shows, ridership has been flat in the last 9 months, appearing to end the four-year trend of slow recovery. It's interesting to note that the image shown below mentions that on-demand services are included in the ridership data, but a version of this plot presented one month earlier (page 4) without any mention of on-demand services showed ridership down 28%.
Multiple member cities of DART, including Plano, are attempting to reduce their tax subsidies to DART.
Nationally, public transit ridership is down 25% compared to pre-Covid levels and appears to be holding steady with little or no upward trend. Of course, there are wide variations in performance by city and Houston is above average.
"In other words, if we eliminated every passenger automobile in the U.S. in favor of a transit alternative and use completely unrealistic assumptions, the total estimated reduction would be barely out of the margin of error for total estimated GHG emissions. ...
I believe we need an efficient and effective transit system as part of the basic social safety net. Providing some mobility for those who cannot afford to own and operate their own vehicle and those who are physically not able to operate one is the right thing to do. It also helps the local economy by providing a way for employees to get to their jobs.
But transit does little to relieve traffic congestion and virtually nothing to improve air quality. We need to start having an honest conversation about the purpose of transit and what we can reasonably expect it to accomplish. And we need to stop lying to the public and voters about fanciful, non-existent benefits."
NYT: Olympics Precautions Failed to Halt Rail Sabotage. One of the issues I've pointed out in the HSR vs. planes debate is the near impossibility of securing hundreds of miles of HSR rail from sabotage or terrorism.
WSJ: The Smart, Cheap Fix for Slow, Dumb Traffic Lights - Most cities can’t afford smart traffic signals. Fortunately, data from new cars—and even drivers’ smartphones—can make old-fashioned traffic lights work a lot better. "the system yields a 30% reduction in stop-and-go traffic at intersections" Can we get this for Houston please?!?
NYT: Colorado’s Bold New Approach to Highways — Not Building Them. I really disagree with this. Studies have shown that highways are the great enabler of opportunity and upward social mobility for the working class to get access to better jobs and newer, more affordable, higher-quality housing in better school districts. Massive transit expansions, like LA, have not increased rideshare and don't work. Environmental solutions focused on reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) will be an economic disaster. Instead, gas stations should be required to charge at the pump for the necessary carbon capture to offset the gas, currently ~$1 per gallon.
New Zealand learns from Houston, why airport rail doesn't make sense, Tokyo vs HTX High Lines, crazy housing reforms, and more
Some more smaller items this week:
The 2024 Demographia International Housing Affordability reportThe 2024 Demographia International Housing Affordability report is out (Antiplanner discussion here). Houston is surprisingly high at a median price-to-income ratio of 4.4, but still better than other Texas Triangle metros and one of the most affordable growing metros in America (vs. the stagnant ones mainly in the Rust Belt). The more interesting note is that New Zealand's affordability is rapidly improving after adopting supply-side reforms that they learned on a visit to Houston!
Chronicle: Why isn't there a train to Houston's airports? I've made similar points on my blog: it always makes more sense to invest in work transit over airport transit. It's a ridership disaster in DFW. There used to be a fast, frequent nonstop express bus from the downtown transit center to IAH but they shut it down from low demand. ~1-2 riders per bus, which is why even slower multi-billion$ LRT there is a massively bad investment.
"Now count how many times you go to the airport versus how many times you drive or take a bus to the office.
“Even if they use the train for every airport trip they take, that might be eight trips a year,” Spieler said.
Business travelers, some of the most frequent fliers, meanwhile have different considerations.
“They are on expense accounts and not price-sensitive,” Spieler said."
...
Three recent rail projects to airports are illustrative, Spieler said, for how a train's service, location and the layout of the airport make a difference. In Washington, the train to Dulles Airport, which opened in 2022, gets around 2,500 boardings per day, less than half that of the train to Reagan National Airport, which is closer to the metro core but also a smaller airport. In Dallas, fewer than 1,100 riders daily hop on the train to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
The #1 way to revive urban cores, CA attempts the greatest white elephant project in history, Australia's home-building restrictions finally catch up with it, and more
Bill King: Harris County Grew By 1.2% In 2023, But Domestic Migration Continues Slide. The #1 change that could revive urban cores would be school choice vouchers. But in general the far suburbs definitely have a superior value proposition: less expensive newer homes in better school districts with lower taxes and less crime. More of their taxes go directly to services as well instead of public employee pensions and other long-term liabilities built up in the core. That is very hard to compete with.
Chronicle: "The trend of converting old offices and hotels into new spaces is gaining momentum in Houston largely due to the city's lack of zoning laws, which makes it easier for real estate developers to repurpose the land and buildings. The concept of adaptive reuse, which involves repurposing an existing building for a use other than its original purpose, is a contemporary approach to land utilization that has the potential to drastically alter the appearance of Houston in the years to come." (hat tip to Rich)
"Magical thinking caused politicians and the media to back this boondoggle in the first place, and more than 15 years later, incredibly, the spell still hasn't broken."
"The plan admits that the agency expects to spend more on the 171 miles between Merced and Bakersfield than the $33 billion it had projected the entire 463-mile project would cost when voters approved it in 2008. ...
Meanwhile, in light of the pandemic, the agency has modestly reduced its ridership expectations from 35 million trips per year to 27.6 million. This is still more unrealistic than the cost projections. In 2019, Amtrak’s high-speed Acela carried less than 3.6 million riders in a corridor with a higher population than the LA-SF corridor. While California is promising higher speeds than the Acela, the Northeast Corridor has the advantage of really being two corridors anchored by New York, America’s largest city. The California corridor has no similar mid-point metropolis; the Fresno urban area has fewer than 725,000 residents compared with New York’s 19.5 million. Incidentally, to the extent that the 27.6 million turns out to be too high, the supposed savings from not having to expand road and airline capacities dwindles."
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.
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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."
Google optimizing traffic signals, idea for HTX office to residential conversions, Why Texas is Becoming America's Most Powerful State, NYT on Houston winning vs homelessness, and more
Just catching up on some backlogged smaller items this week...
"Google AI models that can autonomously optimize the traffic timing at that intersection, reducing idle times as well as the amount of braking and accelerating vehicles have to do there."
And I'd be happy to help get METRO on a better path while they're at it?...
WSJ: America’s Downtowns Are Empty. Fixing Them Will Be Expensive. - Lonely sidewalks and closed storefronts inspire proposals to recast office districts into neighborhoods where people live, work and raise families. A chart shows over 25% of downtown Houston's office space is vacant and only 7.5% of it could be easily converted to residential. A Hines exec at a GHPartnership event last week said that: converting empty offices to residential creates Class B apartments that don't pencil out. But maybe Habitat for Humanity could make that equation work with volunteer labor for affordable Class B condos?
"Dallas officials were prickly when I toured their city and asked them pointedly why Houston was doing better...
The lesson I take from Houston and Dallas is that success doesn’t come from repeating bromides about how housing is a human right; homelessness is indifferent to earnestness but does respond to hard work and meticulous execution. Houston has succeeded because it has strong political leadership that gathers data, follows evidence and herds nonprofits in the same direction. It is relentless."
Finally I'll end with this really well-done video on the population, economic, and energy boom in Texas, which is on track to pass California by the 2040s: Why Texas is Becoming America's Most Powerful State
The epic failure of METRO's Uptown BRT, housing costs vs fertility, YIMBY righteousness, and Honolulu rail-fail
A few short smaller items this week:
I've been saying this for a long time: Higher Rent, Fewer Babies? Housing Costs and Fertility Decline. Lots of good graphs in this one. As economies grow and people get wealthier, they want more space per person, and if they can't afford it, they shrink their family size to compensate. Nobody wants to raise a family in a 2 bedroom apartment anymore. Hat tip to Howard.
"Tinkering around with local fiscal incentives, forging alliances with regional business elites, and helping some property-rich homeowners get richer won’t usher in an egalitarian new millennium of integrated neighborhoods from coast to coast, but it will help YIMBYs build a more persuasive case that housing growth is in the enlightened self-interest of suburbanites who might otherwise be concerned about rising tax burdens and sinking home values. That’s not a bad start."
Bill King: Ridership For The Uptown BRT Is 5% Of What Metro Projected. What an epic failure by METRO, even taking into account the pandemic. Yet they're just going to pretend it didn't happen and plow ahead with the $1.5B Universities BRT line reducing Richmond to one lane each direction?!? 😠
A massive rail-fail in Honolulu: white elephant $5 billion light rail line opens with ridership at TWO percent of capacity! Why does government keep wasting mountains of money on these projects?!
Phoenix has long been a close competitor to Houston for fastest growing metros (closer escape for Californians, lol), but it looks like that's about to come to an end as they run out of readily available water:
"Arizona has determined that there is not enough groundwater for all of the housing construction that has already been approved in the Phoenix area, and will stop developers from building some new subdivisions, a sign of looming trouble in the West and other places where overuse, drought and climate change are straining water supplies.
The decision by state officials very likely means the beginning of the end to the explosive development that has made the Phoenix area the fastest growing metropolitan region in the country. …
The decision means cities and developers must look for alternative sources of water to support future development — for example, by trying to buy access to river water from farmers or Native American tribes, many of whom are facing their own shortages. That rush to buy water is likely to rattle the real estate market in Arizona, making homes more expensive and threatening the relatively low housing costs that had made the region a magnet for people from across the country.
“Housing affordability will be a challenge moving forward,” said Spencer Kamps, vice president of legislative affairs for the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, an industry group. He noted that even as the state limits home construction, commercial buildings, factories and other kinds of development can continue."
TX Transportation Update - legislature, projects, NHHIP, Inner Katy MaX lanes, Austin should convert rail to BRT
This week we have an excellent detailed update on multiple Texas transportation projects from Oscar Slotboom (bold highlights mine).
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Texas Legislature
The regular session ended on Memorial Day. Transportation-related issues were mostly low priority, and the Senate focused mainly on a few important long-term funding bills.
Houston-specific issues (no bills passed):
SB 2515 would have required HCTRA to use its revenue for road improvements only, but the bill made no progress after introduction. SB 1727, signed into law in 2021, placed some restrictions on the ability of Harris County to harvest toll money for non-transportation purposes. Generally speaking, the legislature had little interest in toll issues, passing only two minor bills relating to billing and preparation for icy conditions.
Texas Central high-speed rail received much less attention than in previous sessions, with only three bills filed and none making much progress. With Texas Central moribund, the project opposition did not put effort into anti-project bills.
Bills approved (statewide):
Three bills provide long-term funding for TxDOT into the early 2040s. This is especially important since recent inflation has extended project timelines, with NHHIP now scheduled for completion in 2042.
HB 2230 extends Proposition 1, which provides funding from surplus money in the rainy day fund. Amount is variable depending on oil prices, and is usually $1 to 2 billion per year. Expiration is extended 8 years from 2035 to 2043.
SCR 2 extends proposition 7, which provides $2.5 billion plus a percent of auto sales tax each year. The $2.5 billion is extended 10 years to 2042, and the auto sales tax funding is extended 10 years to 2039.
SB 505 imposes a $200 annual road use fee on electric vehicles, in recognition that electric cars don't pay any fuel tax for road maintenance. Although this will generate a small amount of revenue in the near term, it could become a substantial revenue source in the future.
HB 3297 ends vehicle safety inspections on December 31, 2024. But emissions testing will continue, so in Houston we still need to take our cars to a testing center.
Inner Katy Managed Lanes
In May I provided an update on the status of the Metro's Inner Katy (Loop 610 to downtown) BRT. A TxDOT presentation on May 18 says that construction on the separate managed lanes could begin in 2026 or 2027 (page 19). This is good news! However, there is much work still to be done, including environmental clearance, so 2026-2027 seems optimistic. There is not yet a recommended design option, but all the documents suggest that an elevated structure in the center of the freeway is the leading candidate. Future public meetings will influence the recommended design. The scope of the project includes reconstructing the main lanes and increasing the minimum vertical clearance to 18.5 feet. (It is currently around 15'4"). This will be an expensive project.
Big Projects in Dallas and Austin move ahead of NHHIP
While NHHIP has been engulfed in controversy, the $1 billion I-345 project in Dallas and the $5 billion I-35 project in Austin are moving forward and are now scheduled to be completed much sooner than NHHIP, even though planning for both the Dallas and Austin projects started much later than NHHIP. Dallas City Council recently unanimously approved TxDOT's plans to sink the elevated I-345 freeway into a trench. The DEIS for I-35 in Austin was released in February and TxDOT is moving toward construction as fast as possible. While there has been plenty of controversy for both the Dallas and Austin projects, local officials did not file lawsuits or request federal reviews.
So if I-35 and I-345 continue to progress as expected, they will be completed in 2032 or 2033. Only three small sections of NHHIP are scheduled to be complete at that time (including I-69 south of I-45, and the I-10/I-45 interchange). The vast majority of work including downtown work and all of I-45 north of downtown would be just getting started or not even started.
Austin's New Plan for Light Rail
In April 2022 Austin's original light rail plan including a subway was estimated to cost $10.3 billion, with the tunnels costing around $1 billion per mile. Those estimates were before recent severe inflation in construction costs.
Austin's revised plan (map with data) is now entirely at street level, running in the middle of streets just like Houston's MetroRail. Depictions of the new plan look very familiar to Houstonians. Costs, however, remain outrageously expensive.
9.8 miles, all at street level, taking away traffic lanes For comparison, Metro rail is 23 miles, all at street level, and Dallas has a 93-mile system mostly on dedicated right-of-way including a subway
Project cost: $4.5 to $4.8 billion, $459 to $490 million per mile (!)
Cost includes a new bridge over Lake Lady Bird and startup costs such as a train maintenance facility.
The original Red Line in Houston, opened in 2004, cost $43 million per mile, and the Green and Purple lines, opened 2015-2017, cost $153 million per mile.
Speed: 13.6 miles per hour from north to south; 14.9 miles per hour from north to southeast.
Estimated weekday ridership: 28,500
Depiction of Austin's plan. This design looks familiar to Houston's.
Fixation on Rail: Austin is Repeating Houston's Mistake
Houston's $1.41 billion Green and Purple lines have very low ridership, easily handled by bus rapid transit (BRT). If the lines had been built as BRT, they could have easily reached Hobby Airport with the $1.4 billion budget, likely with plenty of money left over. The Silver line BRT cost $46 million per mile and the University line is expected to cost $63 million per mile.
If Austin uses BRT instead of light rail, the cost per mile would be drastically reduced. They could build the unfunded extensions shown in the map, and provide service to the airport with no transfer. They could also potentially use the savings to build a tunnel under Lake Lady Bird instead of an undesirable new bridge. Once again, fixation on light rail causes money to be wasted and transit service to be limited.
BRT Should Use Shared Not Dedicated Lanes, HTX #1 real estate market, college grads flee the superstar cities, cutting zoning reduces housing costs, and more
A few smaller misc items this week:
BRT Should Use Shared, Not Dedicated Lanes. Everything in here absolutely applies to the planned METRO Universities BRT line, especially on Richmond inside the loop. 'Lite BRT' would be a great option for that line.
"Dedicating two of the six lanes on major streets in Chandler, Mesa, Scottsdale, and Tempe exclusively to buses would be a complete waste, says a new report released last week by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and two other groups in the Phoenix area. Each of the lanes that Valley Metro would take for buses typically move roughly three to four times as many people per day as would have taken the bus before the pandemic, and bus ridership has fallen by 50 percent since the pandemic. ...
Instead of dedicated lanes, the report recommends the Valley Metro experiment with “lite BRT,” which means running frequent buses in shared lanes and coordinating traffic signals so everyone can minimize the number of stops they have to make. If these modest improvements significantly increase ridership, Valley Metro could experiment with other improvements, but if they don’t, “then it is unlikely that . . . dedicated lanes and traffic signal priority would do any better.”
"In 2004, Denver voters approved spending $4.8 billion building six new rail transit lines, and the first line opened ten years ago. This was soon followed by four more to the gushing praise of various outsiders.
Inside Denver, however, people are beginning to realize that the whole thing was a miserable failure, suffering massive cost overruns and never attaining its ridership projections. The West line, which had its tenth anniversary last week, never carried as many passengers as were projected in its first year. It’s too bad that the reporters who are questioning this now weren’t asking the same questions in 2004."
"Policymakers have debated whether allowing more market-rate—meaning unsubsidized—housing improves overall affordability in a market. The evidence indicates that adding more housing of any kind helps slow rent growth. "
NYT: Coastal Cities Priced Out Low-Wage Workers. Now College Graduates Are Leaving, Too (link gets past paywall). Educated workers are increasingly migrating away from the country’s most expensive major metros — and have been since before the pandemic. Really good in-depth article. Lots of stats/graphs. Tide is really turning against the expensive coastal cities, even with educated workers.
The decisive argument for school choice, transit agencies go insane, stop road diets, HTX tops home building and affordability, and more
A lot of smaller items to catch up on this week...
Houston #1 for single-family home building permits, and a close #2 for total permits behind DFW. Austin gets the hype but Houston and DFW have the numbers. Hat tip to Oscar. Click/tap on graph for a larger version.
The best argument I've seen for school choice: in states that have implemented it, public schools for low-income students have gotten dramatically better even while not losing many students!
Fortune: The $300,000 starter home is going extinct (archive link): ‘A renter society not because of choice but because of force’ Affordability has collapsed across the country, although Houston and San Antonio continue to outperform. The Dallas collapse is surprising - almost as bad as Austin. Percentage of new homes under construction which are priced under $300,000, according to Zonda Home: (click/tap on graph for a larger version)
Transit Agencies Go Insane. These numbers are absolutely bonkers and yet are getting no media coverage whatsoever:
"In the 1990s, light-rail lines that cost $50 million a mile ($100 million in today’s dollars) were considered extravagantly expensive. A decade ago, the average light-rail line cost about $125 million a mile ($160 million in today’s dollars). Last year, average light-rail construction costs had risen to $278 million a mile (about $310 million today).
This year, the average light-rail cost has grown to $384 million a mile. Average commuter-rail costs have grown from $232 million a mile last year to $447 million a mile. Average heavy-rail costs have exploded from $974 million a mile to $1.4 billion a mile."
"On November 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Austin voters foolishly agreed to raise property taxes in order to build 28 miles of light rail at a projected cost of $5.8 billion. To avoid congestion, the downtown portion of light-rail lines would go through a four-mile-long tunnel.
No one reading this blog will be surprised to know that, in the short amount of time since then, projected costs have nearly doubled to $10.3 billion. Early this week, the city’s transit planners announced a new plan that would build fewer than half as many miles of light rail."
Cost of living disparities mostly come down to housing. Really great interactive graphs that unfortunately won't copy over to the blog, so be sure to check them out. Houston is the only major city in the lower left quadrant with both housing and non-housing costs below the national average.
Problem, we have a Houston - Houstonians got a free $18k from min lot size reform, METRO 2nd worst for rail crime, The Economist loves Texas, HTX tops std of living, Houston sliding towards zoning? and more
Lots of good smaller items again this week:
Resources for Reformers: Houston’s minimum lot sizes - Problem, we have a Houston (clever twist!) "The lot size reform was equivalent to a one-time gift of $18,000 to every Houston household living in a single-family home. That adds up to about $8 billion."
The Economist: Why America is going to look more like Texas (archive link) - Lessons from the surge of the Lone Star State (followed by the more in-depth article "Texas’s latest boom is its biggest yet" - archive link). Key takeaways: Texas gets 1/3 of all net new US jobs(!), +500k people/year, #1 most Fortune 500 HQs, will pass CA for the #1 state in the 2040s, largest budget surplus ever at $33B (larger than the total budgets of 24 states) without needing an income tax to do it.
"Most of the nation’s major cities face a daunting future as middle-class taxpayers join an exodus to the suburbs, opting to work remotely as they exit downtowns marred by empty offices, vacant retail space and a deteriorating tax base."
"Firms like to open factories and offices in cities with plenty of skilled workers. When choosing between cities, they typically run an analysis to see how many potential employees live within a reasonable commute of a site. Poor traffic shrinks the radius, and by extension the labor pool, hurting a city’s chances of attracting companies."
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.
"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?
“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.”
"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."
Warren Buffet calls bs on rail, remote work permanence, induced demand idiocy, HTX tech + construction + port growth, Ike Dike, and more
Happy new year everyone! Hope you all had a good holiday season and didn't get caught up in the Southwest airlines chaos. Sadly, I accidentally wiped out all my backlog of post topics and blogspot does not have any recovery functionality (why can't it keep history like Google Docs?!). So I'm combing back through my tweets to try to find at least some of them:
Richard Florida: “When I started with the creative class, places didn’t care about young people, they were only trying to attract a family with children to the lovely suburbs, and I’m saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no,’” Mr. Florida said in an interview. “Twenty years later, people forgot about the families. And now here’s a whole generation leaving cities again, for metropolitan or virtual suburbs.” ...
"A few feet away from her, another group of young workers was playing Jenga. One by one, they took blocks away from the structure, making way for the inevitable collapse."
NYT idiotically parrots the induced demand argument, including mentioning I10 and I45. Which type of infrastructure should government invest in: transit nobody will use, or lanes everybody will use? 🤔 Induced demand is a false argument. Nobody says "don't build a new airport runway - it will just fill up with new flights" 🙄
AP: Warren Buffett jumps into local politics to fight streetcar: "Billionaire investor Warren Buffett broke with his practice of staying out of local politics to urge his hometown of Omaha to abandon its planned streetcar project because he says it's too expensive and not as flexible as buses."
WSJ: The Blue State Exodus Continues: "Texas and Florida make up about 15% of the U.S. population but accounted for 70% of its population growth this past year. "
Houston ranks as the top market for tech job growth: “Although sometimes overshadowed by the cachet of Dallas, Austin, & San Antonio, Houston is absolutely a tech hub in its own right, attracting a mix of major tech companies & VC-backed startups + established base of aerospace, defense, & energy companies”
WSJ: California Long Ruled U.S. Shipping. Importers Are Drifting East. - Companies that depended on the West Coast as a point of entry for their goods are turning to other parts of the country as global trade gets upended. A chart inside shows Houston #1 in the country for port growth in containers. Looks like the port expansion is paying off!
"Bloom provided data showing strong economic incentives for both corporations and their employees to continue the work-from-home revolution if their jobs allow it:
First, “Saved commute time working from home averages about 70 minutes a day, of which about 40 percent (30 minutes) goes into extra work.” Second, “Research finds hybrid working from home increases average productivity around 5 percent and this is growing.” And third, “Employees also really value hybrid working from home, at about the same as an 8 percent pay increase on average.”
This week we have another always excellent analytical guest blog post from Oscar Slotboom.
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Average transit ridership nationwide remains down 33.4% in September compared to pre-Covid levels, but Houston Metro is doing better. With a strong upward trend in August and September, Metro's September overall ridership is down 26.5% compared to the 12-month pre-covid average. Bus is down 20.2%, light rail is down 26.7% and park & ride is down 63.3%. September and October are normally the highest ridership months of the year, so the upward trend should peak in October or November (which will be boosted by parade ridership).
Houston ridership is also doing much better than Dallas. The chart below, which includes three North Texas transit agencies, is from the most recent NCTCOGmeeting data and shows that transit use in North Texas remains down 39% and is basically flat in the last year. DART has a 93-mile light rail system, with nearly all of it built on dedicated right-of-way, including a long subway section, long elevated sections and DFW airport service. As I reported in 2021, the light rail system has always been plagued by low ridership. Recently, the Dallas Morning News reported on the high crime rate affecting DART patrons, which probably contributes to low ridership.
Highway use in North Texas has been back at pre-Covid levels for over a year. There's no readily available data for Houston roadway use, but it's almost surely similar to North Texas.
(I've been working toward a goal of having much shorter blog posts. I have finally succeeded. Yay!)
In 2019 Metro convinced 68% of voters to support their $7.5B MetroNEXT plan, which I also cautiously supported. Since then we've had a global pandemic and the rise of remote work along with a transit ridership crash and anemic recovery, so Metro is stepping back to rethink everything...
I have to give them credit for switching it from crazy-expensive light rail to just plain expensive bus rapid transit (BRT) for the referendum, but now the ugly rubber is meeting the pothole-patched road as they transition from nice lines on a map to actual detailed planning, and a hornet's nest of opposition is stirring up:
“The experience of Metro projects is that they carry the same number of riders,” said Neal Meyer, 56, a critic of the agency who has written skeptically of transit plans for years. “They’re not worth it.” ...
“I really don’t know if there is any real strategy that can be implemented that will attract more people to take transit,” he said. “For the whole project and all the mega-projects that they want us to pay for, I just have serious doubts.”
It is the same skepticism raised when Metro expanded its light rail lines. Extending the Red Line trains north and building the Green and Purple Lines took Metro more than six years and $2.1 billion. Along the Purple Line, officials at the time they applied for $450 million in federal funds estimated the route would carry 28,800 riders daily by 2030. Its highest average daily ridership, in October 2019, was 7,581. Currently it is about 3,550. ...
Even where faster, more reliable transit is welcomed, however, the project’s specifics will weigh heavily on neighbors who have seen Metro’s light rail lines gobble homes and green space, cripple businesses through years of street-choking construction and frustrate residents living in a work zone.
Plans for the University Line rely on dedicated bus lanes past Texas Southern University, along Ennis from Elgin to Blodgett through Third Ward. Now a cracked and uneven four-lane street, renderings prepared by Metro show Ennis at Wheeler with six lanes — including the two bus lanes — and wide sidewalks with painted crosswalks.
What it fails to show is where that extra space is going to come from.
“It is pretty, but it is not accurate,” said state Rep. Jolanda Jones, a Houston Democrat whose family has been in the area for decades. “They are going to take homes and that is not going to happen. Not if I have anything to do with it.” ...
Other neighborhoods have similar concerns, though the likelihood of losing homes is more concentrated in certain areas, including Third Ward and the East End. Along Richmond, business and property owners who lived through the fight over light rail along the avenue 15 years ago are mobilizing again. Daphne Scarborough, a long-time Metro critic who fought the light rail plans, said the buses are not much different and will cause problems for traffic where Richmond is narrowed to one lane east of Shepherd.
It's that last point on Richmond getting narrowed to one lane each direction that really concerns me. Given the constraints and bottlenecks on Westheimer, W. Alabama, and Bissonet, Richmond is the only surface street with significant east-west capacity from Upper Kirby to Montrose and Midtown - it absolutely needs to keep a *minimum* of two general traffic lanes each direction all the way through. As more people and businesses find out about the one-lane plan, I expect opposition to continue to mount.
And yet the promise of the University Line hasn’t swayed its consistent critics. The Chronicle’s Dug Begley reported last week that many transit opponents are raising a stink that Metro system’s relatively modest ridership has failed to justify the project’s high cost. They worry that construction of the University Line will snarl traffic, invite unwelcome development and cripple local businesses.
What neither Metro nor the Chronicle mention is that at a 10mph average speed this route will take *more than two hours* to ride end-to-end over 25 miles and 40 stops! I base that on the Post Oak Silver BRT line taking a half-hour to go 5 miles with 10 stops, so 4-5x that. Will people really ride that? And is it much time savings vs. existing bus routes?
What's my suggestion? Given the disruption and cost involved, as well as changes around remote work and autonomous Ubers, it would be better for the University Line to start as an express Quickline service *without* dedicated lanes to see if it can build ridership before spending $1.5 billion (easily $2 billion with inflation) on a BRT. Frequent Quickline service would be a relatively easy, cheap test without the disruption and lost lanes. It would also allow experimentation with the exact route and stops to find the best mix *before* sealing it in concrete. If it proves to be popular with growing ridership justifying more capacity, *then* let's revisit the possibility of upgrading it to BRT. By then we'll also have a lot more clarity on the future of remote work and autonomous taxis so we don't build another underutilized white elephant just like the Green, Purple, and Silver Lines. How about it Metro?
A Spanish news site in Madrid, “La Informacion,” reported that the entire management team of Texas Central has departed, and the project has entered “a hibernation phase in search for financing.” ...
“The unorthodox LinkedIn announcement speaks to the company’s lack of staff, lack of resources, and lack of leadership, with no successful path forward. No money, no permits, no progress…. It is abundantly clear that this project is more than dead in the water, especially when the captain jumps ship,” he added. ...
Their press release included hints that the agreement between Japan and Texas Central may not be as solid as once accepted.
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“Texas high-speed rail is collapsing before our eyes,” Rep. Kevin Brady, R-The Woodlands, a longtime skeptic of the plan, said in a social media post. “Today, with no leadership, no funding, no permits and no Washington bail-out from taxpayers, this project is dead.” ...
Texas Central, meanwhile, has not paid its property taxes for land it already purchased, something critics in rural areas opposed to the train have said for months.
“The math never made sense,” Waller County Judge Trey Duhon said Tuesday morning. “It did not cash flow at $12 billion, much less the current price tag of $30 billion, that was before the recent inflation and escalation of costs.”
Even supporters in recent weeks have started to memorialize rather than champion the project. During his annual state of transportation remarks in May, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner — who signed an agreement with Texas Central to support development of a train station at Loop 610 and Hempstead — lamented the project’s fate.
“I was hoping before I left office that at least a shovel would have been somewhere,” Turner said, joking he might build his own train. “Hopefully, it can be revitalized.”
The economics were only ever possible if Japan was willing to subsidize it as a jobs program and to show off their trains in America (hoping for future sales). The economics never made sense: to repay $30 billion in loans (far higher now with inflation), 6m annual riders would have to pay $255 a ticket on top of whatever it costs to operate the trains! Compare that to typical Dallas-Houston airfares of around $100, and the math does not look good at all...
Sadly, I think the biggest loser here is Texas A&M and College Station, which would have been boosted enormously with the only intermediate stop and fast access to both Houston and DFW.
I wonder how much the rise of remote work/Zoom, luxury bus services, and autonomous vehicle tech also factored into investor resistance? Businesspeople just don't need to travel back and forth between Houston and Dallas like they used to, and when they do there are some very competitive options. Newer cars almost drive themselves on road trips while also getting you to your final destination and giving you local transportation, neither of which the train does.
My own prediction is that in the next decade there will be dedicated barrier-separated MaX lanes added to I45 that will accommodate very high-speed autonomous buses and other vehicles, probably north of 100+mph. Not as nice or fast as a 200+mph train, but an order of magnitude cheaper and with the flexibility of going between any two destinations rather than fixed stations.
If there is a silver lining, it is this: far better for it to die now completely unbuilt than to go bankrupt with the tracks half built or even fully built. What a white elephant scar on the state we'd have then, essentially forcing some sort of taxpayer bailout. I'm convinced that's the California strategy: build an absurdly incomplete line in the central valley (imagine if Texas built a Huntsville to Corsicana line!), and then point out how silly it is to not complete the SF and LA ends until somebody comes up with the funding. Let's just hope it's the California taxpayers that end up on the hook for that boondoggle rather than all of us federal taxpayers...
"Some organisations even sent staff to Houston to watch the system at work, and a pilot of it effectively took place in Auckland with Fulton Hogan and its Milldale project.
What came out of all this broad political consensus was a new piece of legislation: the Infrastructure Funding and Financing (IFF) Act, which allows councils to set up Texas-style Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs). It passed in 2020 with the support of every political party in Parliament, showing just how broad the surrounding consensus had grown.
Megan Woods says she is expecting three special project vehicle initiatives to come across her desk this year.
In the Houston Business Journal, Urban Reform Institute fellow Tory Gattis said: “if all goes well, there should be a tremendous increase in New Zealand housing supply in coming years which will help to ease prices.”
“Texans and Houstonians should be proud to serve as a model to the world for market-based approaches to affordable homeownership.”
Banner week for getting quoted: yours truly gets quoted at the very end of this Reason Surface Transportation Innovations newsletter on the silliness of the induced demand anti-freeway-expansion argument. As taxpayers we *want* government to invest in infrastructure where there is demand! (as opposed to so many new rail lines these days)
“We want government to invest in infrastructure that gets a high utilization (as opposed to roads to nowhere). If they built a new airport runway and it filled up with flights, people would sing the praises of such a great investment. Yet if we invest in additional freeway capacity and it fills up, it was wasted money? How does that make sense? It means the government built mobility infrastructure exactly where people needed it—where there was unmet demand—and isn’t that exactly what we want them to do as taxpayers?”
Unherd: Texas is the Future: "Texan metros, notably Houston and Austin, also are among the nation’s leading destinations for minorities and immigrants, the drivers of America’s demographic future."
Colorado Public Radio has a new four-part podcast that examines how Denver's Rail system has overpromised and under-delivered. The system is deeply in debt and is realizing that they could have a similar level of service with BRT bus lanes rather than expensive trains, a lesson Houston also learned the hard way.
"RTD took on a lot of debt during its rail-building push. Now, the fiscally-struggling agency is paring back planned rail expansion, while looking toward less costly projects that benefit core riders: bus-only lanes and bus system reorganization."
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.
